Prospecting and Pipeline

Revealing the scarcest commodity in corporate business, especially in America today, first requires an understanding of how we got there. Today Barry Trailer, Co-founder of Sales Mastery, joins Chris and Corey. He reviews the four levels of process implementation: the percentage of revenue, the target revenue plan attained, the percentage of reps meeting or beating quota, the outcome of forecast deals, and rep turnover. These are real numbers. But higher levels of relationship and higher levels of process implementation lead to higher levels of performance. And the numbers are just the numbers They continued talking about the turnover. There's a huge contributory factor to the failure to implement significant change on the part of most sales organizations other than the change that a new leader brings in.
What is common is that the new lion, so to speak, the new CRO, the new VP of Sales, comes in and kills the cubs. They attempt to prove that whatever was being done before must not be done anymore. Because I've come in with my new way of doing things and territory must be marked, I was brought in to do something in a new way, and away we go. When the performance isn't there, the CRO or the CSO takes the bullet that the CEO doesn't want to take. But the only reason is that there's been this unholy alliance or this unspoken agreement that as long as we make the numbers, you'll stay out of my sandbox. Listen to this episode to see where your company falls in place in, “The Scarcest Commodity in Corporate Business Today.”
Links from this episode:
Sales Mastery - https://salesmastery.com/ConnectAndSell - https://connectandsell.com Branch49 - https://branch49.com Sales Education Foundation - https://salesfoundation.org/ 
Barry Trailer on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrytrailer/ Chris Beall on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-beall-7859a4/ Corey Frank on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyfrank/ 

We've heard the phrase, "Be careful what you wish for..." It's not unlike wanting to build pipeline quickly and how it relates to a kid in an ice cream store. What is the goal? Build as much - eat as much as possible to gain as much success and pleasure as possible. Think of the system of building pipeline like a child who isn't sufficiently mature enough to handle all that ice cream. Belly aches will ensue. So the issue with too much too fast is you can't find the bottleneck anymore. And if you can't find the bottleneck anymore, you can't manage.
In this episode, Corey asked Chris to visit the theory of constraints. Businesses are artificial, in the sense, that we say we're going to do something for others, and they're going to pay us money for it.  And then the question is, what are the inputs to the business? And whenever you have a system with inputs and outputs, you always have exactly one constraint within that system. That's what the theory of constraints says. 
The reason that people like Mark Cuban, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musks, and the like are such outstanding business leaders is they put their eye on the bottleneck regardless of the noise that's produced by the change that they are willing to induce in order to improve. Most of us can't do that. Listen to this episode of Market Dominance Guys, "The Theory of Constraints and Ice Cream."
 
Full episode transcript below:

How are you tracking your pipeline’s success? If you are only looking at one quarter or two, you are missing the larger picture of the attribution. Most of the results are going to be 3, 4, 5, and 6 quarters later. Is it the SDRs, advertising, phone calls made, or conversations you’ve had? If you wait too long to look at where the pipeline is coming from and where it is weak, you may be behind by an additional three to six months at that point. Companies are cutting back on prospecting teams without fully appreciating the long-term effect on the pipeline. David Dulany, Founder and CEO at TenBound, joins Chris and Corey for the first in a three-part series on Market Dominance Guys. In this episode, you’ll hear why a vendor is like someone with one leg of a giraffe and the other of an octopus tentacle. How do you walk with those? Or is it like Wile E Coyote running into the tunnel the Roadrunner painted on the side of the road?  Chris sums up this episode, “Failure to prospect today will turn future good times into bad times that are worse than today.” How will you avoid this position? Listen to “Prospecting, Inbound, or Pipeline Problems; Should You Hire an SDR?” to find out.