As a sales manager, you have a limited amount bandwidth to go on joint sales calls with your sales reps. While going on joint calls with reps is important, if you have to be on every single meeting, you wouldn’t have time left over to be a manager. Setting goals can alleviate this issue, while still allowing your team to grow as salespeople.
Consider the basic math of meetings. According to recent research, it can take an average of 10-12 meetings to close a typical enterprise sales opportunity (fewer for SMB opportunities). This insight makes sense given a standard 6- to 12-month sales cycle for enterprise deals. For example, if you manage a team of 8-10 enterprise reps, and each rep has an active sales pipeline of 20-30 sales opportunities, your team participates in hundreds of meetings per month.
I recently spoke with a successful sales manager at a global technology company who shared a powerful time management technique he uses with his team to limit the number of joint sales calls. Recognizing that as a manager he can’t be everywhere, but that what happens early in the sales cycle can often determine your ultimate sales success, this manager created his “Rule of 3’s.” That means during the first three meetings, reps are on their own and they must accomplish the following three goals:
First, sales reps must use the initial few meetings to build great relationships within the customer’s organization. The sales manager I spoke with empathized that he encourages his sales reps to think beyond the person they’re meeting with and try to establish relationships with other decision-makers and influencers.
Next, a sales rep in the first few meetings should begin qualifying a sales opportunity by considering whether it satisfies the basic BANT conditions:
Is that enough? No. While BANT is a great starting point, here are other critical qualification criteria:
Finally, influence the buying criteria. It’s easy to forget how much choice your buyer has and how difficult it can be for them to differentiate your solution from the next. What may be an obvious distinction to you may not be apparent to the buyer.
In many cases, buyers don’t know what they want. So, it’s your responsibility to explain why the buyer should select your solution instead of the alternatives. That means highlighting your advantages (e.g., technology, process, or people) over competitors’ by asking questions that position your differentiators.
For example, “Many of our customers are concerned about lack of integration between [X] and [Y}. Is that a concern of yours?” (Knowing that your technology seamlessly integrates [X] and [Y], while your competitors struggle here.) Or “Is JCAHO accreditation important to you?” (Knowing that your competition has yet to be accredited.)
Setting these goals will help your sales team grow without having to be apart of every step of the process. When you follow the rule of 3’s as a sales manager, you’ll protect your time and set the stage for you to join your reps on calls later and keep the momentum going.