Welcome to the Finding Business podcast with Scott Channell. A memo edition.
W. Edwards Deming, the famous business theorist, industrial engineer and management consultant famously said “Every sales system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” Well, actually he said most of that, I just added the sales part. But his quote, Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” carries a truth for sales professionals. Your current sales results—whether strong, mediocre, or weak—are a direct outcome of the system you've built. If you want to improve your results, you must improve your system.
Your sales system is much more than just closing deals.
New business closed is just one piece of an integrated system. A simplified sales process looks like this:
- You have a product or service that improves a company’s business situation.
- Lead generation: inquiries, first sales conversations, and meetings.
- Pipeline management.
- Closing deals.
When revenue falls short, most attention gravitates toward the last step. closing. But closing quantity and quality is determined by the previous steps. Closing is a byproduct of what happens earlier. If you want to close more, focus on improving the entire system, not just the final step.
And guess what?
If you need significant revenue growth, minor adjustments won’t cut it. You must make major changes to your system. (Not minor changes, little tweaks or some fine-tuning.) You must make major changes.
That means:
- Spending less time with low-probability prospects.
- Eliminating activities that waste time and have little impact on closing.
- Strengthening sales messaging to have greater impact on buyers.
- Increasing the frequency and consistency of prospecting outreach.
-Following up more persistently and effectively.
-Asking better questions and listening more.
What Moves the Needle Fastest?
After 24 years of working with sales teams, I’ve seen three factors consistently deliver the biggest and fastest improvements:
1 Ruthlessly disqualifying prospects – throw them down the stairs. Remove low-probability buyers from your prospecting pool and pipeline so you can focus on real opportunities.
2 Strengthening sales messaging. Integrate more references to outcomes and credibility to have more impact on buyers.
3. Asking better questions and listening more. The more they feel that you understand them, the more trust they will have in you.
If you want to close more deals, you need to be ruthlessly aggressive in getting the basics right.
A strong sales foundation is built on quality components, proper techniques, and a structure designed for long-term success.
With a rock-solid foundation:
- You can execute better strategies.
- Your automation and processes work more effectively.
- You have a greater impact on buyers.
Without it, you’re trying to sell on a cracked or crumbling foundation—where any success is temporary, and mediocrity, at best, is the norm.
Build on bedrock. Strengthen your selling foundation. The results will follow.
Hope this got you thinking.
This is a memo edition of the Finding Business with Scott Channell podcast. For more information about this podcast, The Finding Business Lab, and services offered go to Scott Channell with 2 t’s, 2 n’s and 2 l’s, dot com.
Thanks for listening.