How many times have you seen this scenario: the end of the month is approaching, the revenue forecast is looking decidedly shaky and your business development team are grappling for a lucky last-minute break so that everyone can relax for another few weeks?
Then it happens: Panic. Remonstrations. Blame. Job insecurity.
Horrible. And it’s happening everywhere. But it’s not necessarily inevitable (even in this climate). The thing is, short-termism seems to be a common disease that infects commercial teams because setting up (and maintaining) information systems and monitoring tools is something that is deemed “nice to have” when folk are resource-strapped and over-stretched.
When you’re not just selling widgets….it gets complicated very quickly
When you have a product and service portfolio that incorporate things like professional services, consultancy and niche expertise in combination with proprietary technology, your sales process isn’t going to be straightforward. For lifescience companies servicing big pharma and biotechs, there’s a great deal of scientific discussion and due diligence in addition to the contractual issues. Keeping track of where you are in the process of lead-to-closure will be close to impossible if you have more than one sales person on the road and even a meager line-up of potential customers.
Luckily, there are some off-the-shelf web-based resources that you can subscribe to that mean you can keep an eye on your early prospects as well as the late stage deals and understand a lot more about what’s going on in between. The sooner you do this in the development of your business, the better. It only gets harder to incorporate your contacts, accounts, deal information and your current and historical conversations. Plus, you can start to build an unbiased database of information to inform you of business trends and missed opportunities.
Help is At Hand: Online Tools
I’ve had a lot of success with the sales and marketing resources in Salesforce.com over the past few years. The tools they provide can be readily customized to suit most needs and there is a growing community of third party application providers for anything more specialized (such as direct email campaigns and sophisticated sales monitoring tools, for example). I’ve certainly no hesitation in recommending it for any business development team (and I’ve no affiliation to them, in case you’re wondering).
Stuff That You Need To Do:
1. Have clear visibility on your early business development pipeline, not just the stuff that will close this month or this quarter. This will enable you to see whether business development directors have enough in their pipelines to support your growth projections – so you can provide marketing or other support early, when you can actually do something about it.
Break your business pipeline into simple stages and allocate each of your potential deals to them. Make these stages self-explanatory so you don’t have to look up the definition each time you do something to your potential deal.
2. Understand where your deals are coming from, so that you can have a better idea of where to concentrate your marketing budget in order to bring in new business. No more shooting in the dark, wasting money – put the effort in where it yields results. See trends in the uptake of new product offerings.
Add a picklist of lead sources and make this field compulsory in your database. It may not matter to your salesperson where the conversation started, but it will matter to the person in charge of your future commercial strategy.
3. See where the hold-ups are. Are the leads of inadequate quality? How old are your leads; are there hold-ups in the process due to legal/scientific involvement/operations? How well are you progressing your leads through to closure and do you need help?
Set up monitoring tools (in Salesforce, use the dashboards and set up some customized reports that you can run on a regular basis) to include a chart of average age of leads in each stage, for each BD director. You can also set up a graph showing number of leads by stage this month versus last month, so you can see at a glance where the recent movement has been in each sales territory.
4. Understand why deals are lost- so you can develop an unbiased understanding of potential issues that may be hampering business development and long-term growth of the business. It will reduce the subjectivity, give you some numbers to go on and help you to put in place some remedial action.
When you move a potential deal to closed/lost, have a compulsory drop-down list of reasons for losing the deal that’s specific to your customer base. These may include: lack of budget, competition, de-prioritisation of project, company restructure (sound familiar?).
5. Make it transparent to everyone – encourage a bit of healthy competition amongst the BD team and see how different territories are performing, at a glance. You’ll be able to see (again, in an unbiased way) where you need to place more resources; to the sales territory with the heavy early lead pipeline perhaps, in order to help close the deals that are on the table.
In Salesforce you can set up a dashboard that’s visible to your entire BD team and others who may have an interest such as your CFO or CEO. Include charts such as:
- bar chart of number of leads by stage for each BD director
- bar chart of value of leads in each BD director’s pipeline
- leaderboard of closed/won deal values
Lastly: if you set up monitoring tools…use them!
It’s all very well setting this up, but if you don’t keep a watch on these, it’s a bit of a waste of time and a lost opportunity to put in place corrective action on the basis of good data. I’m not in favour of just presenting the graphs in their entirety at each weekly BD meeting, but if one of the team takes the time to look at the charts, take down some conclusions and bring those to the table, it would be worth the discussion.
The aim of all of this is to remove the defensive arguments and subjectivity that creeps into BD meetings whenever the numbers look a bit dicey. Get the data and see where you need help. It’ll remove the blame game and make everything a lot fairer and lead to a more pleasant working environment for all.
