new business

As a rough guide, only 20% at best of all qualified leads (‘qualified’ means that the prospective customer is in the market for your product or service) will actually close as a sale. So, if your average deal value is £100k and your target is £1m – you will have to close 10 deals. This means that you should have 50 leads that you are working on, in order to have a chance of closing. Do you have enough?

Why you are not winning deals? Do you speak to your prospects and ask them why you were not chosen? This will allow you to hone in on areas of weakness and rectify them. But once you’ve found out, how can you feed that back into your business – what if it’s your pricing, your service levels, your sales pitch, the quality of your sales team or your product/service?

Many companies go after each and every opportunity that comes their way, but it is far better to be selective and focus your efforts on the deals you have the best chance of winning. It’s all about qualification……

This is actually a very common problem – many companies have excellent relationships with their clients, but get “pigeon-holed” by them. They think that you ONLY sell what they have previously bought from you and don’t realise that you have a wide range of other products or services to offer them. This can be improved by Key Account Management teams ensuring they keep their clients up to date on your products and services, but sometimes the new business sales teams need to lead the approach, especially if client managers aren’t comfortable selling.

This is a very common scenario. New business sales is a very different skillset to Account Management. Whilst not impossible, it is very hard to find a sales person that excels at both hunting and farming. The answer could be splitting out New Business from Account Management…..