My previous article on Handling Objections was very well received by most of you. If you have not read it, I strongly advise you to read it.

Since I am on a roll, I have decided to write another article on a topic: Bouncing Back!

Picture the following scenario:

You are in an appointment with a large customer. Things has not been going well lately. You are anxious to get things back on track and close this deal.You’ve done your homework, did your analysis and come out with an action plan to move forward.

Then you hear this sentence coming from the customer: “We are going another direction. Your brain freezes and the first thought that comes into head is: How am I going to hit my number?”

Does this sound very familiar to those who have been in sales for many years?

Unfortunately, losing a sales or an account is a fact of life in our profession. Your goal is to have more wins than losses. But these losses can really hurt. You try to rationalize what happened in head. You can think of retention strategies to stop the slide.

Regardless, the fact is – you have to recoup the lost revenue- ASAP.

In order to hit your number, you should have at least 3 times your quota in your pipeline. For instance, for a SGD $1 million quota, you need to have at least SGD $3 million in opportunities. This means that with everything else on track, you need to account for an additional 3 times of the lost revenue.

This is more than a speed bump – but its not a road block either. With the correct approach and planning, you can make it happen!

Planning your approach is about recognizing the factors that will impact your results. One of the largest factors in this situation is revenue possibility.

Don’t focus solely on this though; you still have to include other factors to help prioritize. The factors may be different depending on your situation, but some items to focus on are for instance….

• Probability to close
• Effort to close
• Relationship in the account
• Probability of future revenue
• Customer solution time-frame

And the list goes on and on. Identify the factors that have the highest probability of moving the needle. Ensure that your criteria affect all of the open opportunities you have.

The next step is to determine how much each of these factors matter. Each factor must have a weighting to rank your opportunity approach. For example, how would you prioritize the following situations?

• An opportunity with a high upside but will be require a lot of effort to close
• An opportunity with a lower upside, with a moderate effort to close
• An opportunity with a low upside, has a low effort to close, and has a high probability of further revenue
• A large opportunity that may close after the next quarter or year end

As cliched as that may sound, there is no set answer unless you know how much each of these factors should weigh. For now, I will leave you with this thought. Wait for my next article on sales techniques… stay tuned!

There is no set answer unless you know how much each of these factors should weigh. Till then, wait for the next edition on my sales techniques… Stay tuned!!