It is quite an outrageous claim to need only 15 seconds to be able to conduct a sales review… what could you possibly ascertain in 15 seconds? To make things equal, and possibly more difficult, I would want you to do a review with someone you don’t know, so you have no previous knowledge to fall back on… and you can even have as much information to hand that is available about their current sales… but remember you only have 15 seconds to read it!

15 seconds is all the time you should need to determine how well the sales professional is managing their business. You should be able to clearly see what they have achieved to date, what their likely outcome will be for the quarter, the confidence level you should have in this outcome, how well they are building their pipeline, the confidence level they have in naming the ‘must win’ deals and how well they are managing these deals. 15 seconds is enough time to give you the pointers of where to do a deeper dive if required. Time is money, so don’t waste your time conducting deep reviews in parts of the business that aren’t broken.

The only thing your sales team needs to be doing to help you with this review is to use, and I mean use, our Opportunity Management tool… Focus. Therefore before sharing with you the review process I will provide some background to the tool and methodology behind it.

Background
Focus is a visual tool and it is this aspect that allows the review to be completed very quickly. Focus is also built around a very distinct and powerful, yet simple, sales pipeline methodology, which I should just take a few moments to explain…

The methodology is based on a set of grids that are organised into 3 major vertical elements, Funnel, Pipeline and Outcome. The example I’m showing uses quarterly sales periods. There is a set of grids for each sales period.
The first element of the methodology represents the Funnel. The Funnel is for managing Sales Leads which are considered to be potential Sales Opportunities. It is believed the customer will want to address a potential Need and / or the customer already recognises they have a need, but have not committed to addressing it. The second element is the Pipeline itself. The Pipeline is for managing Sales Opportunities which are considered to be potential Deals. It is believed the customer has committed to buying a Solution for a Need. The third element is the Outcome. Opportunities exit the pipeline as being Sold, Lost or Slipped. Sold is hopefully self explanatory. Lost means you have not won. The opportunity has either been won by a competitor, or the customer has decided not to address the need. Either way, the opportunity is lost. Slipped shows the opportunities that have slipped to the next sales period. Slipped opportunities are the scourge of the pipeline – If you don’t record it you can’t manage it.

Now looking quickly at the methodology. The first thing to know is that it follows the customer’s buying behaviour. There are four behaviours which we label Need, Requirements, Solution and Deal. These can be seen as the grid labels for the top grids shown in the Funnel and Pipeline. If we are close to the deal the bottom grids represent the selling behaviours … we Explore the need, we help Define the requirements, we Propose a solution and then Close the deal.

In order to decide in which grid a deal should sit, first determine the close date and then where the customer is in their buying process – The close date will let you know in which sales period to place the deal. Where the customer is in their process will determine if they are at the Need, Requirements, Solution or Deal stage. The next thing to do is determine where you are… are you confident to commit to closing the deal? If the answer is no, then you are in the top grids – the upside. If the answer is yes then you are in the bottom grids – the commit.

The commit deals form part of the sales forecast for which we apply the two outcome forecast method – win or lose. Let’s face it, for any deal in your pipeline, you are going to either win or not win. There is no percentage winning, no factoring, you either win or lose – therefore forecast on that basis. The full methodology explains what you need to know in order to increase your forecast confidence but basically we look at four areas - the customer’s Business Imperative, your Value to the customer, your level of Influence and the Qualification… and now we know enough to start the review…

The 15 Second Review
If you are running quarterly sales periods then you need 3 basic reviews each period. You could have a month 1 review, month 2 and month 3. I am using a month 3 review as the example. The conclusions drawn would be potentially different if looking at the same data for a month 2 or month 1 review.

Step 1 – Dashboard - time required 3 Seconds
The first step of the review is to look at the results Dashboard. This will give you an excellent first impression on how the person is managing their business.

The visual indicator shows the Time Elapsed in the period, the Performance to date and the Predicted outcome. In the example shown the Time elapsed is 78%, the Performance to date is 16% and the predicted outcome is 114%.

At 78% through period the performance to date should be higher – deals are not closing. However the predicted outcome is 114%. Therefore, it is not due to lack of deals that the performance to date is poor.

Conclusion…this person seems to have a problem being able to close and also appears to be overconfident with forecasting – very little has closed during the quarter, but everything appears to be closing at the end! I would expect a more even closing pattern during the period. First impression is that this person is not managing their business very well.

Step 2 – Current Outcome - time required 2 Seconds
The second step is to look at the exit element of the pipeline. I am looking for evidence that the opportunities are being managed. For a month 3 review I would expect to see opportunities in all grids.

From our initial look at the dashboard we know that sales are not going to be high, however with nothing in Lost or Slipped I would be concerned that this person is only using Focus because they have been told to, and they are not using it to manage their business. With Elapsed time at 78% most people will have lost deals by now and other deals would have slipped.

Conclusion… this person does not appear to be using Focus to help manage their business and the results indicate this as well. This is the second piece of evidence.

Step 3 – Funnel - time required 2 Seconds
The third step is to look at the Funnel. This needs to be full; a full funnel is a characteristic of those that forecast accurately. It means going into a new quarter with most of the business already identified. It allows you to work with the customer early in the process to understand their business imperative, to help shape their requirements, to develop relationships and thereby build trust.

In this example the Funnel is well populated, so our subject does not appear to have problems identifying potential opportunities, but are they being managed?

Conclusion… It is not the lack of opportunity that is producing poor closure… you can’t make your number if there is nothing to close, but in this case there seems to be plenty building so the evidence is beginning to point at managing and closing skills.

Step 4 – Pipeline - time required 3 Seconds
The fourth step is to review the distribution of opportunities in the pipeline. In our example you can see opportunities in the Upside and opportunities in the Commit. Again this shows that there is no shortage of opportunities to close.

However, most of the opportunities are at the Requirements / Define stage… which is not what is expected at this time in the quarter. As time passes, so the opportunities should be moving from left to right. With 3 weeks to go before the end of the quarter I would expect the Requirements / Define grids to be empty. I would also expect not to find that many opportunities in the Solution / Propose grids, whereas the Deal / Close grids should have most of the opportunities.

Conclusion… There are more than enough opportunities to make the number, perhaps too many. Too many of the opportunities are at the beginning of the pipeline and therefore they have not progressed. For this time of the quarter not enough of the opportunities are in the Deal / Close grids. I would suspect that the deals are not being managed correctly.

Step 5 – Qualification - time required 5 Seconds
The final step is to have a quick look at the qualification details of a couple of the commit deals. You are looking to see how well the deals are qualified. The easiest way to do this is open the Qualification panel and click on one of the deals in the grid to view how it has been qualified.

The above shows the qualification details for one of the opportunities in the Define grid. This is an opportunity that has been committed to close and yet nothing is shown in the qualification. The view below is typical of what I would expect to see for an Opportunity qualified at the Define stage.

Conclusion… the opportunities do not appear to have been qualified. This is consistent with the irregular spread of opportunities in the pipeline and the current performance – the opportunities do not appear to be being actively progressed.

Overall Conclusion -

After this 15 second review I would conclude that this person does not have a problem finding opportunities, but they do have a problem with closing them. The evidence can be seen from the number of Leads in the Funnel and the number of Opportunities in the pipeline – there are plenty. The current performance shows a considerable gap and therefore with the number of opportunities in the pipeline this is evidence that they are not being closed. The other piece of evidence to support this is the distribution of opportunities – at this time in the sales period there are too many sitting at the beginning of the pipeline.

I would also conclude that this person is not managing their business very well. If they were, then opportunities would not only have been won, but also some lost and some would slip. The evidence showing this is a lack of won deals and nothing shown in the Lost or Slipped grids. The other evidence is a lack of qualification maintenance for the must win commit deals. The evidence shows the opportunities are not being progressed.

This person is using Focus to record Leads and Opportunities, but not using it to manage their business. They either do not understand or do not want to understand the benefit of the simple methodology. They may also not understand how to progress the opportunities. I would not trust the Predicted Outcome of 114% and therefore an action plan now needs to be put in place to secure the quarter for this person.

Of course, if you would have conducted the earlier reviews then things would have been picked up earlier. There are different conclusions to be drawn from earlier reviews as the distribution of Leads and Opportunities would be different, but the process of the review is the same. If you find you need a little longer than the 15 seconds, then 5 minutes per person would be able time to draw a number of conclusions about how someone is running their business. Do this for all your team and you will be able to quickly identify who needs your help and where they need it.

The beauty of the methodology is that they have to show how they are making their number. They have to commit to the deals that will be closing. Using Focus it is very easy to check the quality of their plan. There is nowhere to hide…
I don’t know about you, but I reckon that’s been a good use of 15 seconds of your time!

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