Why High Priority Deals Get Stuck In Your Pipeline
- Dan Greenberg
- Oct 4, 2023
- 6 min read
Every seller who has spent a bit of time in the business has likely seen and used some kind of 4-quadrant decision matrix which classifies prospects in their pipeline as either large opportunities or small opportunities, as well as either ‘likely to close’ or ‘unlikely to close’. The idea is that you want to be spending your time on the deals that are going to net the most money, and on the ones that have the best chance to close. So, if we were to lay out all of the prospects as scatter plots on this matrix with four boxes, you would want to spend the most time with the ones that lie in the quadrant labeled ‘big opportunity’ and ‘likely to close’, and you would want to spend the least amount of time on the prospects labeled ‘small opportunity’ and ‘unlikely to close’.
All of this makes sense, right? Sure, it does. It is common sense, and it satisfies the sniff test, as well as some tougher scrutiny. But there is a problem. It only takes into account the high-level criteria. Specifically, it leaves out one very important sub-criterion, and that sub-criterion may be most important in evaluating both major criteria in the model.
Sales managers who ask their sellers to rank their deals in this way are not stupid, and it is not that they aren't aware that there is nuance to the evaluations, but they are assuming, more hoping, that the sub-criterion is accounted for in the seller's own evaluation of the ‘likelihood to close’. What I mean by this is that managers assume that sellers have a good understanding of all the factors that contribute to ‘likelihood to close’ and are able to make an accurate assessment of that likelihood, and that the assessment is independent of the ‘size of the opportunity’ assessment. They are assuming that this assessment by the seller factors in the company’s procurement process, its financials, the relationships with the broader prospect company, and the relationship with the individuals at the prospect company. It would be great if this were the case, but in reality, how often do deals that are classified as “high likelihood to close” sit in the pipeline for months and quarters on end without closing? The answer is: All the time. This happens much more often than would be expected given the percentage likelihood to close that sellers assign to their deals.
So, what is this magical sub-criterion that we aren’t spending enough time focusing on? It is the presence or absence of an effective internal champion. This factor is important enough to be evaluated on its own because there is no uniform procedure or expectation around how sellers evaluate their pipelines, so often the evaluations are based on perceived need, or perceived quality of the relationship between the seller and their main point of contact (POC). This is an especially troubling reality because perceived need is just that, perceived. And, more importantly, the quality of the relationship is often a negatively correlated data point, since individuals within buying organizations who take the time and effort to develop overly friendly social relationships with sellers are often the types of individuals who lack internal political influence, and the tools necessary to be an effective internal champion. This is exactly the reason why so many deals marked as “high likelihood to close” sit in the pipeline for much longer than a seller indicated was likely, and why so many never get pushed across the finish line.
The major problem with this is that if we are forecasting based on these seller-generated assumptions, and we are prioritizing our time, and our resources based on these evaluations, we will end up spending time, energy, and resources in places where it is not useful, while leaving other opportunities, with more potential, unattended.
It’s not that sellers and sales managers don't think that individual relationships and internal champions are important, it is that most people simply do not know how to evaluate them. In their excellent book, “The Challenger Customer”, Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon focus a great deal of time on defining what a potentially effective internal champion looks like, and perhaps more importantly, what ineffective internal POCs look like. These definitions can help sellers understand if they are in the right kind of prospect relationship to generate a truly effective internal champion that can keep up the momentum of their deal, even when they are not in the room. Adamson and Dixon define 6 types of employees within customer organizations to help think through the evaluation and actions that sellers can take when navigating prospect clients.
Here is my summary of what they say in their book: You must find the right partner inside the customer organization. This partner is the mobilizer. Star performers focus on finding change drivers and consensus builders and mostly forget about other traits. Top performing sellers make relationships with teachers (good), go-getters (good), and skeptics (good), while average sellers make relationships with guides (bad), friends (bad), and climbers (bad). This happens because great sellers know that those types of people are good at driving consensus and change. Average sellers just want relationships, and want to feel like they are making progress, and so they subconsciously seek relationships that are communicative and friendly, rather than ones that will drive deals forward. Teachers, go-getters, and skeptics are mobilizers. The others have no, or negative impact; they are the talkers.
Your mobilizers are your lynchpin, and they must be prompted to focus on the problem that is commercially relevant for your deal, and then given access to insights that help them form an opinion around solutions that they can then socialize amongst their team. These insights must be credible, relevant, and frame breaking. In other words, they must challenge the way the mobilizer and the rest of the company think about their problem and the current solutions, because if the problem is big enough, that means the current solutions are not working. The insights must challenge the status quo and must identify the current problems and status quo solutions as the enemy. Most importantly, the insights must be packaged in a way that drives your internal champion to want to convey the message and gather internal organizational support.
One of the most important things to understand is that if the main POC is not pushing back (skeptic), or building on the problem / insight productively (go-getter), or actively bringing others into the conversation (teacher), they are likely not an effective champion. Consistent availability (guide), agreeability (friend), and monopolized one-on-one interactions (climber) are not good things; they are signs that your POC is not an effective champion. Sellers get this backwards all the time. The relationships that are always easy and never challenging are the ones that rarely close. If you are talking about a commercial insight that you know means something to their business and the POC does not engage and challenge skeptically, there is a good chance they will not be an effective internal champion. It is important to test how individuals engage with you and others in their organization in order to understand if they are respected internally. Watch them interact with those in their organization or ask them to do a little homework. Effective mobilizers will do it if it’s the right task.
So, how do you know if you have a real champion who can effectively help move your deal towards the finish line?
They challenge you and push back with real objections, and issues.
They add to the insights you are introducing and take you down other paths that could be beneficial for their overall business.
They bring other colleagues into the fray and expand your communication circle proactively.
They understand the problem and your insight about the problem and think about it on the level of the overall business, not just their day-to-day.
And, how do you know if you have the wrong person, who will not help move your deal forward, and may even negatively impact it?
They are agreeable on every point, and don't challenge on the substance of the issue or the solution.
They rarely contribute to the conversation about the solution in a substantive way.
They don’t interact with other employees at their organization in your presence and they don’t help expand your circle of communication.
They don’t talk about the problems and solutions and how they affect their overall organization.
It is only once we incorporate thinking about internal effective champions, and the individual personal relationships that sellers have at prospect organizations that we can start to be able to make accurate evaluations of the likelihood to close, and of the size of opportunities. Until then, our 2-dimensional matrices will be logically sound, but largely, and misleadingly inaccurate.
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