Deal Quality is the missing ingredient in your sales process. Doug and Jess explore the often-overlooked topic of deal quality and its significant impact on sales forecasting. They discuss how poor deal quality can disrupt forecasts, the crucial roles of marketing and training in enhancing deal quality, and share practical tools, including a deal quality calculator, for assessing and improving pipeline health.
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Show Notes:
Pre-Show Banter:
- It’s been a minute since Doug and Jess hit record–but they’re back!
- Doug’s New Year’s Day has finally come. Happy baseball season to all who celebrate.
- Jess returned from her cruise, and she learned you can get back into the states from Mexico with just a driver’s license. Bad news? She still has no idea where her passport went.
Main Discussion Points:
- Definition of Deal Quality: Understanding what comprises deal quality and why it matters in the sales process.
- Impact on Forecasting: How low deal quality increases variance in forecasting and complicates sales predictions.
- Role of Intent vs. Fit: the balance between customer intent and fit, and how modern sales practices might overemphasize intent.
- Improvement Strategies: Leveraging the deal quality matrix and training to enhance deal quality.
- Collaborating with Marketing: The importance of sharing insights with marketing to align messaging and targeting based on deal quality data.
- Influencing Factors: Factors that can influence deal quality include ideal client profile fit, problem definition clarity, and decision criteria quality.
- Importance of Measurement: Consistent rating and assessment of deals using a quality matrix can help identify red flags and encourage proactive sales decisions.
Jess’s Takeaways:
- Build in definite, clear definitions of your criteria as well as your scale.
- Qual quality metrics are prescriptive, and we should break that down in several aspects of the process
- How does it impact post-launch?
- How can we get feedback to marketing to improve messaging and targeting?
- Tracking deal quality is going to drive more consistency in your forecast.
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