Zach Selch uses an ice cream metaphor to explain why salespeople's promises of purchase orders often vanish. A robust sales funnel tracking every step across all salespeople and distributors worldwide fixes this. Selch achieved 93% forecast accuracy using this system, a 25% improvement over peers.
I love ice cream and I love purchase orders. I don't know which one I love more.
You try to grab it and you end up with nothing in your hand. Then you think, wow, look at that, I'm going to get— oh, that goes away. And you talk to your sales manager and he says, I got it, I'm going to get the purchase order for you. Whoa! There's nothing! And you keep talking to him and he keeps saying, don't— and you think, whoa, look at that! But it's gone. And again, you end up with empty hands because there's nothing there. And again, I have nothing in my hand. What's going on here?
Can you—
Because this is what happens. Salespeople are optimistic. They tell you you're gonna get the purchase order. You think you got the purchase order, and then there it goes. It's out of your hands again, right? And boom! And you think you got it. You think you can taste it, but it's not there. And then you finally get it.
So I finally got my ice cream. And how am I going to tell? How am I going to keep track and make sure that I get my purchase order? They're going to come in and they're going to say, I'm going to get it next month. I'm going to get it next month. Shifted a quarter. It's in my hand. I got it. I had a great meeting. I got the purchase order. They're going to come and tell me that stuff. What tools am I going to use to make sure that I don't get the whole runaround and the whole ice cream dance from my sales managers? Well, if I have a good funnel system in place, then I know what my sales people are doing. I know what my sales managers are doing. I even know what my distributors are doing, step by step. So when they say to me, I got this purchase order, I can come back and say, well, did you do this? Have you done a demo? Have you put in a proposal? Have we set the specifications? Are they working from somebody else's specifications? What are the different steps of my sales process? And every sales process is going to be different, but I want to funnel based on those sales, that sales process, Everybody out there selling is feeding information into my funnel. I know what's going on. I know exactly where every single project around the world should fall. Recently, I had a job in a corporation where I was bringing about 93% accuracy on my forecasting, which was 25% higher than anybody else from my peers because I was using a funnel system. And I knew exactly what was going on with each and every salesperson for each and every distributor around the world. The best way to avoid the ice cream dance is to have a funnel system in place that follows the sales process with your salespeople. Remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help.
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