How Does a Sales Manager Convince a Salesperson To Take a Prospect Off the Sales Forecast?

Virtually everyone who has sold or managed has experienced this one. A sale that is on the forecast every quarter but it doesn’t happen. The salesperson is frustrated; the sales manager is even more frustrated. It becomes an internal company joke after a while, with people inside and outside of Sales sarcastically asking when ABC Company will become a customer.  Everyone is a comedian all of a sudden.

There are a few different answers to this question, and one of them particularly resonates with me.  So, I’m a young salesperson in an office of older, more experienced people, and starting to close some business.  I knew I wasn’t going to get much help until I really proved myself, when one of the older salespeople walks by my cubicle one morning and casually says to me: “I’ve forgotten more than you know about selling.”

Not the support I was hoping for, but still pretty funny if you think about it. I had already figured out that Sales was not for the meek of heart.

Anyway, later that morning, our Vice President of Sales is making one of his quarterly visits to our office. Ironically, I happen to hear him addressing our Sales Manager about this very same issue – a prospect that was all too familiar to all of us, and they still hadn’t become a customer.

“I don’t want to see this on the forecast again next quarter,” he yelled at the sales manager.” “So you better close it or make it go away.”

“I will,” the sales manager responds. “I’m sick and tired of going through the same thing with this prospect every quarter.”

“And you know how to make it go away?”, says our Vice President of Sales.

“Not sure,” the sales manager answers, sheepishly.

“Help the salesperson to find another stinking prospect,” bellows our Sales VP.

We’ve all been there. When you don’t have enough prospects in the sales pipeline, you will hold on to the ones you have like your best friend, or your partner, or one of your children. A salesperson’s job is to sell stuff, and if we don’t have enough prospects to sell to, we won’t sell enough to make our quotas – and we may lose our jobs. Geez, I wonder why the salesperson is holding on to that same prospect every quarter…..

Sales managers are trained, as we say in the trade, “to flush out” the prospects that are not going to buy, and concentrate on those who will buy.  As an associate once remarked, “you have to separate the buyers from the liars.”

But, there is a little more to this story.  A good sales manager can keep “flushing”, but what’s to prevent that salesperson and other salespeople from continuing to put bad prospects on the sales forecast quarter after quarter?

Granted, separating the real prospects from the not so real ones is a necessary skill for good sales managers and salespeople, because it ultimately forces one to spend time time with serious buyers.  That results in more sales and more revenue – and that’s a good thing.

But, I say that a good sales manager has to be more than a person who qualifies prospects out of the sales forecast, and makes miracles happen at the end of every quarter.

We all know it takes creativity to get a sale done. But, we also know that if the right things are done during the sales cycle, it shouldn’t be a massive struggle with the prospect at the end of the sales cycle to make the sale happen.

Think about it some more:  salespeople and sales managers are trained to qualify the prospect, get to the decision maker, and determine the real objections in the way of making the sale.  But, how does that help salespeople to find more prospects? It may help to close more business, but it still leaves you with the same problem quarter after quarter – not having enough prospects.

We’ve all heard it since the first day of our first sales job:  the more prospects you have in the sales pipeline, the greater the chance you have to get more business.

So, once more, “how do you convince a salesperson to take a prospect off the sales forecast?.”

I totally agree with my former vice president of sales who says:  help them to find some new prospects, because only then will they admit that the old prospect – the one that keeps on rearing its head every quarter like a flying dutchman coming back to a haunted ship – wasn’t a good one.

You will know I’m right when at a company function, a few months later, you overhear the salesperson tell one of his associates, confidently, “I always knew that prospect sucked. I never really thought they would buy. I have plenty of other prospects who want to buy from me.”