How to Shift Sales Manager Focus from Top of Funnel to Winning More Deals

Welcome back to The Win Rate podcast. Today Andy welcomes Tim Hughes, CEO of DLA ignite and author of Social Selling, and Eric Stine who is just coming off his roles of CRO and Chief Commercial Officer at Skillsoft. Eric, Tim, and Andy explore the importance of evaluating performance at different levels within organizations and the impact it has on overall success, how misclassifying leads affects sales pipelines, and the common practice of capturing leads early on without properly assessing their potential. They explore the repercussions of this, including the pressure to maintain an artificially high pipeline multiple and the struggle to differentiate between top performers and those who struggle to say no to low-quality leads.

They also share valuable insights on the role played by first line managers, the challenges they face, and innovative ways to improve effectiveness. And within all the data, they reflect on why human connection is essential for closing deals and how it can still be easy to build a relationship in a short span of time even when face to face interaction isn’t as common as it once was.

Find Tim and Eric on LinkedIn

Host Andy Paul is the expert on modern B2B selling and author of three best-selling, award-winning sales books, including his latest Sell Without Selling Out. Visit andypaul.com to subscribe to his newsletter for even more strategies and tips to accelerate your win rate!

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Key Quotes

"If you have fairly good sales reps and they're well enabled, then they are performing that early stage discovery almost unconsciously."

— Eric 00:21:410 0:21:52

Pipeline Management: "I have plenty of sales reps that I wouldn't trade for anything in the world that have win rates of 35, 45%. But they have one bad behavior, which is they can't say no to a lead."

— Eric 00:23:32 00:23:43

Improving First Line Management: "And for me, the critical inflection point and where I spend a lot of time as a leader is on first line management, because I think a lot of success or failure happens based on what your first line managers do..."

— Eric 00:25:240 0:25:35

I was fortunate to work for people that I remember asked a boss once what's our pipeline or multiple should I have? And he says, whatever you need to hit your number. Okay, that's good advice. And for me that was yeah, I generally ran 1.5 throughout my career and I was selling big stuff, but that's what worked for me. And somebody else may need three, somebody else may need four. 

— Andy 00:28:320 0:29:27

 "I think there has to be we still need to train sales leaders because we still have the situation where we take the best salespeople and make them leaders. And quite often they're not leaders and they have to learn how to deal with people."

— Tim 00:30:530 0:31:07

“We should have known earlier we didn't talk to the right person that we should have talked to, that would have just devastated us. It was a great lesson, right?"

— Andy 00:36:060 0:36:13

"Got one thing out of that meeting. I got money for manager enablement. Because manager enablement is like a hurricane or a wildfire. Nobody wants to pay for prevention, but once the storm hits, they'll pay for the cleanup."

— Eric 00:41:330 0:41:45