GTD and the sales pipeline

Getting Things Done is often applied to our task list and our email inbox, but rarely to more complex processes like our sales pipeline. However, the principles are the same and the effects could be staggering.

Sales is an Art, Not Really
Sales as an art form is the lead myth and barrier to consistent sales performance. Sales is a process that is performed. Granted some better than other. Just like an Olympic athlete–the technique is consistent, some just get better at it.

Unfortunately, for our sales organizations somewhere along the way we got the impression that there were a variety of better ways to swim the 100M freestyle. Rubbish!

Sales is about making efficiently making contact, delivering value, and collecting money. Most of those you can’t control. I have said it before, but it boils down to this: If the product sucks–you don’t need sales. If the market sucks–you don’t need sales. So, lets figure that out as fast as possible by contacting more people more efficiently with GTD.

Collection
Get all of you stuff in one place. That means all of your contacts, leads, people. Whatever you want to call them–you need them together. When you start calling you don’t want to be hunting for names, phone numbers, or who they are. Dial–Hang-up–Dial.

This means you need a database, spreadsheet, or contact management software that lets you efficiently move from one contact to the next. I suggest contact management software with a robust lead management database. This is going to allow you to scale and make a lot of notes. Hopefully you are building a rolodex for the ages.

Processing
You need a system. Calling fast and frequently is great, but you need to know what to do with each contact based on the results of the call. GTD has a nice 5 choice process. Make your sales lead management process just as simple:

  1. Trash it
  2. Close it
  3. Transfer it (hand it up or down)
  4. Schedule it
  5. Nurture it

There is nothing else.

Organizing
When you organize your sales pipeline manage it in the same way as GTD. Set-up the right buckets and make sure your processing system gets the right contacts into the right buckets.

Here are the buckets I use:

  1. Attempted
  2. Contacted
  3. Proposal
  4. Closed
  5. Withdrawn
  6. Scheduled
  7. Bogus

The nice thing about creating buckets in your contact management software is you can use it to automate your contact flow, lead prioritization, and any lead nurturing campaigns you have. Manual or automated–organizing into predefined buckets makes sales happen faster.

Reviewing
No system is perfect. Review it. See what is working and what is not.

This is again where a good lead management database comes in handy. Look at your reports and do some quick analysis. Don’t get overwhelmed by the minutae–eyeball your reports for oddities.

I like to look for what I call–”slowing and heaping” in my reports.

What processes seem to be happening slower or less frequently than expected? Try something new to speed them up.

Where are leads piling up? Try something to process them out of the log jam.

Doing
Want to know the number one cause of most poor sales performance? Ssssssh, come close for the secret…NOT DOING ANYTHING!

That’s right. Just doing something even without a contact database, or a system, or a process, or organization will yield more than standing around organizing sheets of paper, counting your pencils, or labeling your folders.

As Nike says, “Just Do It!”

Article contributed by Bill Rice, a sales expert and GTD enthusiast. This was originally published on Bills’ blog. We thought it was a great summary of applying GTD to sales so we are posting it here with Bill’s permission.

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8 Comments

  1. I know a lot of GTD gurus and evangelist in sales. I would love to hear more about how you apply David Allen’s principles to your sales.

    GTD Times thanks for giving me the opportunity to contribute!

  2. In one business that I run (landscape garden center) I do sales similar to what you listed but my folders are a little different:

    1. need to call back – most leads contact us first so their info goes into here until I call them back

    depending on if it is a fit for us or not I put it in one of the 2 folders:

    1. need estimates – i contacted them and i need to make an estimate
    2. old items – i like to keep their contact info even if we are not giving them an estimate

    then the rest of my folders

    1. estimates – the estimate was sent to them and I’m waiting to hear back to see if they accepted it or not
    2. scheduled – if they accept the estimate the job gets scheduled
    3. owes money – when the job is done it goes in here until i get paid
    4. jobs done – all the completed jobs

    seems to work pretty well, i started it this year (after reading GTD) and I haven’t looked back

  3. Hi Donald,

    Thanks for the feedback. In my system as soon as I get word of an accepted estimate I schedule it. Instead of a folder for scheduled we have a wall in the office where we have 5 rows of 7 clips that are hanging on the wall. One clip for each day and each row is a week. We can very quickly see where to schedule the next job and we put the estimate on the wall as soon as it is accepted.

    Once the job is completed I either email a copy of the estimate and it goes in my ‘owes money’ folder or if it needs to be mailed I give a copy to our office person who handles it from there.

    a ‘to Invoice’ folder probably would work for me, but I do a good job of sending it out as soon as the job is complete. If I get backed up that folder would be useful.

    That is a all paper system and I use quickbooks for the invoicing/estimates.

    As far as my day to day todos I made getitdoneapp.com . I put all my work and home tasks in there, it is much easier for me to keep track of everything on the internet so I can get to it from home and work.

    Thanks,
    Mike

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