Everyone’s experienced it, or knows someone who has: A person you’ve been dating for a while pushes back the conversation as soon as you try to define the relationship. In your gut, you know the relationship won’t make it, but can’t bring yourself to break it off.   Sales leaders have a term for this behavior: Chasing garbage trucks. This is when a rep continues to pour time, energy and company resources into the pursuit of deals unlikely to ever materialize.

Unfortunately, that’s what too many sellers are doing with prospects in today’s customer-empowered sales environment. As my colleague Brent Adamson wrote last week, customers are 57% of the way through the buying process before they engage suppliers. Yet, most sellers haven’t changed the way they sell, in particular, how they approach the sales process and the pursuit of individual opportunities. It’s no wonder The TAS Group has found that on average, it takes 65% longer to lose a deal than to win one. Sellers today are terrible at breaking up with customers who will never buy.

The mandate for sales leaders becomes this: We must engineer an approach to managing opportunities that uses the Challenger^TM model to steer sellers to the right deals and the right stakeholders.

Two key concepts help make that that mandate possible.

1. Customer verifiers

How we measure deal progress must shift from seller activity to tangible customer behavior. Challengers verify where customers are in their buying process –an ongoing ‘define the relationship’ conversation, if you will.

2. Mobilizers

Challengers find Mobilizers, the customer stakeholders that have the willingness and ability to drive change in the organization and can help shepherd the opportunity through to completion.

We’ll dig much deeper into this critical challenge as part of the CEB Sales Summit at Dreamforce.  Together with leaders from the Sales Cloud team, Brent Adamson and I will host a day-long series of sessions for senior Sales leaders on Wednesday, November 20^th.  We’ll drill down on the most troubling trends, with a look to how they are affecting selling organizations, and how the best ones are fighting back.  In addition to opportunity management, we’ll talk about selling skills, sales culture, the role of Marketing, and more. 

Additionally, Matt is a prolific business writer.  He is the co-author of The Challenger Sale (Penguin, November 2011), and The Effortless Experience (Penguin, 2013).  He is also a top contributor to Harvard Business Review, Matt holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh as well as a B.A. in International Politics from Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he graduated summa cum laude. 

Join us by registering with promo code M13CEB, or if you are already registered for Dreamforce, search for “CEB Sales Summit” in the Dreamforce app to reserve your seat.