Behind your quota?

Read time: 2 minutes

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We have 3 exciting things happening in the next 2 weeks!

1. Sales workshop & panel discussion in partnership with ELRIG in London. You can register for it here if you’ll be there on Oct 1. Spots are almost full.

2. Networking, food, and drinks in London on Oct 2. We’re bringing together Succession + SAMPS for a fun evening meeting other life science sales and marketing professionals. Sign up here

3. Prospecting Mastery Accelerator starts on Oct 7! This is a live virtual training program to help you get more meetings with your ideal customers. If you need more deals in Q4 or want to start filling your pipeline for Q1, come join us!

Back in article 39, we introduced a framework to systematically uplevel your skills to hit your target.

If you’re behind on your sales target for the year, the first step of the process is extremely important. Find where the cracks in are your pipeline.

1. Have you already hit your target?

2. Do you have enough late-stage pipeline to hit your target?

3. Are enough deals progressing to late stage?

4. Are you creating enough qualified opportunities?

5. Are you having enough first meetings?

6. Are you doing enough prospecting activities?

These questions help you understand where to focus your time and energy.

In the majority of cases when you’re behind on your number, it’s because you don’t have enough qualified opportunities to hit your target.

If that’s the case, your main focus needs to be on prospecting!

• You can’t sit around and hope leads will fall into your lap.

• You can’t hope that every deal in your pipeline will close (they wont!)

• You can’t hope that a current customer will come back to you with a monster order.

Hope isn’t a strategy!

While you can’t control every outcome, you can control your actions.

By increasing your prospecting efforts (quality and quantity) you will create more opportunities.

A fat healthy pipeline cures all sales problems.

Here is a 5-step process to get your prospecting on track

Step 1: Figure out your sales math and how many prospecting activities are needed to hit your quota. (Not sure how many activities are needed to hit your quota? Use this Hit Your Quota Calculator)

Step 2: Figure out who your best customers are and build a target list of customers that look just like them. Tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, SciLeads, BiopharmIQ, or Apollo will help.

Step 3: Prioritize your list into 2 segments. Decision makers (have the budget) and influencers (users). Typically these are based on title within the organization.

Step 4: Create targeted prospecting messages and sequences that will resonate with each persona. Here is a simple email framework you can use. You shouldn’t send the same message to a CSO that you would a bench scientist. They care about different things.

Step 5: Block off time every day to commit to prospecting (and don’t skip it). If you’re behind and need more opportunities, you can’t skip prospecting. During that time block all you will do is prospect and work your way through the list you built.

Prospecting Mastery Accelerator

If you want us to help guide you step by step through all of this, that’s what the Prospecting Mastery Accelerator is all about.

We will personally help build lists, show you what tools to use, rewrite your messaging, and show you how the best reps are breaking through the noise to book more meetings. The skills you learn will help you this quarter and for future years to come so you don’t end up in a situation where you have a dry empty pipeline.

Apple Podcast | Spotify | YouTube

Episode 46: [Sales] Build trust at scale through content and social media with Rizwan Chaudhrey

• Put yourself out there because you never know who you'll meet

• Focus on what your customer needs not what you want

• Build trust at scale through content and social media

• Curating content can be a great way to start on LinkedIn

1. Lead Generation: We’ll build target lists, write scientifically relevant messaging, and send messages on your behalf to book qualified sales meetings with biotech and pharma companies.

2. Succession for Reps: A skill development platform for life science sales reps who want to improve their sales skills, exceed their quota, and take the next step in their career.

3. Succession for Teams: If you want to upskill your team around prospecting, driving to close, key account management, AI, or any other topic, we can put together a training plan specific to your organization’s needs.

4. Strategy Call: Need more than training? Want help implementing and executing your sales strategy? In a 30-minute call, we will assess your company’s current situation and identify growth opportunities.

Special Offer: If you’ve made it this far, you can use the coupon code NEWSLETTER to get 20% off an individual Succession membership.

Recommended Products & Tools: We’ve used every one of these products and can highly recommend them to you. Everything from CRMs to AI tools.

Join SAMPS: A free community of sales and marketing professionals of the sciences. They run in-person events and put on regular webinars packed with great content.