In our industry, selling to government clients is the key to growing your business and achieving success. If you are struggling to succeed in government sales, it’s important to find out why and address the problem that is holding you back. There are three main reasons for a government sales process not working, but they all boil down to the same problem: a serious lack of visibility. If you don’t know what is going on with your sales pipeline, your sales team and your opportunities, your government sales process can’t work effectively.
Take a look at these three main reasons for a failing government sales process and ask yourself which one lies at the heart of your problem.
1. No Visibility Into Your Pipeline
The pipeline for government sales can be very different from the pipelines of other organizations. You need good visibility into your pipeline to understand where your company is in the process of selling to a government client for every deal you are managing. The data you gather should shed light on not only the activities of your sales team, but also their progress moving deals along the pipeline, so you can see where the sticking points are.
It’s also important to consider how your budget affects the sales pipeline. All too often, CEOs doom their government sales process to failure by not allocating the necessary resources to understand the buyers requirements and close sales.
2. No Visibility Into Your Personnel
Do you know exactly what the sales team is doing on a regular basis to capture sales? If you aren’t aware of your sales team’s activities, you can’t understand the reasons for your government sales process not working efficiently. Once you have set up a system to reliably track the activities and progress of your sales personnel, you can begin to set goals for them and meet each week, month, quarter and year.
A well-designed system of goals can help to motivate government sales professionals to make more sales to public sector clients. Always reward significant achievements from the highest-performing members of your sales team to keep morale high.
3. No Visibility Into Specific Capture Details
It’s not only the number of government sales that you make each year that you need to consider; you also need to know the specific details of each capture. What deals are losing and WHY? What deals are you winning and WHY?
When you collect and manage this data, you can make better projections for your sales and, more importantly, for the revenue that your sales process will generate over the next month, quarter or year. This data can also help you develop more win-able deals for your sales team, which will help to improve your overall sales figures.
Final Thought
Improving visibility is critical to understanding and addressing the reasons for your government sales process not working. In particular, you need to focus on improving visibility into your pipeline, as well as visibility into your sales teams’ activity level for all the specific details of your captures.
Gathering and analyzing this data is the key to gaining the necessary insight into your government sales process – which is essential to reforming the process to make it work successfully.
