Avoiding the "Dry Pipeline"

by Graham Denton

It's the sales profession's most widely hated -- and most commonly encountered -- revenue generation pattern: the "boom and bust" cycle. You have a phenomenal amount of business closing one quarter, then have to scramble to barely make quota in the next. Call it boom and bust, peak and valley, or the Roller Coaster Effect, the outcome is the same. You're unable to make realistic forecasts of future revenue because you're periodically faced with a low-yield, dried up opportunity pipeline.

As much as this scenario may resemble the typical (and allegedly uncontrollable) ups and downs of a business cycle, it's actually caused by something far closer to home. The reason that salespeople periodically encounter dry months is that they have set themselves up for this situation through their weekly work patterns. That, fortunately, is something you can control.

In any given week, in order to survive in selling long-term, you've got to attend to basically three categories of business opportunity: new business, business that's somewhere in the middle of your sales cycle, and business that's getting close to the contract stage. In other words, you've got to prospect, work the ongoing opportunities, and close. The secret to avoiding those periodic dry pipelines is in performing these three activities, every week, in the optimum sequence.

That sequence is not the traditional salesperson's sequence of closing first, working on the ongoing opportunities next, and prospecting last. In fact, following that time-honored and ostensibly logical sequence practically will ensure that you'll encounter periodic dry months. Why? Because if you save the unpleasant task of prospecting until last, it always will get short shrift, and in many weeks it simply will drop off your agenda altogether. That only has to happen once or twice before the incoming opportunities start to dry up. Once that happens, it's only a matter of time before you close your last "instant commission" deal and you have nothing coming down the pipeline to replace it with.

The moral's simple. If you want to ensure steady, rather than boom and bust, income, you've got to make working the opportunities at the "top of the pipeline" a higher priority. Not your first priority (that should remain closing immediate business), but your second. The optimum sequence of your work, week after week, is this:

• First, close business.
• Second, prospect and qualify.
• Third, work on your ongoing opportunities.

Anthony Parinello, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Dynamic Selling, thinks so much of this sequence that he refers to it as "The Parinello Principle." He didn't invent it, though. Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman, the founders of Miller Heiman, Inc., recommended exactly this sequence over a decade ago, in the first edition of their classic Strategic Selling. They called it the cure for the "Roller Coaster Effect." But they didn't invent it, either. As they acknowledged, it always has been the sequence of choice for the best sales professionals, and for the best of reasons. It eliminates the wheezing and spluttering of a poorly managed pipeline by making the acquisition of new business a regular activity.

Sales stars don't do this because they like prospecting. Nobody likes prospecting. They do it because, in the end, it's what makes closing possible.