SellingPower.com’s article – Help for Your Pre-Call Prep – makes a bold statement in the opening sentence:

When you get right down to it, sales are won or lost on preparation.

I would argue that sales are won or lost on execution.  Give me a salesperson who executes flawlessly any day over one who prepares flawlessly.  Again, the context is in terms of where deals are lost.  Be that as it may, the article has an interesting statistic found in one of the later graphs.

At a time when relatively few initial discussions with a client are progressing further into the sales cycle (40 percent of organizations say only 25 – 50 percent of initial discussions progress to a presentation; 30 percent say 51– 75 percent of discussions do so, according to CSO Insights), the issue of pre-call preparation deserves some attention. After all, it’s the quality of your preparation that largely determines whether or not the client agrees to a second meeting.

Ok, I take umbrage with the over-emphasis on pre-call prep.  Salespeople who show up and throw up are the main reason suspects do not move into prospects.  I thought this number was shocking – up to 50% of initial discussions progress to a presentation.  This fact could be that salespeople are better qualifiers in lean economies.  Perhaps they are qualifying suspects more thoroughly to eliminate the tirekickers from their pipeline.

In other words, a lower number moving into the pipeline could be construed as better qualifying.

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