The excuses some salespeople use to explain away their lack of productivity are never-ending. Their unwillingness to do the dirty work of selling seems to be a reflection of their fear or insecurities. Some account executives (AEs) spend more time trying to acquit themselves of their responsibility than simply marching forward. Admitting failure sucks, but it beats the heck out of lying to yourself, your colleagues, and your manager. 

The Pipeline Review

The pipeline review session is critical for a company to have a view into its future sales and the ability to forecast the timing for when new business opportunities will close. It’s also the venue where AEs are most likely to expose their lack of actions, all of which are slathered in a thick morass of hogwash. These affairs typically happen during a conference call with a regular cadence. A frontline manager hosts the call and grills each of his AEs one by one. The manager uses this information to then distill down his staff’s pipeline and forecast to present to both the VP of sales and his peers.

Some salespeople are too optimistic and others are too pessimistic about the chances for their opportunities to close. A critical quality of high-performing sales managers is the ability to filter through all of the gibberish they were fed by their AEs and accurately forecast business for closure. The VP must do the same thing with all of the deal information she’s hearing from her managers. The simple point of these reviews is for the manager at each level to question her staff on the efficacy of their opportunities. 

What’s an Invisible Fence?

The information that can be gleaned during an AE pipeline review can be exceptionally helpful to the participating AEs. It’s a chance to hear what strategies and tactics are working and a chance to ask questions. On the negative end of the spectrum, the bullshit meter explodes when certain salespeople share their selling activity, or the lack thereof. There are few things worse than admitting failure, but some salespeople seem to feel that lying is a good alternative. It’s not that they’re bad people, they’re simply not being honest about their lack of effort. 

Here are a few excuses you might hear:

• My prospect has an enterprise license for our competitor’s product, and they won’t talk to me or consider our product.
• The account is sold out; there’s nothing left to sell.
• This person in the organization is preventing me from speaking to other people.
• Our CEO pissed off one of my prospect’s executives in the past, and now they won’t talk to me.
• Procurement told me I can’t talk to anyone in the company while an RFP is in play
• I’m waiting… waiting on a security badge, waiting on the client to set a meeting, waiting on the client to estimate the services, waiting on the client to calculate the return on investment.

These are all interesting bits of data, but they’re really nothing more than invisible fences the salesperson is erecting around their opportunities and chances for success. Managers must kick down these invisible fences at first sight of them. If they don’t, other well-intended AEs will begin to exonerate themselves of their responsibility in a similar manner. This imaginary wall-building can infect an entire team and beyond if allowed to grow.

Ignoring Invisible Fences

Several years ago, one of my colleagues was working with General Electric (GE). Our company identified GE as a global account and assigned several salespeople to work it. At one point in the relationship with GE, our president and the global account executive met with the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for all of GE. Prior to the meeting, both firms spent the better part of a year hashing through the terms and conditions for an enterprise contract. The contract was complete, but the price was keeping the deal from crossing the goal line. 

If the deal closed, it would make the current quarter’s revenue goal for my company. If it closed, my colleague stood to make a life-changing amount of money. The price countered by the CIO wasn’t just unreasonable, it was ludicrous. The global AE worked for many months along with staff from GE to justify the functional need and financial value of the deal. There was no negotiation. The CIO wouldn’t budge from his demeaning offer, so our president and global AE chose to walk away from the deal. The CIO was furious and told them that they’d never sell anything else to GE. 

The global AE worked on this giant opportunity for a couple of years, so you can imagine the heartbreak of walking away from this deal. The sales guy could have requested another account or used the statement from GE’s CIO to explain that his future selling activity was dead. His president could corroborate this fact. Instead, the AE chose to ignore the CIO’s harsh dictate. Three years later, the global team working GE closed over $14 million in new sales revenue. And yes, the GE CIO who said that nothing from our firm would be sold into GE was there the entire time. 

This isn’t an isolated event. I’ve experienced these types of issues and have seen numerous colleagues climb enormous invisible fences and succeed in spite of them.

Preventing Invisible Fences from being Erected

The trick to avoid erecting barriers to your success or goals is responsibility. It’s not always so easy, or least it’s not for this author. Years ago while reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I came across a statement that had a lifelong, positive impact on me. Stephen Covey wrote that “the ability to choose your response” is the definition of responsibility.  It was a simple, but powerful observation.

The nonstop challenges of selling can push even well-grounded salespeople to start building invisible fences. This is where the sales manager steps in; they must call out anything resembling an excuse by their sellers. They must demand evidence that progress is being made. When the AE is avoiding personal responsibility, it’s the manager’s duty to push back and quickly correct course. 

In my humble opinion, when the AE doesn’t respond, the manager must quickly take further action and, where appropriate, cull these negative influences. This may sound harsh, but selling is a high-risk, high-reward career for a reason. The rest of the company is depending on the sales staff to perform for everyone’s job stability.

High Risk, High Reward

Many sales positions offer tremendous compensation potential. Companies know the challenges sellers must overcome to be successful. How about constant rejection to start? Does anyone pop out of bed each day knowing that most of their efforts will end in defeat? It takes a special kind of person to work through the embarrassment of being hung up on in mid-sentence, then get up and do it all over again, day after day.

The endless pressure to close business and make your number year after year is too challenging for some to handle. Making your goal in sales is also often rewarded the next year with fewer accounts to work and a higher quota. Some days, the thorn-filled fields we walk through to get something sold gets to be too painful. A way to rationalize a lack of recent success presents itself in the form of an invisible fence. Recognizing what it is and choosing the right response will continue to give you the opportunity to succeed.