March Madness – Bracket Your Prospects
We are a week away from the once a year rite of jump, the NCAA Mens Basketball Game, affectionately known as March Madness. Part of the ritual includes is carrying out your brackets for the huge dance, a ritual that is not lost on sales people, in fact there will be special meetings held in “bullpens” or boardrooms across the land. Not a terrible business, team building, contributing to the underground economy and all, but while you are at it, and in the groove, why not bracket your prospects, cause that’s where the real money is at!
While in the one case it is excellent fun and distraction, chief to minor glory and a bit of sap change if you pick right. I the case of your prospects and pipeline, it is your livelihood and success, and major glory as you spend your commissions. The excellent news is that the skills and process are not dissimilar.
As usual it is a amalgamation of tangible and the intangible, but solidly off-center to the tangible. Look at the team’s records, how they have preformed under uncommon conditions, and a range of other factors. The key is to examine what has worked and what hasn’t. How players and team respond to and react in uncommon conditions.
You can’t just succeed with your brackets by picking up the paper Sunday before, and making your picks based on the stats in the sports section. Your picks are based on following the teams throughout the season, last season, as long as the coach has been chief the team. Yet when it comes to prospects and pipelines, many sales people seem to do just so that. In fact if they would have as developed a system for administration their pipeline as they did for carrying out their brackets, they would be far more successful at selling, even more so than with their March Madness picks.
Now some purists may reckon this is crude, looking at sales gambling in the same way, but the reality is that the way many sales people approach and manage their pipeline really amounts to nothing more than gambling with much greater risk and impact.