How To Establish a Rhythm for Your Business

There is a rhythm to business. Understanding that rhythm and working to ensure the proper cadence is critical to growing your sales organization.

Here are three meetings, or conversations, you need to have with your sales team (or yourself) every week.

Pipeline Review: This is the foundation of a good cadence. Reviewing the pipeline to inspect how many new opportunities you created in the prior week is the activity that ensures you have the ability to reach your goals. Without the right number of opportunities, you throw your future into doubt. The pipeline meeting also allows you to inspect the overall health of the opportunities in your funnel, ensuring that they are progressing smoothly from target to close. Without this meeting, you will always be surprised, and most of those surprises will not be pleasant.

Opportunity Review: Opportunity reviews allow you to ensure that the opportunity is real, that you can create value for your dream client, and that you have an effective plan to win. Opportunity reviews allow you to focus on strategy. You can ask questions like “What is compelling this prospect to change?” You can also ask questions like “How are we different, and how does that make a difference for this prospective customer?” Most of the time, pipeline reviews end up being opportunity reviews, and these two activities are different and need to be separated. Otherwise, you’ll lose the focus on prospecting that is necessary for a Pipeline Review.

Team Huddles: You need to make sure that you are improving from week to week, from month-to-month, from quarter to quarter. Team huddles provide you the format to deal with the challenges that you are having, or that your sales force is having, in a group setting. It’s a way to share best practices, brainstorm on how to overcome common obstacles, and notch your team up by sharing across the entire sales force. These meetings don’t have to be long. But they do have to provide the people involved with actionable insights that will help them do better immediately. It’s a worthwhile investment of time and energy.

I could add more pieces to this cadence, but this is enough to get you started and massively improve your results now. If you are a solo act, you still need to do this work, but you might need an accountability partner to push you.

How do you ensure that you are creating the opportunities you need to reach your goals?

How do you improve your strategy to ensure you win the opportunities you do create?

What do you do to ensure you get better from week to week?