Episode 212: The Simple Weekly Rhythm That Keeps Your Sales Pipeline Moving

There is a version of your pipeline where every lead has a clear next step and someone responsible for it. Getting there takes 30 minutes a week.

In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast, Thomas walks through the sales meeting rhythm Wize teaches firm owners to run with their client managers, and why it works better than any CRM or automation your firm could buy.

✅ Why the purpose of a sales pipeline is focus rather than reporting
✅ The difference between a lead and a prospect and why the distinction changes how you follow up
✅ Why chasing a clear no is worth as much to your firm as chasing a yes
✅ The six questions that turn a short sales meeting into the most useful half hour of your week
✅ Why client managers stop selling to existing clients and what that costs you
✅ How a thin top of funnel is what makes your team sound desperate on discovery calls
✅ Why a no-blame culture is the thing that finally gets your team comfortable with sales

If leads keep going quiet and nobody can tell you why, this is the rhythm to build your pipeline around.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome

Welcome And Today’s Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:01

to The Wise Way, the show for accounting and bookkeeping firm owners who want more time, profit, and freedom and a business that can run without them. I'm Brenn Ward, your host, and each week we deep dive into the real stories, proven strategies, and battle-tested tools from successful firm owners just like you. Our wise mentors want to share their journey of how they've scaled and systemized their way to freedom so you can too. If you're stuck in the grind or you're ready to scale smarter, this is your blueprint. Let's get into the episode.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Specifically

Why Pipelines Go Stale

SPEAKER_01 0:39

on sales today, we're going to be focused on the weekly meeting rhythm that keeps the pipeline moving. I'm sure we've all been there. We've created a sales pipeline in an Excel sheet or maybe somewhere in our CRM, and it's got leads coming into it, and then you're having discovery meetings. Some of them have proposals, some of them may have been accepted or lost just yet. And what it looks like for 90% of businesses and accounting firms out there is there'll be records in the sales pipeline system that just linger there. And there never seems to be a resolution. Like, is it lost? Was it a yes or was it a no? There will be leads, there'll be hundreds of leads scraped from some list. Like maybe you're targeting electricians and you scrape the electrician's registry list or something. We're going to work on them and start calling them up and getting to action on sales. So one of the number one workflows for salespeople is sales pipeline hygiene. And talking to a ex-head of sales who used to work at Xero and was largely responsible for helping New South Wales accountants adopt Xero. I've been getting sales training from him once a month for over a year now. So I would try things, I'll do practice in front of the camera, or I'll do certain calls with people and I'll ask for his feedback. And then I'll also show him my workflow and systems. And the thing that stood out to me, I'd save all the sales, like actual technique advice. But when it came to the workflow and I would show him a list, what he would look for is he would look for what he calls stinkiness. Like, is it a stinky list? Like, are there any is anything rotten and it's just been sitting there for days and no one's touched it and this pipeline has become meaningless? Or is it fresh? And what we're all tempted to do is we're all tempted to just talk about all the top-of-the-funnel opportunities that the firm has. Oh, we have 50 prospects we sent out proposals, but they haven't accepted yet. Like all this action and nothing closed just yet. What we want to achieve here is we want to ruthlessly cull and keep this sales pipeline clean. Because the purpose of a sales pipeline is not just to be a management reporting tool. It's actually a tool of focus. Like in practical day-to-day sales, it would be a tool of focus. So when you're looking at this sales pipeline, it should be clear for each, say, client manager or even yourself, who are the two top priorities I should actually be putting my attention into for trying to close a sale? Right? Who should I actually be trying to focus my energy on? Who can I call from this list? It's not just a matter of, like if you have 20 to accept on a proposal, and you you'll be tempted just to email each one. If you've only had two, you'd give them a phone call. Okay, so this is all about the sales pipeline hygiene and this meeting rhythm, this simple meeting rhythm that keeps it clean. Nothing fancy needed, no fancy technology needed. It's just meeting rhythms and keeping this uh pipeline clean. Okay,

The Monthly Sales Meeting Agenda

SPEAKER_01 4:00

so in this sales meeting rhythm, this is a once-a-month meeting that you can hold for 30 minutes to 60 minutes. And the agenda items that you want to cover in the sales meeting are here. So, what leads do you have and what prospects do you have? And just briefly, the difference between leads and prospects is that a prospect is someone who's at least had a meeting with you, and you're either going to produce a proposal for them or they've been sent one. And a lead is just someone who looks like that call qualify as your client, but we've we haven't had a discovery meeting just yet. Okay, so what leads do you have? What prospects do you have? And what leads and prospects have you lost? Now, some people would be afraid to answer this question. Oh, you know, I haven't lost any leads, I haven't lost any prospects, they're all good, they're all going, I'm gonna win them all. This is a natural, untrained sales instinct that is just a natural human instinct that doesn't come from any like sales training or place. A disciplined sales meeting and a person in sales would be seeking out an answer to a no just as much as they would a yes with a sale. And with no, it's not like no, please leave me alone, you're harassing me. It's more like, yeah, you know, no, your proposal isn't going to work out for us, and because of these reasons. Okay, we're not saying harass people until they say no. It's just can we actually help you or not? So we can resolve this and close it out. So, what leads and prospects have you lost in this sales meeting? You want people to share? And you want to see signs where people are trying to find an answer. A no is just as important as a yes, because then at least in this meeting, we'll have something to learn from. What prospects have you won who are now new clients? Okay, so we'll ask this in this question. Have you sold additional services to existing clients or customers? This is an important one. As a client manager, it's often that they have their attention dedicated towards new clients to generate new business and then end up neglecting their existing ones. Being in a relationship business, clients, especially the right clients, will have more work to give the firm as they have more trust with you. So client managers investing in the client goodwill, an emotional bank account, that's what allows them to consult with the client and offer them more services. And this is a sign of okay, well, are we? And then if we're not, is there are there signals of this in a low client NPS? Are you too busy? This is something that would raise flags worth investigating so that we can free up client manager time. And what existing clients have you lost and why? And the why part is quite important. It's often clients would just leave. Individual tax return clients won't come back the next year. You know, that's fine. We they like to change accountants, sure. Uh, with long-term business clients who are most likely the firm's ideal clients, it's quite critical to attempt to find a why. Attempt to find a why where the client's excuse isn't cash flow or something, because we're literally their accountant. This is important because we want to be able to find if there's anything that needs to actually be solved, like fundamentally. Okay.

Simple Tools Beat Fancy Systems

SPEAKER_01 7:36

So these targeted lead questions, uh these targeted questions are asked in the weekly sales meeting every single week. That's the complete implementation of it. And to extend on this and to make this a productive meeting, because it's 30 minutes and at most 60, is to create a Teams or a Slack channel called a sales channel, just like how we do here in WISE where Sham, you collecting the sales and KPIs from different areas in WISE from reported by people into that channel, and that gets reported into the meeting. Okay. Now, this is in huge contrast to say another different type of business you could be thinking of, where they've got some crazy sales pipeline logic setup thing with automations to like send emails, automations, and for retention and all those sort of things. It's in stark contrast to that because with those sort of systems, I see firms equal in two camps. They either have those systems and there's just they're not making any use of at all. Like they've been sold on it, but they're not the right firm to actually use a tool like that, or they're actually making use of it. And for the firms who aren't the right firm to be using a tool like that, they just find that it's great. It's just requires a lot of love and maintenance and care to get the most out of. Like someone needs to actually care about it. Having questions in a weekly meeting for 30 minutes and a Teams channel for people to report their figures to an operations manager such as yourself, Sham, in this case the COO, it that's probably the easiest and like lowest barrier way to get our team caring about sales and starting to drive home every single week with them how it is a continuous effort with the firm. Okay, because we're accountants, we're not trained to be managers. Okay, it's very rarely we've been trained to be managers, it's even rarer we'd be trained in sales. And the last thing we want to do is put roadblocks in front of people with anything too elaborate. We just want to start simple and create a meeting rhythm for people to share these results here and address any culture of blame or insecurity or lack of planning at this stage, and you will naturally lean on a tool that you would want to use.

No Blame Culture Builds Confidence

SPEAKER_01 10:26

This is the place where as a team we would you would go and include the transcriptions and analysis from the sales meeting in there. Okay, one tip I would like to share is sales can feel like demoralizing for a lot of people because it's like they have a target that they would need to reach and they don't really know how to exactly get there. Okay. The challenge is when they're not really sharing with you what they're trying, and in that situation, it's because they're scared that, you know, it's making them look bad. Okay, it's gonna make them look bad or that, you know, they might not have a you might not have a good opinion about them. In achieving in sales, in most cases, it really stresses upon a no-blame environment because there is lots of failure in sales and a scarcity mindset and a cautious one, it doesn't help. Okay, when a person's going to a sales meeting and they're thinking about themselves and how they need to get their targets hit and then they're not even comfortable doing it themselves, it doesn't help because they're worried about a bad outcome. They're thinking about their livelihood. So it's important to create that no-blame culture and share, share losses, share, share situations you've lost too with them, and then how what you've learned from that. No one likes to sit go in front of their team and go, I'm bad at sales, or I failed here too, or I've implemented this before and I screwed it up. That's totally normal. It's totally normal to just be human, especially when your staff, you're trying to address something in your staff, which is it's hard for them because they're lacking the confidence. Okay, so that's going to be the number one challenge as firm owners, we're going to face working together with our team, training them to be client managers, making them decent at maintaining a client relationship, but then getting them to go further to actually look for how they can proactively help a client. And

Sell By Helping Not Pushing

SPEAKER_01 12:35

that's what it is in our industry. We're not selling TVs or like the latest computers. You know, we don't have shiny things like that that are consumer great. Or everyone here, all our work, we deal in compliance, in accounting or bookkeeping. These are all generally pretty serious, and to the average person would seem not that interesting. Okay. So we come at the approach of wanting to help the client. It's really just about finding where's the strongest emotion that they're having coming from right now. Is it their what they have about their goals or is it about their fears? And then just to understand it and then help them with the knowledge of our firm. Versus, okay, I'm selling family trust. Okay, this maybe like a year years ago. Okay, like selling trusts. People are gonna set up trusts. Let's hit up everyone and get them a trust. Doesn't work. Doesn't work. It's it doesn't, the market smells that it smells what you were planning in your in the meeting rooms. If we're not actually wanting to help the clients, and if we're not framing everything we do around wanting to help people and helping the right people, the team doesn't get to build their confidence. Okay, so that's one thing around confidence. The second

Top Of Funnel Stops Desperation

SPEAKER_01 13:53

thing about confidence is, and this was from the salesperson that chatting with, he would say if you have a small lead funnel, like small top of the funnel, then naturally when you do a dis when you do a discovery meeting, you're going to sound desperate. Maybe not, like that's depending on the personality. But generally, if you have fewer opportunities, you're gonna want to like feel like you you need to grab more of them. Like more of them, a high percentage of this needs to succeed. And desperation is another term, is another thing that Sam would say is a stinky thing. So like people smell desperation. They smell like you really want this. You really, really like you're not thinking about what helps me, you just really want this. So the solution to this is having a plentiful top of funnel. Always putting yourself into a position where it's okay if this, what I'm, you know, what what I'm what we're offering isn't right for this person. I'm not gonna waste my time any further. I have somebody else that I need to go and also see and talk to as well. Okay, you're not gonna think about it all too much. You'll just think it wasn't right for them. It's not because you're a bad salesperson. You you listen to them, it's just not right for them. There's a lot of psychology in it. And where accountants typically lack the confidence to do sales, it's because half it's to do with them, and the other half it's to do with this, it's to do with the environment that the firm has set up to be able to encourage a sales uh environment. Okay, I've only of the types of accountants who are not business owners, who seem like go-getter sales type, uh like they're like they're thinking about like, oh, I got these reports, I can I can deliver this type of service to the client. Those type of managers who think like that, I I would they are very rare. They're rare from everyone's like a general wives observation and a personal observation. When I come across firms and then I get to meet their teams, it's very rare that there would be that type of person in there. Okay, like that firm would have that type of person in there. Okay, so that is on a little, I said I wouldn't go into like sales like specific stuff, but that I wanted to, I guess I shared that, but that's the sales meeting. You would

Who Should Join The Meeting

SPEAKER_01 16:24

book it together with yourself and your client managers and your operational manager as well. Okay, and at times you might include marketing personnel in there. Marketing is often required to support sales as well. Thank you everyone for joining today on the sales meeting rhythm. I hope you make your way into the Wise Hub and start tracking your sales meetings in there.

Reviews Subscriptions And Newsletter

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Wise Play. If today's episode sparked an idea or helped you see things differently, please don't forget to leave us a review. And if you haven't subscribed to the podcast on your favourite platform yet, please go ahead and do that as well. Let's continue the conversation here through YouTube or any other social platforms that you can find us on. And just remember, if you're not a subscriber of our weekly Friday tip newsletter, you can get that to your inbox every week going forward. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, you don't have to do it alone. Let's build a business that works for you the wise way. We'll see you in the next episode.