Bigger isn't always better
There's such a thing as too big. When it comes to your sales pipeline, you must be careful about not letting it get overstuffed with prospects.

Think of it this way. If your goal is to have 20 deals in your pipeline at any given time, and it turns out you've got 50, this seems like a good thing, doesn't it? After all, with so many deals in the various stages of your pipeline, you're ahead of the game.

The reality is that this may not always be the case. Too many deals spread your available resources too thin. When you're over productive in this way, you tend not to pay the proper amount of attention to all the deals in the pipeline and some can grow cold and stale.

We know, it happened to us
We once hired a salesman who had really distinguished himself before signing on with us. Strangely, it didn't take very long before we realized he was having some challenges. In one month, he began with 10 really great leads but by the end of the month, most of them hadn't moved on along the pipeline.

It took us a while before we both had come to the conclusion that the good old "we're still thinking about it and we should have a definite decision in a couple of weeks" canned response wasn't good enough. For one, we had heard it too many times.

When our new star changed his close tactics and asked all prospects if they were ready to place an order that month, we found out that only 1 was actually going to make a purchase. It was clear that while the volume of conversations he was putting into the pipeline was reasonable, the velocity of those deals was abysmal. His pipeline which had seemed healthy had actually been "clogged".

He quickly learned his lesson and became one of the best closers on the sales team. Slow prospects suck; they suck the $$$ right out of your commission checks.