Effectively Managing Your Sales Pipeline at Scale

Effectively Managing Your Sales Pipeline at Scale

Vadim RevzinFounder, Tascit@vrevzin tascit.com

Q1: How well do you understand the state of every deal in your sales pipeline?

Q2: How are you making sure that every department is aligned on this information?

As your sales team scales, 3 things start to happen:

1.Consistency between reps is difficult to enforce2.Information falls through the cracks3.Data (good or bad) impacts every major decision

How can you prepare for this?

With a combination of the rightprocess and technology

A Framework for Effective Pipeline Management

4 Core Principles

Simplification Communication

Consistency Tracking

Principle 1: Simplification

“The best sales people are often the laziest” -Bryan Rutcofsky, VP of Sales, Yext

Sales people only care about 2 things:

Reaching quota

Getting the commission check

3 Questions to gauge if your CRM is too complex to be effective:

1)Are my sales reps updating every single field?2)Is detailed information being entered about the

progress of each deal?3)Is there information that currently lives outside of the

system? (ie: a Shadow Pipeline*)

* When sales reps have a separate excel file where they personally keep track of their real pipeline

Less is more

Remove as many fields, steps, screens as you can so that your reps are required to enter only the most critical information about each deal

Would you rather work with this?

Or this?

You can leverage technologies like Tascit (www.tascit.com) or Cirrus Insights (www.cirrusinsight.com) to drastically simplify the CRM user experience for your sales team

Principle 2: Communication

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”

-George Bernard Shaw

As your team scales, effective communication around deals requires:

Well Defined Process+

Preparation

Typically, managers receive pipeline updates in a variety of ways:

Most managers and sales reps come to pipeline review meetings completely unprepared

Management must set and adhere to appropriate expectations

Prior to each meeting:

Managers: must review notes from their previous meeting with the rep

Reps: must identify next steps for every deal in their pipeline

Process is defined by:

• Clearly defining each stage of the deal and how it can be reached

• Streamlining deal level updates around one communication tool

• Setting an agenda around each meeting (50% pipeline updates, 50% coaching)

Principle 3: Consistency

“It was character that got us out of bed, commitment that moved us into action, and discipline that enabled us to follow

through.” -Zig Ziglar

Consistency drives sales professionals. You already train your reps to:

“Consistently make 50 calls per day”“Consistently schedule 2 appts. per day”“Consistently close 2 deals per month”

Use the same approach to ensure adoption of a new process or system

Goal: Get the sales team to update the status of each deal on a daily basis

Suggested Solution: Institute a Daily Deal Scrum meeting with the sales team where everyone walks through their day’s progress, and next day’s goals

Likely Outcome: Sales reps understand that each person is now expected to be prepared with information about each deal in their pipeline before the meeting every day

Other tips to improve consistency

• Use tools like Tascit to send automatic daily email alerts to every rep (see tascit.com)

• During weekly team meetings, single out a different rep each week to ensure everyone is prepared

• Use tools like Hoopla to publicly highlight individuals adhering to process

Principle 4: Tracking

“You can't manage what you can't measure” - W. Edwards Deming

Every sales team should already be tracking:

Call attemptsContacts madeMeetings set

Demos runProposals sentContracts signed

As your revenues scale, it becomes important to start tracking a whole set of new metrics*:

Deal VelocityTime at each StageSwings in Contract ValueChanges in Close DateChanges in Win Rate

*At scale, optimizing one seemingly small metric can result in significant revenue increases

To successfully track revenue opportunities you must configure your CRM correctly as early as possible to capture the maximum amount of data at every stage of the selling/post sales process, with the minimum amount of friction for your end users

“Systems debt” can costs you millions of dollars in • Internal custom development• CRM Consulting• Data cleansing• Missed revenue opportunities

How do I make sure that the team maintains a clean pipeline?

• Clearly define how everyone involved in the sales process will interact with the CRM

• Focus on correct adoption by executives and management (this cadence will organically permeate down to the individual contributors)

• Consider what can be automated for better data (call/email tracking, deal nurturing, etc.)

Have a question that’s specific to your business?

Send me a note

e: vadim@tascit.comt: @vrevzin