Conduct weekly pipeline reviews to track deal progression, identify stuck deals, forecast close probability, and allocate leadership attention to high-impact opportunities.
Pipeline Management and Review
A pipeline needs to be actively managed to ensure your actuals will meet your targets.
The impact: Active review and management of your pipeline allows you to detect bottlenecks and issues when they are still minor. You also stay on top of deal flow which minimize deal rot.
The goal: Create a process to monitor the health of your pipeline and proactively respond to deal rot.
How can Golden Section Assist?
process ensures only changes that have the desired effect are made and prevents resources from being wasted on ineffective changes. To lead the conversations regarding sales process adjustments, it is helpful to have a regular set of questions to be discussed each review meeting.
Pre-determined, regular questions allow your sales rep to come to the meeting prepared and keeps the conversation going in the direction you want it to. These questions are helpful:
re-engagement. For example, you could classify a lead as "poor timing," which would then automatically tag that lead for a follow-up in 6 months to re-engage.
Too much focus on anecdotal stories in the pipeline. It is easy for pipeline meetings to devolve into story telling. Sales people are relational and love sharing stories. Likewise, founders enjoy hearing good news. This mix can result in the pipeline review meeting becoming a story telling hour where two or three tenuous anecdotes that sound hopeful hijack the entire meeting. All parties will leave feeling 'good' about the status of the company but with little to no progress to show for it. This will end poorly. As a founder or manager, your job is to limit anecdotes, focus on process, data and KPIs. Your opportunity qualification criteria should be rigorously applied which will ensure the stage data on your pipeline will reveal the proper state of the pipeline.
Non-sales related complaints by under-performing sales team members. People don't like to miss targets. It is uncomfortable. As a manager your job is to come alongside your team and encourage them, look for ways to support them, and otherwise help them achieve their goal. We have found that underperforming sales team members will look to non-sales related things to 'own' when their pipeline is languishing. For instance, a team member may complain that the CRM isn't working for them and that they will dedicate time this week to customizing it and 'ironing out the problems'. Do not let this happen. Sales should focus on selling! The tools of selling are not required to get a sale; they are helpful, not essential. When sales can claim a non-sales related 'win' it distracts from what is truly important. When those issues pop up, it is your job to discern if the issue is real and, if so, then own it yourself so that sales can remain focused.
Sales people working on non-qualified accounts. This happens all the time and happens quietly. We have found that when the job gets hard and opportunities push out, sales team members will start discussing their unqualified moonshot deals. If you hear a sales person mention a non-qualified deal twice, it's a good sign that you need to take action. Ignoring this will result in low sales performance. Take the sales person aside and help
them evaluate the qualification of that connection. If there's a strategic benefit to it, ask
them to transfer the relationship to you; if not, help them see they need to drop it.
Considerations Goal: The goal of regular pipeline review is to identify weaknesses in the sales process and then iterate and improve your approach. To that end, it is good to set the expectation that these review meetings are to improve strategy rather than serve as a passive catch-up on what has happened. You want to maintain a proactive focus instead of a reactive one.
Too much focus on anecdotal stories in the pipeline . It is easy for pipeline meetings to devolve into story telling. Sales people are relational and love sharing stories.
Conduct weekly pipeline reviews to track deal progression, identify stuck deals, forecast close probability, and allocate leadership attention to high-impact opportunities.
Revising deals down in the pipeline: You have previously defined the criteria required to move a deal from one stage of the pipeline to the next \[See Play: Pipeline Creation\]. It is important to consider how to identify a lead that needs to be moved back in the pipeline. 33 the lag outlined in your funnel, then it should be pushed back to the prior funnel stage.
Conduct weekly pipeline reviews to track deal progression, identify stuck deals, forecast close probability, and allocate leadership attention to high-impact opportunities.