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    New Sales Leader? Avoid these 3 Common Mistakes

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    Revenue Operations Holds the Key to Unlocking Growth in 2022

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    The secret to High Performing Sales Teams – Analytics

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    Is Your Sales Dashboard Showing you the Right Metrics?

    Is Your Sales Dashboard Showing you the Right Metrics?

    Why do I need a Compensation Plan Designer?

    Why do I need a Compensation Plan Designer?

    Variable Compensation and the Gig Economy

    Variable Compensation and the Gig Economy

    7 Step Guide to Building a Profitable Sales Territory Plan (with Examples)

    7 Step Guide to Building a Profitable Sales Territory Plan (with Examples)

    “Look At Our Dashboards”

    “Look At Our Dashboards”

    Introduction to Sales Operations

    US Tech Market Forecast Shows a Best-Case 5% Drop in 2020

    Forecasting in a Time of Uncertainty: Tech Markets

    It’s Time to Re-prioritize Accounts and Re-balance Routes to Market

    It’s Time to Re-prioritize Accounts and Re-balance Routes to Market

    Deal Optimization – Key to Survival

    Deal Optimization – Key to Survival

  • Sales Compensation
    • All
    • ICM Tools
    • Incentive Travel
    • Plan Design

    Sales VP Compensation – Sales Plan or Executive Plan?

    Does the size of our company determine which SPM platforms we should evaluate?

    Does the size of our company determine which SPM platforms we should evaluate?

    What is the Difference Between a Commission and a Bonus?

    What is the Difference Between a Commission and a Bonus?

    How much of our sales team should we include in our President’s Club?

    How much of our sales team should we include in our President’s Club?

    Sales Compensation Plan Templates

    Sales Compensation Plan Templates

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    The 21 Buying Methodologies

    The 21 Buying Methodologies

    New Sales Leader? Avoid these 3 Common Mistakes

    New Sales Leader? Avoid these 3 Common Mistakes

    What’s Your Ideal Customer Profile

    What’s Your Ideal Customer Profile

    A Guide to OKRs for the Sales Ops Leader

    A Guide to OKRs for the Sales Ops Leader

    4 Keys to Successful Sales Management Meetings

    4 Keys to Successful Sales Management Meetings

    Sales Math: The Impact of Discounting

    Sales Math: The Impact of Discounting

    Revenue Operations Holds the Key to Unlocking Growth in 2022

    Revenue Operations Holds the Key to Unlocking Growth in 2022

    Sales Math – Pipeline Principles

    Sales Math – Pipeline Principles

    What’s The Purpose Of A Pipeline Review?

    What’s The Purpose Of A Pipeline Review?

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    The 21 Buying Methodologies

    The 21 Buying Methodologies

    What’s Your Ideal Customer Profile

    What’s Your Ideal Customer Profile

    The 5 Levels of Relationship in Sales

    The 5 Levels of Relationship in Sales

    What’s The Difference Between Sales Enablement And School?

    What’s The Difference Between Sales Enablement And School?

    Training Reinforcement: Is it Back to Business as Usual?

    Training Reinforcement: Is it Back to Business as Usual?

    Give your Sales People what they need!

    Give your Sales People what they need!

    Which Sales Methodology?

    Which Sales Methodology?

    The Rise of Virtual Selling and the Implications for Sales Enablement

    The Rise of Virtual Selling and the Implications for Sales Enablement

    A Sales Enablement Conundrum: Who’s Coaching the Coach?

    A Sales Enablement Conundrum: Who’s Coaching the Coach?

  • Technology
    Data Science and Sales Operations: Driving Greater Predictability Together in Uncertain Times

    Data Science and Sales Operations: Driving Greater Predictability Together in Uncertain Times

    Building a B2B SalesTech Stack for Growth

    Building a B2B SalesTech Stack for Growth

    Does the size of our company determine which SPM platforms we should evaluate?

    Does the size of our company determine which SPM platforms we should evaluate?

    The Boom In Sales Technology

    The Boom In Sales Technology

    Setting your 2021 CRM Enhancement Priorities

    Setting your 2021 CRM Enhancement Priorities

    Do You Really Need Sales Automation?

    Do You Really Need Sales Automation?

    How the New AI – Authentic Intelligence – Can Improve Sales Productivity

    Use Tableau to Track the Virus Through Actionable Data

    Use Tableau to Track the Virus Through Actionable Data

    “You Are Doing Everything Wrong!”

    “You Are Doing Everything Wrong!”

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    What to Measure in Sales?

    What to Measure in Sales?

    The Pipeline and Forecast are Different

    The Pipeline and Forecast are Different

    Ignite Your Sales Performance at the Intersection of Purpose and Passion

    Ignite Your Sales Performance at the Intersection of Purpose and Passion

    How Sales Reps Are Hitting Quotas Without Hitting the Streets

    How Sales Reps Are Hitting Quotas Without Hitting the Streets

    Buying Is About People, Why Isn’t Selling?

    Buying Is About People, Why Isn’t Selling?

    The secret to High Performing Sales Teams – Analytics

    The secret to High Performing Sales Teams – Analytics

    Variable Compensation and the Gig Economy

    Variable Compensation and the Gig Economy

    On Measuring Sales Performance

    On Measuring Sales Performance

    “Look At Our Dashboards”

    “Look At Our Dashboards”

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Home Excellence

The Pipeline Review

David Brock by David Brock
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I was meeting with a client, we were doing the first pipeline review as part of their implementation of the Sales Execution Framework. Pipeline reviews are a great starting point for the process, a good pipeline review helps identify and isolate potential challenges as well as the performance leverage points.

The client was a very large company, the current pipeline had thousands of opportunities. They had always done pipeline reviews—I suspect a number of the managers were thinking, “Why are we doing this, we do them all the time–isn’t there a better way to identify our performance leverage points?”

But they were really struggling to meet their numbers, performance was way off and they didn’t know why.

RelatedPosts

The 21 Buying Methodologies

New Sales Leader? Avoid these 3 Common Mistakes

What’s Your Ideal Customer Profile

A Guide to OKRs for the Sales Ops Leader

Their mantra of “doing more” wasn’t working. They needed to figure out what the real performance issues were.

Starting out, we focused on pipeline quality and integrity. It’s impossible to understand pipeline health if it’s filled with garbage.

First, we looked at deals with passed due target close dates. 6% of the opportunities in the pipeline had target close dates that were 90-450 days in the past. When I asked, “What’s happening to those, are they still real, why aren’t they updated,” no one knew the answer, they had to ask the sales people what had happened.

Next we looked at deals that had been in process an abnormally long time. The average sales cycle was about a year. 10% of the opportunities had been in process for 3 years or more. While it was a small percentage, 12 opportunities had been in the pipeline for 10 years–never moving.

Next we looked at overly optimistic close dates. We already knew the average sales cycle was about a year. We looked at opportunities that had just been qualified, 15% had unrealistically short sales cycles–sales people were estimating sales cycles of less than 60 days—25% of what was the normal sales cycle.

In 30 minutes, we had discovered at least 31% of the pipeline opportunities were inaccurately represented in the pipeline, or even not real.

We went through other issues, in an hour, we discovered a number of issues. For example while their average deal size was over $1M, over 50% of the opportunities in the pipeline were less than $100K. Only 1% of the qualified opportunities had plans in place to move the customer to a buying decision.

We adjourned. The managers had to go to their people to clean up the pipeline. There were too many quality/integrity questions to really understand the pipeline and to begin to address performance issues.

When we reconvened about a week later, they had cleaned up the pipeline. 27% of the opportunities that had been in the pipeline, were eliminated as bad opportunities or opportunities that were wishful thinking.

The numbers were grim. There wasn’t enough volume to make their numbers. There were some velocity issues. The number of opportunities less than 10% of their average deal value was still very high.

But now we could begin to identify the problems and begin to develop solutions to those. As grim as it looked, we were able to develop an action plan to improve performance.

Three months later, we got together again. Yes there were some integrity/quality problems in the pipeline, but it was only a few percent. More importantly, we were starting to see pretty dramatic performance improvements. We had found more efficient ways of handling the low value opportunities, freeing people to focus on the high value opportunities–this alone changed the pipeline dynamics and the number of opportunities needed to achieve their numbers.

Forecast accuracy improved dramatically, they were no longer allowing opportunities that were wishful thinking into the pipeline. Win rates were improving, both because they were focused on higher quality opportunities, but every opportunity in the pipeline had a close plan in place, that was kept updated in regular opportunity reviews.

Cleaning out the pipeline made the performance problems obvious, enabling the management team to work with sales people to improve performance. Those problems had always been there, but management couldn’t “see them” because of all the garbage and clutter in the pipeline.

We always need to deal with facts as we assess our own performance or that of our organizations. Clouding them with garbage doesn’t help, in fact it masks the issues preventing us from facing reality.

However bad a situation might look, when we focus on reality and the facts, we can always figure out solutions and a path to recovery.

Tags: CRMForecastingSales Management
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Disciplined Execution, The Secret To Success!

David Brock

David Brock

Dave has spent his career developing high performance organizations. He worked in sales, marketing, and executive management capacities with IBM, Tektronix and Keithley Instruments.

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