Did you know when you look at world-class pipelines, there are four fundamentals that you always find back?
Those are:
- the right customers with the right opportunity,
- spotless documentation,
- movement within those opportunities,
- balance in the pipeline
Before we go further: I am compiling a report, “the state of the revenue strategy, 2024”. If you are a b2b tech CEO or sales leader, it would mean a lot if you can spend only 5 minutes to fill in following survey.
Let’s look at the 4 fundamentals in a bit more detail:
The 4 Fundamentals
1. The Right Customers with the Right Deals
It is clear that you have an ideal client profile (ICP) and that your opportunities come from there, because I’ve seen sometimes that you have exotic opportunities from exotic clients that don’t really fit within any pipeline.
When you look at the right opportunity, this is dependent on your strategy.
There are companies that first aim to have a foot in the door and then work with upsells and others go wide and try to go all in.
2. Spotless Documentation
There is one rule and only one rule:
If it’s not documented, it did not happen.
This will help you in removing all the guesswork.
It will also help you becoming a data-driven organisation that makes data-driven decisions.
While sometimes reps think that it is micromanagement, it is not:
when you document everything, you’re able to make data driven decisions that will help you, and them, to execute better.
3. Movement of opportunities
This is closely related to the documentation.
You will find that all the activities are noted, and that the opportunities are worked.
Based on this, you will discover that there is a clear momentum, a journey, within the opportunity.
In addition, you understand the next steps, and that the sales rep has control over their deals.
When you see this, in general you find out that then that most of the deals will close within your average sale cycle.
4. Balance in the pipeline
The 4th element is that balance, and you can see this across the different sales stages.
Most of the opportunities are more or less evenly distributed across all the sales stages.
The best pipelines have every week -or every month in complex sales, new deals coming in, to compensate the deals that have been moved out (due to wins, losses and disqualified opportunities).
At the same time you will make sure that there is a balance, that you don’t have anything at the beginning of the pipeline.
Or that you have everything at the end in the negotiation stages, so that you have a skewed pipeline.
When you look at the total value of the pipeline, people with world class pipelines makes sure not to be blinded by one or two big whales that skew the total value.
They strive to have opportunities with more or less similar deal sizes to prevent sudden drops (or at least, those sales reps look at to maintain control and mitigate the risks those big whales have on their total pipeline value).
I am interested to know if you have a worldclass pipeline, and if not, what will you do to build one?
Have a nice day and best of luck building that world class pipeline.
I created an entire ebook based on interviews with revenue expert around creating a worldclass pipeline.
Download your resource here.
