The Phone Works Sales Advocate - April, 2008
Is Your Pipeline Fact, Fiction, or Fantasy?
Fiction and fantasy are great for books and movies, but not for sales. Your sales pipeline is your company’s lifeblood. Everything depends on it. But, looking at your pipeline, how can you tell how accurate or real it is? Are the sales opportunities in the pipeline just hopeful wishes, or are they real opportunities? Are your projections for the quarter realistic? Are you really going to hit your number this quarter?
Key Questions You Must Be Able To Answer to Ensure You Have a Fact-Based Pipeline
New Pipeline Since the Beginning of the Month / Quarter / Year
What’s new in the pipeline since the beginning of the selected time period?
What % of the pipeline is new for this period?
What % of the new pipeline has closed within the same quarter historically?
Pipeline Fluctuations in the Current Period
What moved out? What’s stuck?
- What % of the current period pipeline moved out to future periods?
- Is there a pattern? (e.g. particular sales reps, particular products, particular industry verticals)
Where has the pipeline shrunk?
- What % of the current period pipeline shrunk?
- Is there a pattern? (e.g. particular sales reps, particular products, particular industry verticals)
Where has the pipeline grown?
- What % of the current period pipeline grew?
- Is there a pattern? (e.g. particular sales reps, particular products, particular industry verticals)
Pipeline Velocity
What % of the current period pipeline is stuck in its current stage?
What % of the current period pipeline has progressed to subsequent stages?
Do You Have Enough In Your Pipeline?
What are your conversion rates and sales cycle times?
- Lead to opportunity
- Opportunity to demo
- Demo to quote
- Quote to close
What % of your current period pipeline is above and below the thresholds of average days to close for deals that end up being won?
- By industry vertical
- By sales rep
- By competitor
What % of your current period pipeline is nearing the threshold of average days to close for deals that end up being lost?
- By industry vertical
- By sales rep
- By competitor
What is the pipeline for the remaining part of the quarter/year?
- Next 30, 60, 90 days
What is the % distribution for early stage vs late stage opportunities?
- By region
- By sales rep
What are the dynamics of new vs. repeat business?
Days to close for new vs. repeat business
Current period pipeline for new vs. repeat business
Sales and Pipeline Analytics: Making Sure You Have the Facts
Lack of actual facts leaves people with no options other than to make guesses based on gut instinct. The problem with gut instinct is that it’s based only on anecdotes from your past experiences. Unless your industry and your business aren’t changing, the information on which you are basing your gut instinct is now outdated.
Implementing an effective sales and pipeline analytics solution is the best way to combat this situation. CRM systems are valuable, but their focus is on capturing sales and customer data and automating processes. The critical second half of a complete sales solution is analytics, which focuses on getting the relevant and timely information back out and structuring in it a way that can be easily analyzed and understood. With the right approach to analytics you’ll optimize and improve sales processes, not just automate them.
A sales and pipeline analytics solution pulls in data from sources such as your CRM system, which captures lead, opportunity, customer, and sales rep data; your financial system, which captures bookings, billings, shipments, and discount data; and spreadsheets where a lot of relevant quota, price list, and other critical sales data often exists. With a sales and pipeline analytics solution in place, you can avoid the pitfalls described earlier.
For example, if your sales and pipeline analytics solution can capture snapshots of the deals in your pipeline on a regular interval (say, weekly), then you can see what stages your deals were in over past weeks and months and easily identify which deals have been stuck in the same stage for much longer than the average. Also, historical opportunity snapshots can be used to show what has moved into your pipeline and what has moved out.
Since a good sales and pipeline analytics solution can gather data from multiple sources as well as keep historical data, you can get performance information on your sales reps, including trends, over a broad range of metrics. In addition, that same information can be used to track many key conversion ratios and how they’re changing over time, as well as look at sales rep ramp rates.
The bottom-line is that to ensure that your pipeline is fact, not fiction or fantasy, you need the ability to manage your pipeline based on metrics, not hunches.
Implementing a Sales and Pipeline Analytics Solution in Your Company
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) model has already made it far easier to set up and use transactional solutions such as CRM and ERP applications, now it is enabling companies to enjoy similar benefits when applied to business analytics solutions. These business-analysis-as-a-service (BAaaS) solutions are reinventing the traditional BI marketplace. Companies of all sizes can now deploy on-demand sales and pipeline analytics solutions that are simple to set up, simple to use and simple to buy in terms of subscription licensing and overall affordability. These solutions should be designed to take care of all the “heavy lifting” traditionally required to build and manage in-house business intelligence systems by instead providing the right analytics as a service managed by the vendor and delivered over the web. So, rather than focusing on managing complicated software and hardware infrastructure, you can focus on managing your sales pipeline and exceeding your goals.
To read the complete white paper written by LucidEra - Is Your Pipeline Fact, Fiction or Fantasy - click here.
About LucidEra
LucidEra is breaking down the traditional barriers to business intelligence adoption by delivering business analytics as an on-demand service. LucidEra customers are no longer ?ying blind when it comes to pipeline visibility and achieving new levels of sales success, thanks to dynamic reporting and analysis that is simple to set up, simple to use, and simple to buy. No more excuses. No more guesses. No more surprises. Know more with LucidEra.
To try LucidEra, visit http://www.lucidera.rsvp1.com/s130894XYCb, or call 1-866-392-8008.
About Phone Works
Phone Works, a professional services company, has helped over 250 clients design and implement successful sales strategies by building new inside sales teams or optimizing existing inside sales groups. Leveraging 17 years of real-world experiences with winning sales organizations, Phone Works identifies the best-fit strategy for you, and creates predictable, measurable sales 2.0 processes that maximize productivity, accelerate results and increase revenues for technology companies and companies with complex B2B sales models.
