Common Sense in Selling B2B™

How healthy is your sales pipeline right now? And what steps are you taking to progressively improve its fitness? Just as your own doctor might measure your body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure before putting you on a personal fitness regime, a pipeline doctor would want to understand your qualified pipeline value, average sales velocity and average sales win rate – and how these factors had changed over time – before coming up with their diagnosis.

Here’s why these three measures are so important…

There are three fundamental things you can do to improve your sales figures: you can generate more qualified sales opportunities, you can shorten your average sales cycles, and you can increase your average sales win rates. Steadily improving all three factors will have a powerful multiplier effect on your sales – and dramatically improve your revenue predictability.

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Bottlenecks and Best Practice

But if you’re not regularly measuring and reviewing all three factors at every level in your sales organization – from each individual sales person through to the whole sales team – you’ll struggle to identify either where your most pressing performance bottlenecks lie or (and this is equally important) to identify pockets of best practice which if adopted more widely would enable you to systematically increase your overall sales performance.

Value, Velocity and Win Rate

Proactive pipeline management involves paying particularly close attention to all three factors – value, velocity and win rate. Together they represent what we have come to regard as the essential pipeline success formula.

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And just in case you wonder whether the effort is worthwhile, a series of studies have shown that organizations that take a data-driven approach to proactive pipeline management show significantly accelerated revenue growth compared to their peers.

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Qualified Pipeline Value

The key word here is qualified. Measuring pipeline value without imposing a company-wide universally agreed definition of what a qualified sales opportunity ought to look like will simply generate misleading, unhelpful and ultimately useless data. And “leads” or “enquiries” don’t count. As I’ve pointed out before, tracking the number of leads generated in the absence of a consistent quality standard tells you nothing and may even lead you to do more of the wrong thing.

You’ll need to craft qualification criteria that address the specifics of your offering and your markets, but at minimum, a qualified sales opportunity must satisfy all of the following:

• Have they identified a clear need?
• Are they likely to buy something?
• Do we have a reasonable chance of winning?
• Would they make a good customer?

Sales Cycle Velocity

Most sales managers would acknowledge that the longer a deal hangs around in the pipeline, stuck at its current stage, the less likely they are to buy. Sales cycle velocity – the amount of time it takes for an opportunity to move from start to finish, and from stage to stage – is therefore an incredibly important predictor of sales success. And if you can shorten your average sales cycles, you have the capacity – without increasing your resources – to sell more.

Given all of this, it always surprises me to see CRM systems that are not set up to report on how long each deal has spent at each stage, or to throw up an exception report when opportunities have been stuck for long than the typical time taken for winning deals to progress. If you’re mot measuring or reporting on this, take an initiative today to deal with it. In fact, if your current CRM system can’t provide it, I would seriously think of changing it. It’s that important.

Sales Win Rate

This is an obvious metric, but even here not all organizations track it with enough granularity to learn the significant lessons this metric can provide. You need to be tracking all possible outcomes. In most complex B2B sales environments, there are at least four:

1. You win the deal
2. A competitor wins the deal
3. The prospect decides to implement an internally developed solution
4. The prospect decides to do nothing

You’ll miss the opportunity for incredibly valuable learning if you categorize the last three outcomes simply as “lost”. If you’re not evaluating the outcome of every opportunity into at least these four categories, I strongly suggest you start doing so today – and that you retrospectively analyze recent sales outcomes.

Measure at Every Level

My final recommendation is that you measure these three metrics at every level within your organization, as well as analyzing outcomes by source of opportunity – including comparing different marketing campaigns. You’ll inevitably find outliers in both directions: poor performance that clearly needs to be corrected, and exceptional success that needs to be replicated.

In fact, the latter may provide some of the most valuable learning opportunities: where are you currently being most successful today, what can you learn from this, and how can you enable the rest of the organization to embrace the winning habits you have identified?

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