Sales Performance: How to Optimize Your Pipeline Management?

There’s no magic bullet to learn how to improve sales performance.
According to Jason Jordan, Founder of Vantage Point Performance, there are many ways to improve your sales performance; the key is to identify what will move the needle and focus your efforts on that.

According to Vantage Point, your pipeline management makes a big difference. Out of 62 large B2B companies they surveyed, those who considered their “pipeline management” ineffective had below-average growth over twelve years. But companies that considered themselves effective in their pipeline management experienced above-average growth, and 15% higher than other companies.
It is therefore important to have real “pipeline management” to improve your sales performance and thus your growth.

Sales Performance: State of the Art in Enterprise Pipeline Management

Vantage Point conducted a survey in partnership with The Sales Management Association. They looked at how often sales managers met with their sales teams to discuss their pipeline. Here are the results:

• 5% meet several times a week
• 51% meet once a week
• 16% meet several times a month
• 17% meet once a month

This study also showed that the average duration of these meetings was 53 minutes.
For a sales director who holds a one-hour meeting per week with each of their ten sales representatives, this represents 40 hours per month spent reviewing their sales reps’ pipelines. “There’s a huge commitment from organizations to do things right,” Jason states in his webcast.

For any company, there are six reasons why it’s necessary to have regular, genuine pipeline reviews:

• Ensure sales forecast accuracy
• Review sales rep performance
• Review sales rep activity
• Help close deals
• Identify bottlenecks
• Identify areas for improvement

It is however necessary to clearly distinguish between sales forecasts and sales pipeline management. Sales forecasts serve to develop a vision of what will happen in the future. Sales pipeline management involves analyzing sales performance, closing time, and sales representatives’ skills.

If you separate these two activities, you will do both more effectively. Pipeline management will help evolve sales management and sales representatives’ behaviors so that active deals in the pipeline are won as much as possible and lost as little as possible. Sales forecasting serves to predict tomorrow; this falls more under sales strategy than sales management.

How to Improve Your Sales Performance?

The answer is simple: through better management of your sales pipeline.

To improve your sales pipeline management, here are three strategies to implement:

1- Clearly define your sales process.

This might seem too basic to ignore. But when we look at the sales processes implemented in many companies, we realize that their sales process is equivalent to what happens in their CRM: a lead arrives, it’s qualified, the sales proposal is made, then it’s won or lost. If you have a truly well-defined sales process that accurately reflects your customer’s behavior, and if each step is clearly communicated, everyone will understand what constitutes each stage of the sales cycle, and you will be able to manage your pipeline correctly. However, if you don’t define the process, you leave it open to interpretation by your sales reps regarding where they are in the process and what enters or doesn’t enter the pipeline.

2- Spend more than 3 hours per month per sales rep on their sales pipeline.

It’s not enough to just spend time observing your sales reps. It’s about having in-depth discussions about ongoing deals and how to win them, not just tidying up deals.

3- Train your sales managers in pipeline management.

Training goes beyond logging into the system and creating reports. Management needs to be trained on the entire sales process. Managers need to know what to do during those 3, 4, or 5 hours per month when they try to have conversations with your sales reps about their pipeline.

If you implement these three strategies, you will see that your sales reps will find it easier to track and manage their sales pipeline. This will increase the number of signed contracts and thus your sales performance.

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• Prospecting Email: Optimize the Impact of Your Emails (3/3)