In this video, we will look at how to do a pipeline review and the three key aspects of a pipeline review.
In this video, we will look at how to do a pipeline review and the three key aspects of a pipeline review.
So what to look for in a pipeline review? It is:
The integrity of the pipeline
The volume of the pipeline
The velocity of the pipeline
Now let’s have a look at what I mean by the integrity of the pipeline.
There are multiple pipelines that you can create, and then you can visualize them. For example, you can see pipeline by an individual, by product, by type etc.
What you see here is the pipeline for the team, you may want to focus on this pipeline for a particular month and this you can do by clicking here.
When we talk about the integrity of the pipeline, over time, if a salesperson is managing the pipeline well, the discussion becomes more about volume and velocity and less about integrity. And you will know in a minute why.
When it comes to the integrity of the pipeline, you know, one of the things we need to look at is expected closing dates.
So here you see a red calendar which means the expecting closing date is overdue.
Does it mean that this deal is abandoned? Are they real deals? And in this case you can see there is no expected date, there is no follow up as well, and there are other deals that do not have follow-ups.
Let’s see what the average time to close a deal is, and if the expected close dates are much smaller than average, the salesperson may be overestimating the time needed to close those sales.
In this example, the average time to win is 143 days. So if it is drastically over or underestimated, it could mean that the integrity of the pipeline may be compromised.
Next is pipeline volume. One of the critical questions here is: Is there enough volume of deals to hit the targets?
For example, in this pipeline, the unweighted value of deals is 2 million 210 thousand. And you can see that the closing ratio is 40%. So you can expect revenue of 884 thousand from this pipeline. Then if you want to hit a target of 1 million, you would need additional deals worth about 290 thousand in the pipeline at the current closing ratio.
Now that we have looked at the pipeline integrity and pipeline volume Let’s look at pipeline velocity.
Deals that are in the pipeline for longer than average time to sell may be stuck for various reasons.
You can also look at deals in the various stages, which ones are taking more time than average to move ahead?
If deals are moving too fast as in this example, it could be because there is too much discounting or is it due to some other reasons?
So in conclusion, there are three aspects to look at when conducting a pipeline review:
Pipeline integrity
Pipeline volume
Pipeline velocity
Over time, if a salesperson is managing the pipeline well, the discussion becomes more about volume and velocity and less about the integrity of the pipeline.
