“Is your company struggling to improve its pipeline and forecasting accuracy?
This question resonates deeply with CEOs and sales leaders across industries. Whether you’re at the helm of an FTSE 100 or Fortune 100 enterprise or a Micro with less than ten employees, the challenge of pipeline accuracy is significant. It can mean the difference between exceeding quarterly expectations or facing tough questions on your company’s financial performance from the board, investors, or shareholders.
We’ve seen the anxiety surrounding pipeline accuracy firsthand at Scale Your Sales. Having just celebrated our 12th anniversary, our experience working with CEOs and sales leaders revealed two primary causes of missed forecasts: insufficient pipeline opportunities and a lack of high-quality opportunities.
But you have heard this before, right?
So, why has there been little or no change in as many years, even decades?
Let’s delve into the data to understand the extent of these issues and explore solutions to tackle them head-on.
Objective Management Group’s 35 years of experience have involved extensive work in over 33,000 sales organisations. They developed the Sales Pipeline Benchmarking Data to assess pipeline performance through the Sales Effectiveness and Improvement Analysis (SEIA). They analysed data from 55 organisations and 1,000 individual sellers, a sample representing a fraction of the 75,000 sellers assessed annually.
The Findings Reveal:
Only 49% of salespersons had four closeable opportunities in their pipelines, with a significant portion having even fewer. This shortfall in pipeline quantity puts revenue targets at risk and hampers growth potential.
It will not surprise you that over 59% of salespeople are not meeting the minimum threshold for pipeline quantity.
Less than one of the three closeable opportunities provided by the average salesperson was deemed closeable. Alarmingly, nearly 75% of opportunities were categorised as ‘suspect’ or ‘prospect,’ indicating a lack of essential qualifiers such as engagement with decision-makers or confirmed budgets.
Only 3% of all salespersons had four closeable opportunities in their pipeline.
These statistics underscore the urgent need for CEOs and sales leaders to address pipeline deficiencies. But where do you start?
Five Solutions to Revitalise Your Pipeline
1. Conduct Weekly Pipeline Reviews: Implementing regular pipeline review meetings empowers your sales team to strategise and troubleshoot effectively. These sessions provide valuable insights into pipeline activity, ensuring deals progress smoothly and meeting revenue targets. We interviewed Mick Gosset, the CEO of Jointflows, Mick Gosset discusses his insights on sales success and the greater importance of deal management.
2. Utilise a Sales Deal Scorecard: Implement a standardised scoring system to objectively assess each opportunity’s viability. This enables informed decision-making and ensures consistent evaluation criteria across the sales team.
Similarly, Scale Your Sales Podcast guest Christina Brady Brady, who has over 16 years of SaaS sales experience, discusses revolutionising sales training and her insights on scaling sales.
3. Cull Dead or Unqualified Opportunities: Empower your team to prioritise high-potential opportunities by removing dead-end leads from the pipeline. This proactive approach optimises time and resources, maximising overall sales effectiveness.
Jamie Shanks, CEO of Pipeline Signals, guest on the Scale Your Sales Podcast, discusses how sellers self-source pipelines, enabling them to connect with the right buyers at the right time with the right message.
4. Focus on Top of Funnel Volume and Bottom of Funnel Quality: Address pipeline challenges holistically by increasing lead volume while enhancing opportunity quality. Balancing these aspects ensures a healthy and sustainable pipeline for future growth.
Barrett King was featured on Scale Your Sales Podcast discussing the importance of building lasting sales partnerships, humanity in sales and strategies for key account management.
5. Use Sales Team Assessments: The success of the solutions mentioned above hinges on what I often talk about having the right people with the necessary skills and aptitude. Unfortunately, the data indicates that many sales professionals overestimate the quantity and quality of their opportunities. Without the right personnel, even the most robust pipeline strategies will falter.
In the Scale Your Sales Podcast episode with guest Cristina Lasagni, a distinguished Go-to-Market Senior Leader, discusses the most considerable skill set in B2B: building and leveraging relationships.
I recently hosted a LinkedIn LIVE with Lori Richardson, where we discussed the benefits of the right sales-specific validated and predictive assessments to drive revenue goals. The five solutions to improve the pipeline will only work if you have the right people in the right seats with the skills and aptitude to deliver consistent results.
The evidence shows that too many sales professionals are fooling themselves and you about the quantity and quality of opportunities.
What Will Change?
That’s why I strongly advocate for using sales-specific validated and predictive assessments.
I use the same tool employed to create the sales pipeline benchmarking. It offers an in-depth look at your sales organisation’s people, systems, strategies and zeros on problem areas with targeted solutions. This analysis answers critical questions about your sales organisation.
Questions like:
- How much more effective can we be?
- What will it take to accomplish our goal?
- Do we have the right people in the correct positions?
- How effective are our sales managers at recruiting, coaching, motivating, and holding their people accountable?
- How can we improve our pipeline and forecasting accuracy?
As discussed in our LIVE session, personality, intelligence, behavioural, and psychometric assessments are not sales-specific and will not give you normative data, allowing you to identify areas for improvement and tailor training initiatives for quantifiable results.
Talk to me to access the 21 core selling competencies to comprehensively understand your team’s and sales’ operational strengths and weaknesses.
The Scale Your Sales Framework uses this flagship tool to offer a holistic view of your sales organisation’s performance. By answering critical questions about effectiveness, personnel, and strategy, this process enables targeted solutions to address pipeline and forecasting challenges, from recruiting and coaching to optimising sales strategies, impacting sales-specific data-driven insight, and the right team and competencies to drive meaningful and predictable growth.
Leveraging data analysis and sales team assessments is paramount for optimising your sales pipeline and achieving sustainable revenue growth.
