Almost every revenue leader we talk with sees lead and pipeline generation as their #1 priority. Unfortunately, this is a very poor investment when the pipeline management process is broken.

Most sales teams are spending far too much time chasing deals they can never close and losing deals they should close because they’re skipping critical steps in the sales process. Worse yet, management can’t see what’s happening because pipeline reporting is limited and they have to rely on verbal deal reviews.

We see these same issues every day:

• We step on the gas and the car doesn’t move
• Marketing/SDRs generate pipeline that doesn’t close
• Reps are pushing deals every quarter and missing forecast
• Close rates, sales cycles, average deal sizes are all over the place
• Leadership aligns on new strategies but the team doesn’t execute

Imagine instead a sales team that manages pipeline like a well oiled machine. Each rep understands how to qualify deals, what steps to take at each stage of the process, and how to forecast accurately. They know what they need to do to close more and bigger deals faster and when to walk away to preserve precious selling time. Management has visibility into this pipeline and knows exactly where to help each rep improve their selling process. Most importantly, sales AND marketing leaders can see what’s working, what’s not, and where to optimize.

We’ve seen this thousands of times, literally, so we built the Revenue Efficiency Pyramid to help and today we’re going to break it down to help you operationalize your pipeline management process.

In this framework we’ll share how you can:

• Get quick wins in just a few weeks
• Set the foundation for long-term growth
• Get real visibility into pipeline and forecast
• Get alignment across sales, marketing and CS
• Identify what’s working, what’s not, what to do
• Optimize the entire pipeline management process
• Leverage automation and AI to amplify what’s working

This framework will take you from wherever you are today – even if your pipeline is a complete mess – to a well-oiled machine and a data-driven process-driven revenue team!

Additionally, once we have this foundation in place for new business we can then extend these concepts to expansion sales and, to a more limited extent, retention, improving our entire GTM engine.

ICP, Buyer Personas, and Product Set Defined

Sales teams lose deals by targeting the wrong people and companies. Often, they define their ICP too broadly, choosing entire industries or large revenue ranges, without diving deep enough into their customer data to pinpoint the true ideal profile for each product.

They also miss the mark by not engaging the right stakeholders, leading to lower close rates, longer sales cycles, or smaller deals. Before optimizing the sales process, ensure you know exactly what products you’re selling and to whom.

Sales Methodology and Process

Most deals are lost or stalled for a small set of the same reasons. Sales Methodologies like MEDDICC help sales teams proactively identify these common issues, improving qualification, discovery and deal strategy. MEDDIC claims a 60% boost in sales price, faster close rates, and improved conversion. (source)

A clearly defined sales process takes our methodology and breaks it into defined stages. Each stage has clear entry criteria, action items, questions reps need to ask, and data to collect before moving forward.

This informs how our reps manage their pipeline and the workflow and reporting we will build in the CRM. Many companies skip over this and wonder why the CRM doesn’t provide management any visibility.

Sales Process Implemented into the CRM

We can have the best process and training but reps will still forget 99% of it in a few days. We need a system to reinforce it, to track it and remind reps what to do when. Management needs real-time visibility.

By implementing the sales process into the CRM, steps are only completed with the input of specific data, and reps can’t continue to the next step without filling in required information. This is how we transform it into daily execution and, eventually, muscle memory among our sales reps.

Here’s an example of what it might look like to have your sales process built into Salesforce:

Pipeline Review Process

The CRM alone is not enough though. Reps need accountability and coaching from management. Management should review the pipeline and individual deals on a consistent basis and coach reps to drive improvements in pipeline cleanliness, close rates, sales cycles, and deal sizes. This is essential for accurate forecasting and sustained growth.

This reinforcement can include:

• Daily/weekly pipeline review
• Weekly 1:1 data-driven rep coaching
• Weekly forecasting meetings with leadership
• Weekly sales-wide deal “tear downs” on one key opportunity
• Monthly team win/loss reviews to assess strengths and weaknesses

*Everything outlined so far can be achieved in days or weeks! It can take multiple deal cycles to optimize from here but the foundation, the fundamentals and adoption, can be achieved extremely quickly.

Here’s an example list view on opportunities in Salesforce that you can use to conduct your pipeline reviews:

Pipeline Insights

Once we have accurate pipeline data we should go much deeper to uncover insights into what’s working and what’s not. We can look at pipeline metrics such as:

• Close Rate
• Average Sales Price
• # of SQOs Generated
• Our Average Sales Cycle

Most teams don’t go deep enough here to uncover valuable insights. They have these reports but don’t slice, dice and compare this data by rep, team, product, geography, customer type, etc. This requires significant time and GTM expertise but it’s where we identify ways to optimize the sales process, generating more revenue per rep, improving CAC, and investing more where it counts and less where it’s wasted.

We have an entire framework on GTM Metrics and Insights coming soon. Sign up for the newsletter to get notified when it’s published!

Regular Forecasting

With accurate pipeline data, we can move into a regular forecasting cadence. This relies on and further reinforces everything above, as we think carefully about our pipeline and what we can expect to close.

There are three main forecasting methods:

Weighted Forecast: We assign a percentage close rate to each stage in the pipeline and run simple math to produce a forecast. This method is straightforward but limited.

Bottoms-Up Forecast: A deal-by-deal analysis, beginning with sales reps and rolling up to leadership. This approach is recommended as it prompts reps and managers to assess each deal critically.

AI Forecasting: Uses AI to project outcomes but requires large sets of highly accurate data to be effective.

We can also combine these methods to improve the forecast, ideally reaching accuracy within 5% of actual bookings.

Pipeline Council Meetings

The above tells us what’s happening but not what to do about it. A regular Pipeline Council brings leaders from sales, marketing, CS, product and/or finance together to tackle big issues and opportunities.

This is a recurring meeting for senior leaders to align on and dig deep into what’s working and what’s not working to generate and close pipeline. Then we discuss what to do about it, where to invest more or less resources and ways to optimize the GTM Engine.

Not every company needs a Pipeline Council. This approach is most valuable for companies with fully developed GTM teams and complex strategies. Typically, companies with 150+ employees (Dunbar’s Number) benefit from this structured, cross-functional collaboration to drive alignment and solve issues.

Learn more about starting and running a pipeline council here.

More Resources on Running a Pipeline Council

Podcast: Running a Pipeline Council with Mallory Lee

Make a Copy: Suggested Attendees and Agenda Sample

Download: Pipeline Council RevOps Data Checklist

AI Tools and Automation

Many revenue teams want to jump to AI and automation before they have the fundamentals in place. What happens when you automate things that don’t work?

You end up chasing the wrong deals with the wrong people in the wrong companies with the wrong process. Each step in that process that is automated just gets you to the wrong destination faster and the AI generates mediocre insights and outputs because it’s built on a broken foundation.

In other words, you end up doing more things that don’t work faster. On the other hand, when revenue teams build upon proper processes (following the structure of the Revenue Efficiency Pyramid), they’re set up for success with or without AI and advanced automation.

We wrote a three part series on how AI is impacting GTM. Read them here:

Generative AI Series Part One: Marketing

Generative AI Series Part Two: Sales

Generative AI Series Part Three: Customer Success