Building and managing sales pipeline should be predictable, measurable, and scalable – but too often, it’s a blackbox. Managers struggle to trust the data. Reps work deals that should’ve been disqualified weeks ago. And when the quarter ends, the forecast is way off.

The fix usually lies in the Fundamentals: a baseline series of critical Pipeline Management processes and definitions, and a system in place for reps to easily adopt them.

The following processes are not “nice-to-haves”, they’re essential for maintaining accurate and consistent Pipeline Generation metrics, Pipeline Management Metrics, and most of your Financial and GTM Metrics.

(This newsletter is a part of our new Framework, The GTM Process Index, which is a supplement to our GTM Metrics & Index Framework.)

ICP & Buyer Persona Definitions

Having the wrong ICP and Buyer Personas in your pipeline will skew metrics from ASP, to sales cycle length, to close rates. When reps are desperate to hit quota, they’ll try to win bad-fit customers, which means making concessions such as custom packages and discounts. Even if the deal is won, this will end up costing you down the line.

Sales Process & Sales Methodology

Sales Methodologies are things like MEDDICC/MEDDPICC; a structured, repeatable approach that outlines the best practices a sales team should follow to move prospects through the sales funnel and close deals. Sales Methodologies shouldn’t be mistaken for the Sales Process.

The Sales Process translates your methodology into the step-by-step journey your reps take through every sales stage.

Both of these things need to be well defined so that they can be baked into your CRM – effectively creating guardrails for your reps while moving prospects in and out of each stage (I.e., qualification criteria within the pipeline).

This process determines how we measure pipeline generation, close rates, sales cycle, ASP, sales stage age, etc.

Targets & Quotas

These aren’t technically processes, however having them well-defined and thought out is just as critical for accurate metric measurement. The targets and quotas you set are going to have an effect on what your reps spend their time and focus on.

For example, if you give your reps a meeting quota without any kind of qualification, your reps are going to do what they have to do to hit that quota. Then, you might be scratching your head at why your meeting-to-opportunity conversion rate is so low.

Capacity & Territory Planning

This topic has a lot of complexity to it, but the main thing to ask yourself is “How many accounts can each rep cover effectively?”. This should take into account all of the activities a rep needs to complete to work each account, how long that takes, and then what are the best accounts we can give each rep to fill their capacity.

When it comes to Territory Planning, we want our metrics to be able to tell us how well we’re covering any given territory. Even though our reps might be busy and crushing it, are there any Tier 1 accounts in a territory falling through the cracks and not being covered?

If the best rep you have doesn’t have the time to call on every Tier 1 account in their territory, they’re not the best rep for those accounts, and your territories should be re-evaluated.

Outbound Prospecting Process

We’ve written an entire Framework and guide on this process, but here are the essentials for accurate metrics:

• What is our prospecting cadence and strategy? Over what channels and how many times do we contact them before we give up?
• Creating reports that tell us: How well are we covering each contact/account? How many contacts have been converted into meetings?

Keep in mind this is a huge topic and there are many ways to optimize your Outbound process, but these are the bare essentials for collecting consistent data.

Pipeline Review Process

What is the actual process for Sales Managers? How can they leverage the data in the system to look at the pipeline and determine whether or not reps are following the sales process? How do they then use this information to coach their reps in 1:1 meetings?

If our goal is to not only collect accurate metrics, but to optimize those metrics, then we need a process for management to step in and point out what’s going well and what needs to be improved.

Sales Coaching Cadences

Piggybacking off of the Pipeline Review Process, we need to define how often and in what way we should expect our sales managers to conduct this pipeline analysis and use other metrics for coaching.

More on This Topic:

• Framework – The Pipeline Management Framework
• Newsletter #71 – Data Driven Sales Coaching
• Newsletter #66 – Implementing Sales Process into the CRM
• Newsletter #62 – How to Conduct Pipeline Reviews Like Salesforce
• Newsletter #56 – Create Strategic Alignment with a Pipeline Council
• Newsletter #47 – How to Craft the Perfect Executive Scorecard
• Podcast – Create Strategic Alignment with a Pipeline Council
• More on this topic in upcoming newsletters – subscribe here to get it in your inbox