Pipeline generation was down 47% last year, according to this 2023 report by Ebsta and Pavillion.
This means your managers have to be proactive rather than reactive, when evaluating deals at the later stage of the process.
The key to success is keeping your process centralised. And a dashboard in Gong or Salesforce is the way to do this.
Here’s a snapshot of the US dashboard, to give you perspective 👇
- Deal warnings → helps managers to understand what could be potential blockers.
- ACV vs Sales Headcount → helps determine if there’s an opportunity to sell more seats.
- Notes → Outline action items/next steps, such as:
- Number of active stakeholders
- Buying champion(s).
- Budget holder.
- Signer.
- Decision criteria.
- Individuals/teams/regions that are on a trial.
The key thing to remember is that at this stage, the deal should pretty much be on track to close. It’s more about fine-tuning certain aspects or areas that could act as a delay to the outcome.
Bonus resources:
Stopping Revenue Leak and Slippery Deals with Shruti Kapoor, Head of International Business @Clari
Today I’m going to share how I approach early-stage deal evaluation with my team through coaching office hours.
Anyone can show up - it’s totally optional.
The aim of these sessions is to coach reps that have brought in deals that are in the very early stages. For example, they’ve just had the first call, and that’s it.
Besides the top-level information of who the rep is talking to and what they’re talking about, I want to get the rep to understand the value of the deal.
🗒️Note → This is paramount. Because if the rep can’t articulate the value in the deal, the buyer can’t either.
In the sales cycle, so little time is spent with a buyer speaking with an AE 👇
If your buying champion can understand the value, they’ll be equipped to sell internally to other decision-makers.
And once your rep has clarified the value, it’s about the next steps:
- Should we go ahead with a demo? ✅
- Who should we ask to attend the demo? ✅
- Based on the information we have, what messaging are we going to use? ✅
These next steps also act as a great exercise for reps to improve their discovery skills
My hope with these sessions is that the deals we lose - we lose them quicker. If reps are pursuing deals that aren’t going anywhere, it’s not an efficient use of their time.
Plus, it means your reps can identify red flags on future deals, much quicker 🚩
Bonus resources:
I thought I’d share my 3 focuses on how I’m going to achieve a better hiring and training process, in 2024 👇
1️⃣ Hiring process structure
- This process has enabled us to hire the very best reps out there.
- In this day and age, multithreading has become a vital skill for many sales reps.
- Especially if you’re going after an ENT company - there’s just no way around it anymore other than to multithread 🧵
- Being able to test this skill upfront is important.
2️⃣ Qualities & traits
During the mock discovery call, these are the characteristics I’m looking out for:
For example: Is a candidate asking whether the problem they’re faced with is going to impact the ability to hit a quarterly target?
3️⃣ Investing in an in-house sales trainer
- We’ve decided to invest in a sales trainer, meaning that our strategy can have a clear 🆚 a scattered approach.
- It means we can plan on a monthly/quarterly basis, as opposed to a last-minute weekly basis.
- There’s a clear set of outcomes for the reps in terms of their training 🎯
And there you go - a sneak peek into part of my roadmap for hiring and ramping reps fast - in 2024!
Bonus resources:
The Importance of High-Impact Coaching with Gabrielle Blackwell
Building Coaching Plans With Alli MacManus, Global Revenue Enablement Manager at Demandbase