As your sales organization grows, accurate forecasting becomes increasingly more important as major business decisions are made based on this information. Being hyper focused on optimizing the pipeline management process can help drastically reduce the number of opportunities that fall through the cracks, uncover deals with no potential, improve accuracy of the information captured by the CRM, and even reduce the length of your sales cycle.

1. Effectively Managing Your Sales
Pipeline at Scale
Vadim Revzin
Founder, Tascit
@vrevzin tascit.com

2. Q1: How well do you understand the state of
every deal in your sales pipeline?
Q2: How are you making sure that every
department is aligned on this information?

3. As your sales team scales, 3 things start to happen:
1. Consistency between reps is difficult to enforce
2. Information falls through the cracks
3. Data (good or bad) impacts every major decision

4. How can you prepare for this?

5. With a combination of the right
process and technology

6. A Framework for Effective Pipeline Management

7. 4 Core Principles
Simplification Communication
Consistency Tracking

8. Principle 1: Simplification
“The best sales people are often the laziest”
-Bryan Rutcofsky, VP of Sales, Yext

9. Sales people only care about 2 things:
Reaching quota
Getting the commission check

10. 3 Questions to gauge if your CRM is too complex to be
effective:
1) Are my sales reps updating every single field?
2) Is detailed information being entered about the
progress of each deal?
3) Is there information that currently lives outside of
the system? (ie: a Shadow Pipeline*)
* When sales reps have a separate excel file where they personally keep track of their real pipeline

11. Less is more
Remove as many fields, steps, screens as you
can so that your reps are required to enter only
the most critical information about each deal

12. Would you rather work with this?

13. Or this?

14. You can leverage technologies like Tascit
(www.tascit.com) or Cirrus Insights
(www.cirrusinsight.com) to drastically simplify
the CRM user experience for your sales team

15. Principle 2: Communication
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that
it has taken place”
-George Bernard Shaw

16. As your team scales, effective communication
around deals requires:
Well Defined Process
+
Preparation

17. Typically, managers receive pipeline updates in a
variety of ways:

18. Most managers and sales reps come to pipeline
review meetings completely unprepared

19. Management must set and adhere to
appropriate expectations
Prior to each meeting:
Managers: must review notes from their previous
meeting with the rep
Reps: must identify next steps for every deal in their
pipeline

20. Process is defined by:
• Clearly defining each stage of the deal and
how it can be reached
• Streamlining deal level updates around one
communication tool
• Setting an agenda around each meeting (50%
pipeline updates, 50% coaching)

21. Principle 3: Consistency
“It was character that got us out of bed, commitment that
moved us into action, and discipline that enabled us to follow
through.”
-Zig Ziglar

22. Consistency drives sales professionals. You already
train your reps to:
“Consistently make 50 calls per day”
“Consistently schedule 2 appts. per day”
“Consistently close 2 deals per month”
Use the same approach to ensure adoption of a
new process or system

23. Goal: Get the sales team to update the status of
each deal on a daily basis

24. Suggested Solution: Institute a Daily Deal Scrum
meeting with the sales team where everyone
walks through their day’s progress, and next
day’s goals

25. Likely Outcome: Sales reps understand that each
person is now expected to be prepared with
information about each deal in their pipeline
before the meeting every day

26. Other tips to improve consistency
• Use tools like Tascit to send automatic daily
email alerts to every rep (see tascit.com)
• During weekly team meetings, single out a
different rep each week to ensure everyone is
prepared
• Use tools like Hoopla to publicly highlight
individuals adhering to process

27. Principle 4: Tracking
“You can't manage what you can't measure”
- W. Edwards Deming

28. Every sales team should already be tracking:
Call attempts
Contacts made
Meetings set
Demos run
Proposals sent
Contracts signed

29. As your revenues scale, it becomes important to
start tracking a whole set of new metrics*:
Deal Velocity
Time at each Stage
Swings in Contract Value
Changes in Close Date
Changes in Win Rate
*At scale, optimizing one seemingly small metric can result in significant revenue increases

30. To successfully track revenue opportunities you must
configure your CRM correctly as early as possible to
capture the maximum amount of data at every stage
of the selling/post sales process, with the minimum
amount of friction for your end users
“Systems debt” can costs you millions of dollars in
• Internal custom development
• CRM Consulting
• Data cleansing
• Missed revenue opportunities

31. How do I make sure that the team maintains a
clean pipeline?

32. • Clearly define how everyone involved in the
sales process will interact with the CRM
• Focus on correct adoption by executives and
management (this cadence will organically
permeate down to the individual contributors)
• Consider what can be automated for better
data (call/email tracking, deal nurturing, etc.)

33. Have a question that’s specific to your business?
Send me a note
e: vadim@tascit.com
t: @vrevzin