It’s that time of year, I suppose. You’ve hopefully approved your 2021 operating plan by now — even if you’re on an increasingly popular 1/31 fiscal year end. You’ve signed up for some big numbers to meet your aggressive goals (and fund those aggressive spending plans). And now you might well be thinking one thing:
“Oh shit, we need some pipeline. Fast.”
To really help you — in the long-term — we’ll need to have a stern talking to about driver-based planning, sales capacity models (particularly if you’re upside-down [1] on sales capacity), inverted funnel models to calculate the demandgen budget, and time-based closed rates to forecast conversion from your existing pipeline (and, I’ve increasingly seen, conversion from to-be-generated pipeline [2]).
And we’ll also need to review the seven words Mike Moritz said to me when I started as CEO of MarkLogic: “make a plan that you can beat.”
But, I hear you thinking: that all sounds great and I’m sure I should do it one day — but right now I have a problem. I need some pipeline, fast.
Got it. So here are three high-level things you need to do:
- Declare general quarters — all hands to battle stations. You should never waste a good crisis, so call an all-hands meeting, start it with this audio file, and tell everyone you want them working on the problem. You want zero complacency [3] or fatalism: we don’t need people cueing the quartet to play Nearer My God To Thee [3a] when there are still lots of things we can do to affect the outcome.
- Focus on winning the opportunities you can win. You think you need pipeline, but what you actually need is the new ARR that comes from it. Let’s not forget that. In math terms, we’re going to need high to record-high conversion of the opportunities (oppties) that are in the pipeline today. So let’s put sales and executive management attention on identifying the winnable oppties and fighting like never before to win them — including potentially re-assigning your best oppties to your best reps [4].
- Focus on finding new opportunities that move fast. Remember that nine-month sales cycle is an average; some opportunities close a lot faster. Expansion oppties tend to move a lot faster than new logo oppties. SMB oppties tend to move faster than enterprise ones. Get salesops to figure out which ones move faster for you — remember you don’t need just any pipeline, you need fast-moving (and high-converting) pipeline.
In addition, if you’re not doing it already, you need marketing to start forecasting next-quarter’s day-one pipeline as of about week 3 of the current quarter, so we can increase our lead time on finding out about these problems next time.
Now, let’s dive a bit deeper into ways to accelerate existing pipeline and how to generate new, fast-moving pipeline when you need some more.
Pipeline Acceleration Tactics
Here is a list of common pipeline patterns and how you can use them and/or workaround them to accelerate your pipeline.
- Expansion pipeline moves faster than new logo pipeline. So have AEs, CSMs, or SDRs contact existing customers to discuss expansion opportunities.
- It’s easier to accelerate planned expansions than create new ones. Look at out-quarter expansion pipeline and have AEs reach out to customers to discuss moving them forward and/or offering incentives to do so.
- Partner-sourced pipeline usually moves faster than marketing- or sales-sourced pipeline. It also typically closes at a higher rate. Now is a great time to sit down with partners to review opportunities and see what can be accelerated and what incentives you can offer them to help out.
- Proofs of concept (POCs) stall oppties in the pipeline. To remove them from your sales cycle try to substitute highly relevant customer references as alternative proof. It’s a win/win: you get your deal faster and the customer gets the benefits of your system faster. Alternatively, reduce the customer’s need for up-front proof by offering a back-end guarantee [5]. Either way, we might be able to cut 90+ days out of your sales cycle.
- Reheated, old pipeline often moves faster than new. I’ve often quipped that the best patch in the company is the no-decision pile [6]. Now is a great time to have AEs and SDRs call up no-decision oppties. “So, whatever happened with that evaluation you were doing?” Hey, while we’re at it, let’s call up lost oppties as well. “So, did you end up buying from Badco? How’d that work out?” Both types of reheated oppties have the potential to move faster than net new ones.
- SDRs can delay entry into the pipeline. We love our SDRs and they’re great for funnel optimization when times are good. But when times are tough, selectively cut them out of the loop [7]. For example, make a rule that says for accounts of size X (or on list Y), when we get a contact with title Z, pass them directly to the salesrep. Not only might you accelerate pipeline entry by a week or two, but the AE will likely do a better job in discovery.
- Legal can stall you out on the two-yard line. Get your legal team involved in your red zone offense by creating a fast-turn version of your contract that contains only your minimum required terms. Then inform the customer that you’re giving them toned-down paperwork and incent them to turn quickly with you on signing it [8].
Techniques to Generate New, Fast-Moving Pipeline
When nothing other than net new pipeline will do, then here are some things you can do:
- Run marketing campaigns to find existing evaluations. If you can’t make your own party, then why not sneak into someone else’s? Run a webinar entitled, “How to Evaluate a Blah” or “Five Things to Look for in a Blah.” Record and transcribe it to get draft 1 of an e-book you can use as a gated asset.
- Use search advertising to find existing evaluations. Buy competitive search terms (brand names), evaluation-related search terms (“how to evaluate”), comparison search terms (e.g., “Gong vs. Chorus,” “Oracle alternatives”), or late-funnel search terms (e.g., “Clari pricing”).
- Look for warm accounts, not just warm contacts. Sometimes you can see more if you step back a bit. Instead of looking at the lead/contact level, do an analysis of which accounts have high levels of activity across all their contacts. That might be a good clue there’s an evaluation happening or starting.
- Buy intent data. Several vendors — including 6Sense, Bombora, Demandbase, G2, TechTarget, and Zoominfo — look for data that signals companies are investigating given product categories. Let someone else do the company-finding for you and then market to (and/or SDR outbound call) them.
- Buy meetings. While I’ve always heard mixed reviews about appointment-setting firms, I also know they’re a go-to resource when you’re in trouble — particularly if you’re bottlenecked up-funnel in marketing or SDRs. Consider a service like Televerde or By Appointment Only. While these vendors started out in appointment-setting, both have broadened into more full-service demand generation that can help you in many ways.
- Stalk old customers in new jobs. Applications like UserGems let you track customers as they change jobs. What could be faster than selling an existing happy customer when they’re in a new position? It won’t hit every time (e.g., if they already have and are happy with another system), but they’re certainly leads that can turn into fast-moving pipeline. You can do roughly the same thing yourself manually with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
- Do LinkedIn targeted advertising. I’m always surprised how many colleagues say LinkedIn doesn’t work that well despite its superior targeting abilities. Perhaps that’s like anglers saying the “fishing is OK” regardless of the action. If you know who to target and think that target can move fast, then go for it.
- Call blitzes. Remember we said to never waste a good crisis. It’s a great time to set up dedicated call blitzes to prospects or existing customers. Just make sure we know who’s blitzing whom so the same person doesn’t get hit by an AE, an SDR, and a CSM all at once.
- Contests and prizes. Finally, why not make it fun?! Nothing gets the sales blood flowing like competition and incentives.
Hopefully these ideas stimulated some thoughts to help you get the pipeline you need. And, even more hopefully, realize that we should build many of these now-crisis activities as healthy habits going forward.
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Notes
[1] Meaning that your plan number is larger than your sales productivity capacity. An undesirable, but certainly not unheard of, situation.
[2] As I’m increasingly seeing time-based closed rates used, something to my surprise. I’d really created the technique for short- to mid-term gap analysis. I generally make an marketing budget purely off an inverted funnel model. But that said, using time-based closed rates by pipeline source would be more accurate.
[3] If for no other reason to avoid the common fallacious complacency of “well, with a nine-month sales cycle, if we’re short of pipeline now there’s nothing we can do, so let’s just accept that we’re going to hit the iceberg.
[3a] While I make light of it in the post, it’s actually both an amazing and touching story. “Sometime around 2:10 a.m. as the Titanic began settling more quickly into the icy North Altantic, the sounds of ragtime, familiar dance tunes and popular waltzes that had floated reassuringly across her decks suddenly stopped as Bandmaster Wallace Hartley tapped his bow against his violin. Hartley and his musicians, all wearing their lifebelts now, were standing back at the base of the second funnel, on the roof of the First Class Lounge, where they had been playing for the better part of an hour. There were a few moments of silence, then the solemn strains of the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee” began drifting across the water. It was with a perhaps unintended irony that Hartley chose a hymn that pleaded for the mercy of the Almighty, as the ultimate material conceit of the Edwardian Age, the ship that “God Himself couldn’t sink,” foundered beneath his feet.” Hartley concluded in saying, “Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight.”
[4] Most compensation plans allow midstream territory changes and while moving oppties from bad reps to good reps cuts against the grain for most sales managers, well, we are in an emergency, andd we all know that the odds of an oppty closing are highly related to who’s working on it. Perhaps soften the sting by uplifting and then splitting the quota. Or just fire the bad rep. But win the deal.
[5] Introduce a 90- or 120-day acceptance clause. This will likely have accounting and/or bookings policy ramifications, but we are in an emergency. Better to hit your target with a few customers on acceptance (especially if you’re sure you can deliver against the criteria) than to miss.
[6] That is, the oppties that were marked by their owners as neither won nor lost, but no decision. Sometimes also called derailed oppties. If you have discipline about reason codes you can find the right ones even faster.
[7] Perhaps using the freed-up time to prospect within the installed base, if your CSMs are not salesy. Or doing longer-shot outbound into named accounts.
[8] I’m a little dusty legally, but the ultimate form of this was a clickwrap which, in a pinch, was sometimes used (with the consent of the customer) to work around the customer’s oft-bottlenecked legal department and get a baseline agreement in place that can later be revised or replaced.