Pipeline

Emergency Rescue

Your challenge:

Your sales team does not have enough quality pipeline to achieve your bookings goals.

Your managers are pressuring sellers to maintain the correct pipeline coverage which is resulting in them accepting poor fit leads into the pipeline, refusing to qualify out poor fit opportunities and over estimating opportunity values.

At the end of each month ‘committed’ deals slip or close with no-decision, making it impossible for you to confidently forecast to your board or make educated investment decisions.

Seller sentiment is low resulting in increasing voluntary attrition that further pushes up your cost of sale.

Different teams are pointing fingers at each other “Marketing create bad leads”, “Sales don’t follow up on our leads”, “Customer Success aren’t generating testimonials and referrals for us”.

Your frontline managers are pushing the playbooks that worked for them previously - but they aren’t working now.

This is an emergency. If you don’t fix this right now, your next investor update will be painful to send, and your next board meeting tough to sit through.

Your outcome:

By the end of this 12 week engagement you will be on the path to consistent pipeline coverage

You will have a defined process for creating valuable high converting pipeline. Your sellers will be more confident in their own pipelines reducing the flight risk of your top sellers. Your forecasting will become more consistent with fewer slipped deals or “Closed -No Decision”

You will have a revenue playbook that is working, giving you the confidence to invest, and giving credibility to any future fundraising you embark on.

You are typing your monthly investor update with a smile on your face.

Who is this for?

This engagement is suitable for companies at Series B-D that are struggling to build and maintain consistent pipeline coverage.

You are a founder, or revenue leader with overall revenue responsibility across marketing, sales and customer success.

If you don’t have overall revenue responsibility then introduce that person to me, as they will need to be the sponsor for this program - you can’t be successful trying to deliver it as a siloed function.

How long does it take?

12 weeks to have you back on track.

  • 4 weeks - Analysis of the current situation to diagnose the problem

  • 2 weeks - Prioritise most impactful opportunities to solve the problem

  • 6 weeks - Build and deploy the required tools, processes and enablement

What is the process?

Diagnose the problem

  • Qualitative assessment (surveys and interviews across execs, individual contributors, customers, prospects, partners)

  • Quantitive assessment (metrics, targets, history, conversion rates, values)

  • Segmented results (region, team, channel, product, customer size)

  • Playback session

    • What is the situation?

    • What has changed and why?

    • Where is the main challenge?

    • What is the goal?

    • How will we know when we’ve got there?

Prioritise the options

  • Assess top opportunities to fix the pipeline

  • Typical options

    • Revisit ICP and Value Proposition

    • New campaigns into target segments

    • Buyer enablement tools

    • Pain-related SEO content

    • Seller enablement tools and activities

    • Training and coaching

    • Referrals and Testimonials

    • 1st and 3rd party events

    • New channels/partnerships

  • Prioritise with ICE framework

    • Impact

    • Confidence

    • Ease of implementation

Build the solution

  • Select 2-3 options to test

  • Customer Success and Support interviews

  • Customer and partner interviews

  • Build required tools

    • Revenue playbooks

    • Buyer enablement tools (calculators/diagnostics)

    • Sales enablement tools (content, videos, guides)

    • Prospect and intent data

    • Event planning

    • Video and social content creation

  • Train and coach the team

  • Measure success and iterate

Who needs to be involved?

This is an emergency.

It is all hands on deck.

Pipeline is not a marketing problem, its not a sales problem, its not a customer success or product problem.

It is a company problem and needs an aligned cross-functional team to fix it.

A common mistake is to start with marketing - “let’s get more campaigns out there”, but what marketing has been doing isn’t working so avoid just doing more of that.

Instead, I want to go and speak to your customers as quickly as possible - how are they using your product, what did they think they would use it for initially, who did they speak to to learn, what was missing in the buying process?

Remember all those customer interviews you did when you were finding product market fit? That is where your pipeline answers lie.

Now we can start to combine your customer’s perspective with your product team, your sellers and finally your marketers to refine your value proposition for each customer segment and buying persona.

 FAQs

  • Yes. Even companies with fantastic top-line growth are facing increasing headwinds in generating high quality pipeline.

    Buyers have become more frugal, they are spending more time researching independently, and they have more choice than ever.

    But SaaS spend is still increasing - that spend is going to the companies that are doing the best job of solving the customer’s problems.

  • No - its a company problem.

    Your customer doesn’t care that you have a marketing team, a sales team and a customer success team.

    They want your company as a whole to understand their problem and to demonstrate that you know more about them than just how they can use your product.

  • As your company expands you will increase your Total Addressable Market by adding in new customer segments, selling new products or moving to new geographies.

    These introduce new buying personas and require new value propositions - but companies often forget to or avoid going back to basics defining these - assuming that product market fit in one market automatically transfers to another.

    What got you here won’t get you there.

  • A rough rule of thumb in SaaS is 3x pipeline with a close date in this quarter as you enter the quarter.

    As you progress through the quarter and close pipeline this will decrease towards zero on the last day of the quarter.

    Looking further out, you should have 2x pipeline for next quarter, 1x pipeline two quarters out, and anything further than that is a bonus and shouldn’t be included in your coverage planning.

Is this right for you?

Wondering if the Pipeline Emergency Rescue is suitable for your business?

  • How confident are you that the pipeline in your CRM is real, high quality, and will close on the dates forecast?

  • How confident are you that you have enough pipeline to hit your bookings targets?

If you are not confident, get in contact and we can discuss your current concerns and agree a suitable path forward.

Not ready to chat yet?

How much pipeline do you need?

Use my pipeline coverage calculator to find out: