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If you’re like me, you’ve seen weekly sales meetings turn into deep dives for a single opportunity instead of an overall review of the pipeline. Let’s go over some of the ways to stay on track and what to focus on.
Table of Contents
1. Set an Agenda
Whether you have 2 reps or 50, and whether your call is 30 minutes or two hours, it’s important to have a specific focus for your call. This focus doesn’t have to be the same each week. In fact, I would argue that it should not be the same each week. The trick is to notify your team at the beginning of the call about what you’ll go through. Let’s take a look at some of the different topics you may want to review with your team.
2. Decide on Deals to Review
The Bottom of The Funnel
Bottom of the funnel refers to opportunities that are close to closing. If you have 6 deal stages, these are the ones in stages 5 and 6. These are the deals that usually get looked at on calls because they have the best chance to bring in money for the company. While these are important, if you look at them in every sales meeting, you’ll miss other key opportunities.
The Middle of The Funnel
These are the deals that have been initially qualified and are being actively worked on. These would be stages 3 and 4 out of 6 deal stages. It’s important to review the middle of the funnel from time to time in sales meetings to see if anyone on the team needs a higher up on their call, has a random question for the team, or even as a nudge to the sales rep that they shouldn’t forget about this opportunity. Sometimes reps forget about deals in the middle of the funnel if there is a very long sales cycle, they have too many deals, or if they are hyper focused on opportunities that are close to closing.
The Top of The Funnel
Even more than opportunities in the middle of the funnel, opportunities at the top can get lost in the midst of so many other higher priority deals. The stage 1 and 2 deals, out of 6 stages, need to be looked at to ensure that your pipeline is being replenished with deals that have potential, are genuine opportunities and not just first meetings, and are being properly qualified in or out.
Deals That are Missing Data
Regardless of where a deal is at in the funnel, it’s important that key opportunity fields are filled out properly. While you should notify your team when you notice missing data, it’s also good to review these items in sales meetings. We do this because we want to hold our reps accountable. Whatever is reviewed in a sales meetings is what reps tend to think is important. The same holds true for any type of call; whatever is discussed with frequency is deemed important whether stated outright or implied. When we review missing data in a sales meeting, it lets the team know that opportunity metrics are important; plus you get accurate reporting with good data, which everyone wants.
3. Review Key Fields and Changes in Values
It’s vital to keep track of data that changes or becomes outdated. Here are 3 key fields that almost every B2B sales team should keep an eye on:
Deal Stage
It’s not enough to simply see an opportunity at a certain stage and check in on the status. It’s vital to understand the changes in deal stages. Stages represent the major milestones that are being completed to turn your opportunities into customers. When a deal stage moves forward, it’s a chance to do a quick spot check to ensure that your rep has completed all of the necessary steps in the previous stage to warrant a move forward in the process.
Close Date
Much like deal stages above, we can’t just look at the close date of a deal and ask the rep if this is accurate or not. We need to keep track of changes in the close date, especially in tandem with the deal stage. If your sales cycle is 6 months and you have 6 stages, whereby it roughly takes 1 month to complete each stage (yes, this is an oversimplification), if a close date is in 2 weeks, but only in stage 3, then you know something is wrong.
Deal Amount
Akin to deal stages and close dates, we want to know when deal amounts change. Teams tend to focus on opportunity amount far more in the later stages of a deal than at the beginning because there is a greater chance of success and thus a more immediate impact to revenue. The top of the funnel may not have pricing yet, so the amounts tend to be taken with a grain of salt. However, we should also focus on the amounts for deals in the middle of the funnel because these numbers help us get a picture of our pipeline value.
Other Key Fields
In addition to the aforementioned fields, think about the metrics that are important to your business; be sure to track the changes and discuss them on your pipeline review calls. A handful of other fields to consider are product, term length, annual recurring revenue, professional services, and any other numerical value important to your organization.
Wrap Up – Sales Meeting
No matter how often you have a sales meeting, it’s important to avoid deep dives for single opportunities. We have to remember how vital it is to review the overall pipeline. Lastly, be sure to change the area of focus from time to time to ensure you review the entire pipeline.