The Sales Pipeline Training Origin Story...

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A Career Twist

After 25 years spent as a consultant, researcher, writer, and trainer focused exclusively on sales management issues, I found myself in an unexpected place… In demand as a Chief Revenue Officer. I was recruited by several private equity funds to implement sales and sales management best practices in companies they owned.  So I served as Interim CRO time and time again – generally in 6 to 9 month sprints before hiring my replacement. And what I observed was shocking in its consistency: Ridiculously wasteful meetings masquerading as ‘pipeline review’ sessions.

In sales force after sales force that I stepped into, sales managers were holding weekly meetings to discuss the sales pipeline, typically in a team format, with sellers narrating their top deals to a wholly disinterested audience. The meetings were universally low energy and low impact, while consuming hours of valuable sales force effort that could have been spent on more productive sales activities.

The List of Infractions

I spent one evening documenting all the issues I needed to resolve. From my actual notes, here are the items I listed:

• Uncertainty that sales pipeline sizes are sufficient
• Questionable sales forecasts
• Low and inconsistent deal win rates 
• Lack of trust in deal quality
• Sloppy opportunity stage definitions
• Doubt that many deals are ‘real’
• Poor data integrity
• Wasteful meetings with lack of discipline
• Lack of focus on deal strategy
• Too little prospecting to replenish the sales pipeline
• No meeting preparation
• Little sales coaching taking place
• Unused and shabby reporting
• Lack of meaningful KPIs (including leading indicators like prospecting)

What a list!  Sound familiar?

The Plan

From this list a plan emerged. I would create a sales manager workshop to resolve the issues. Having owned a sales management training company for a decade, I know how to train sales managers. In fact, I had previously created a training program on sales pipeline management strategies… I now realized that the true need is instruction on pipeline execution. Sales managers are not taught how to manage a sales pipeline. They’re not taught how to conduct an effective pipeline meeting. They’re not taught how to measure and improve pipeline health. Yet ironically this is the core responsibility of most sales managers – to help their sellers find and win more deals.

Again from my notes, here are the goals I set for a new pipeline management workshop for sales managers:

• Increase intensity of focus on the sales pipeline
• Coach sellers vs. just scrubbing CRM data
• Create purpose-driven interactions
• Add discipline to the management cadence
• Know where deals actually are in the sales process
• Build confidence in the pipeline
• Improve forecasts
• Get a complete view of the pipeline

And so came The Pipeline Playbook Workshop. It was created out of my own need to provide guidance to my own sales managers. It helps ANY sales manager create their own playbook for managing and maintaining efficient, productive sales pipelines through focused effort in disciplined meetings .It was an unexpected outcome from a bizarre career twist. And now I offer it to you. If you also suffer from the common maladies listed above, then this sales management workshop was literally built for you.  If you would like to achieve the fundamental goals outlined above, then this workshop was built for you.

CONTACT ME to discuss how we can help you enable more focused and productive sales pipeline meetings for your team.