Fix Your Pipeline - Pipeline Clarity

Cleaning up your pipeline starts with clarity. In Part 1, I show you how to separate real opportunities from false comfort and build an honest forecast.

Check out all four parts of the Fix Your Pipeline series:
1. Pipeline Clarity
2. Consistency Wins
3. Metrics that Matter
4. Honest Forecasting

For more strategies like this, check out my sales tip video library on YouTube...

If you prefer to read - here is the transcript:

In a recent video, I challenged you to look at the holes in your pipeline and to try to figure out ways that you could improve that pipeline. And I got a lot of questions about how we do that. So I thought I would create four videos on each of those metrics and how you can increase them. Because what I really believe is if you take one of these metrics and work on it for three months, one quarter of the year, and choose one thing to improve every single month, you'll dramatically improve that particular pipeline metric.

So with that in mind, let's get started with part one and take a look at the average value of each opportunity. If you've noticed that the average value of each opportunity is much smaller than your company average, or maybe it's too small for you to hit your goal, you've got a couple of options.

If it's in your control, you can increase prices. Even a 5% increase in price will have a noticeable effect. You could talk to more people in that organization and bring out a bigger opportunity. Perhaps if you go wider in the organization all at once, you can turn a $5,000 opportunity into a 10,000, 20,000 or $25,000 opportunity.

Think about bundles. Put together a bronze, silver and gold plan inside your organization instead of selling with a land and expand type of opportunity where you sell a small piece and you're going to expand it later. Talk to the customer about the benefits of buying the whole package all at once.

The fourth thing that you could do if you need to raise is the average value is, of course, look at your customers. Maybe you're stuck selling to the easy small deals. Maybe you get a rush from really quick turn small deals, but you just can't manage the cadence of those opportunities in order to make meaningful traction on your goal. So maybe it's time to get uncomfortable and think about much bigger opportunities. Take a look at a different industry or opportunities with multiple facilities.

If you're really stuck on ways to increase the average size of your deal, look at the pipeline for the seller who has the biggest deal, who's closing the whales? Or at least the tuna if you're closing all the minnows. And follow them on some sales calls to understand how they're finding these opportunities. By emulating the best on your team, you're able to drive change into your daily habits that will then drive an incremental increase in your opportunities.