Colleen’s Blog

This week, I want to discuss your pipeline metrics. Our clients are noticing an unstable marketplace and, if you're not paying attention to this instability, it can dramatically change your pipeline metrics and lead to disastrous results.

There's a step that's commonly missing in account management planning. Do you know what it is? Many strategies look like this:

Nothing causes you to lose a sale more than being out of sync with your buyer when it comes to your sales process. Thus, how do you prevent that? Create a buyer-verified pipeline.

Today, your customer sees you—the seller—before you see them. That means we no longer live in a sell-to marketplace. It’s a buy-from world now. That shift has important consequences for how sales pipelines are built and what you use them for.

Your greatest sales success will come when you stop using seller-focused pipelines in your sales process. As I explained in the previous article in this series, that old approach—while still common—is mired in assumptions that simply aren’t true anymore.

In earlier times—let’s call it 2018—it was common for sellers to be exclusively in control of their sales pipeline. They built it and moved prospects through it based only on inputs that mattered to their organization. However, just because those seller-focused pipelines were popular didn’t mean they were effective!