Month 4
- Extreme Whiteboarding
The Pipeline has the team entering much better info than they did with just CRM. Opportunities in the Pipeline are grounded in reality now. You know what the impact of a new change should look like. And you keep reading. Maybe you’ve finished reading or listening to The Joshua Principle Or any of the many great selling books out there.
Almost every book is pushing sales processes. Not than just a set of deal stages in CRM, a real process is the work that justifies the progress of a deal from one stage to the next.
This is a clear differentiator for world-class selling orgs. It fixes most of the weaknesses in sales forecasting.
Problem
- How do you design it? Test it? Share it? Monitor it? Update it
There’s nothing in standard CRM. The Pipeline takes you step-by-step.
Your Process Canvas
Open the Pipeline. Click the Sales Processor panel. All your stages are across the top. Click one.
Click the New Action button. Pretty simple. Actions are how you work with the customer. They should also be how you prove a deal is in the right stage. If an action isn't complete, it shouldn't move to a different stage
So create an action. Start with just one action for each stage. Add more as you learn more. Set expected outcomes. Customers don’t always do what you expect, so use the Pipeline to prove your idea is good - or adjust it until it works. Every good idea is available to everyone right where they need it most. On the opportunity.
Test Your
Customer Theories
Here’s the big shift in thinking:
In Pipeline Manager you also define expected outcomes.
This is the perfect way to guide customer conversations without limiting them.
Adding more and more fields on CRM forms never worked. It only made people hate CRM.
Small chunks information presented at the right time in the customer journey? This is how to acquire all that data that drives your next moves.
Biz Dev Scrums
Review a process with other managers. They just open their Pipeline to comment or adjust.
The first process only took you a few minutes. Create more processes for verticals, client types, regions and even for types of salespeople.
Easy to create and update. Pipeline processes are always up to date and agile, responding to the latest news in the field
Lightspeed Dynamic Processes
The Sales Processor is a whiteboard where you collaborate to devise your selling processes. How do you connect those processes to the customers?
Every opportunity has a menu listing all the processes that you’ve set up.
Choose one. You’ve just connected your best practice to an active deal at warp speed. Nobody retypes the steps. Your best practices are hard wired directly to your team.
You’ve heard of A/B testing online ads. Now you can A/B test processes. And A/B test how an online ad was supported with process A or process B.
Onboarding
Hiring new reps just got easier. When the big picture for any type of deal is laid out step-by-step, new-hire time to productivity is reduced by months. What’s that worth to your organization?
Six Sigma/LEAN For Selling
Coaches monitor the changes, the process adoption and the impact of the actions. All in real time. THEN coaches react and adjust the processes. In real time. And those adjustments hit the field. In real time.
The usual too-late revenue warnings can't zero in on where the deal went south. In the Pipeline, rep and manager see exactly where each change is improving the big picture for the customer and the bottom line for your org.
With the Pipeline, CRM ROI leaps past all the old metrics of revenue and time savings. Now you’re in HR’s space, considering hiring, on-boarding and retention improvements. You’re continually reevaluating and upgrading the team's skills.
Sales Transformation: The Missing Link
Now you're meddling with the primal forces of culture. That means change. Learning. Habits. Communication and coordination. Cross-departmental alignment. Pipeline Manager is your Sales Transformation info nexus. It won't tell you how to change. That's your job. Pipeline Manager is your change Executive Assistant, helping you prioritize efforts, keeping everyone in the organization on track as you manage the countless moving and ever-changing parts that define the transformation superstar.
Playbooks ++
Sorry. We think playbooks are just a bad idea. They are often too regimented for real selling and too cumbersome when the customer throws a curve.
Worst of all, they take too much decision making away from the person you hired to become an expert.
We take the best of playbooks and open them to all the ad hoc changes that lead to learning and better selling
