Are you tracking your deal quality? What about pipeline stages? Tracking can make a huge difference to startups.
In a recent podcast episode, I spoke to Andy Mowat about the importance of tracking quality of deals and pipeline in your company.
Andy works as a Vice President of Growth Operations at Culture Amp, a company that makes it easy to collect, understand, and act upon employee feedback. Specifically, he focuses on the company’s go-to-market operations. Here’s what he had to say about the subject.
When it comes to deal quality, Andy says you need to track the answers to these key questions:
Do you have the right start date for the client?
Have you got the correct billing address?
Have you entered all of the data correctly?
Are your people following the right procedures in terms of discounts and what they’re giving to your clients?
These may seem like small things, but they’re all essential when it comes to moving a lead through your pipeline. Making mistakes in these areas causes delays and may even directly cost your business money.
Such issues often come down to a lack of clarity.
Defining and tracking the answers to these questions improves your deal quality. This improves your interactions with potential clients and helps make your sales and service processes more efficient.
Pipeline Quality
Pipeline quality has some similarities to deal quality. According to Andy, it’s pretty easy to confuse the two.
He says that tracking pipeline quality means ensuring everything in your pipeline has the correct close date. You also need to track the probability in terms of achieving a conversion.
He also says that it’s important that anyone in the company can see the status of the leads in the pipeline.
There may be other issues that you need to track, such as where the leads are in terms of legal and security. However, those may not apply to your own pipeline. The key here is to remove any ambiguity from the process. Defining and tracking these things allows you to scale effectively without having to deal with issues later on.
In regards to how deal and pipeline quality differ, pipeline quality examines open opportunities. By contrast, deal quality tracks closed opportunities.
The Sales Stages in the Pipeline
This is an area where over complicating can become a real issue. You don’t want your teams going through sales stages where they’re looking in all sorts of different places for the things they need.
Every stage in the pipeline needs a definition and clear processes in place. Culture Amp’s way of dealing with the closing of a lead as an example.
Their system prompts the sales rep to fill out a form that asks them several questions. That simple process provisions the account, alerts the right people, and gives them the info they need to work on the account.
This ensures that all of the stages that surround the upcoming kickoff call for that lead get followed.
Using forms allows Culture Amp to track the stages of their pipeline while keeping things simple for their reps.
Each stage in your pipeline needs to offer a similar level of simplicity. The more complex it gets, the harder it is for you to keep track of what’s happening.
This only scratches the surface of the topics that we covered with Andy during the podcast. For each of these points, he dives a lot deeper to provide some valuable information.
There’s a lot more that you can learn from Andy and the many other people that I’ve interviewed for my podcast. We cover a host of topics that may help you to implement tracking and amplify revenue.
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Proper tracking is so important once your startup starts scaling and you build a team. It helps you to understand what’s happening so that you can nip any problems in the bud.
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