Streamline your deal pipeline for communications & media with airSlate SignNow

How to create outlook signature

foreign [Applause] thanks I was uh tucking my daughter into bed last night and she asked if she could come because I was explaining I was giving a presentation I was like you know not really uh you have school it's not really going to work out um but hey I'm there actually it's going to be recorded so you know I'll show you maybe I'll put the video up on YouTube and you'll get to see it and she goes you're gonna be on YouTube like it's really amazing how much cred YouTube gives you uh when for a six-year-old but uh so shout out to Riley shout out to uh all of you I am CJ this is Phil say hi Phil hello uh we're the gist we are an inbound marketing agency and certified HubSpot Solutions partner uh based right here in Buffalo New York actually more specifically we're based right here in this building on the 29th floor so we're close to home and we're very excited to be here thank you to Maura and everyone else from the 43 North team for having us just to give you guys a little bit of context who we are where this is all coming from uh we are not a full-service marketing agency we don't do branding we don't do paid media we don't do a lot of things what we actually do is we work with primarily B2B software and service companies throughout the United States to design and Implement scalable organic growth systems right we like to see growth as something that you build into the design of the company rather than an event or a campaign or something that you do when you feel like at a faucet that you turn on and off right so we help companies invest in the assets that they own or control and design growth into every aspect of their delivery from marketing and sales and customer service what does this translate into it translates into SEO and content strategy inbound marketing sales enablement and of course CRM configuration which really brings us to where we're at right now we are as I mentioned before certified HubSpot Solutions Partners we help companies buy HubSpot implement it may manage it so support it all this that and the other thing and it's through all of our experience in doing this that uh in trying to orchestrate growth systems through CRM design where we realized the importance of yes a deal pipeline like something this innocuous deal pipeline feels like a pretty trivial topic to be giving a presentation on we all know what it is it's pretty simple but we're actually here to make the case that through our experience in helping people grow through how their crms are designed that a deal pipeline can be more than just a procedural requirements and actually an instrument for growth that touches all teams not just the sales team and that's really the case that we're going to be making today so what are we covering we're going to start with what is a deal Pipeline and how do we as in most people think about a deal Pipeline and use it and we're going to spend as few time as little time there as possible because it's kind of stuff that everybody knows but we just need to hit that get on the same page then we're going to offer how we think about deal Pipelines and we're going to offer some very specific examples and concrete suggestions for how you can improve or optimize your deal pipeline so that it becomes more of that instrument for growth and less just like a organizational tool for sales right we're going to share some resources including a workbook that is going to allow you guys to try to put some of these ideas in place immediately and then q a and that's obviously our favorite part we have these have you ever seen these throw mics before honestly I must not get out a lot because I've never seen those but the way it works is you just throw it and then it becomes the mic so if you have a question everybody's going to be able to hear you which is awesome uh one more thing I do want to mention is that yes we said we are HubSpot Solutions Partners we are going to reference HubSpot at times we a lot of the things that we're talking about right now are examples that are derived from our experience with HubSpot but I want to be very clear that this presentation is platform agnostic it does not matter if you use HubSpot or not it does not matter what CRM you use what's in your Tech stack in this presentation you will be able to appreciate what we're talking about and if you're interested apply some of these best practices regardless so just want to get clear on that so first and foremost what is the deal pipeline we're going to go through this pretty quickly because most of you already know if you ask a handful of different people you'll probably get a handful of different answers even though a deal pipeline is seemingly so innocuous so let's just go from the source to somebody who really should know what a deal pipeline is and I promise this is like going to be the only time I'm reading off a slide deal pipelines this is from HubSpot deal pipelines help visualize your sales process to predict revenue and identify selling roadblocks deal stages are the steps in your pipeline that signal to your sales team that an opportunity is moving forward or to the point of closing okay everybody yes okay makes sense all right this is what a deal pipeline looks like how incredible there are a bunch of cards or records which indicate a sales opportunity they progress through stages which represent major milestones in the sales process as you move them along there are probably fields or properties that allow you to capture data relevant to the specific sales process and this is a pipeline and your organization may have one pipeline or it may have multiple pipelines some companies have multiple pipelines for different products or services or different teams sometimes it's by deal type right you have a pipeline for like net new growth and acquisition and maybe another one for retention and renewals maybe another one for current client upsells regardless right here's your pipeline and this is how it looks now finally how are most people using it and thinking about it it really breaks down into two different categories right there is the individual sales level and then there's the leadership level on the individual sales level very much as a prerequisite it's going to show every single opportunity right you don't really have much of a pipeline if uh it's not show if you're not having a deal record for every single opportunity broken out into stages or Milestones then sales reps are going to use that to track those opportunities they're going to see how far or close they are to quota and then how to prioritize their time on the leadership side deal pipelines are very critical for forecasting right we all know this but I want to be very clear forecast is very important but it is not a list of companies that you're talking to or that you have a proposal out to it is a rather simple but still a formulaic way of expecting what's going to be coming in and when or not right so obviously that is a very important thing that people use the deal pipeline for and then finally sales managers use it for coaching holding their reps accountable I think we're all pretty much on the same page that okay I got it you've totally belabored be labored the point CJ we all have a deal pipeline or if I don't it's on purpose because I don't want to use it um but the point is that these are very instrumental tools and if you're using it for all of these reasons which the vast majority of companies this is basically what it is no need to overthink it but what we we are here to argue is that a deal pipeline is even more important than that or actually a better way of saying it would be a deal pipeline is significantly more valuable than that as I mentioned before most people the way they use a deal pipeline it is a procedural requirement right it is like an organizational tool or project management for sales you track deals you submit deals you report on them and while that's great the deal pipeline actually has the potential to be an instrument for growth that touches all teams so think about it this way right everything flows either into or out from your deal pipeline everything that marketing does is designed to influence the creation and ultimately the closed winning of new deals now I get it that marketing is responsible for brand awareness and PR and like all of these other things but let's be honest like regardless the one thing that as a marketer that you are held accountable for is how many deals that you are creating or influencing and what percentage of them close as well as like the cumulative Revenue right how much are you influencing the actual growth of the company how much are you supporting sales right so obviously not every campaign is going to be a home run and not every uh blog post view or content offer download or social media follow or lead generated whatever is going to result in the creation of a qualified sales opportunity and a deal let alone a closed one but we we know where the thrust is marketing needs to flow opportunities into this pipeline sales need to work them and then after a deal is closed one you have implementation or you have client success teams that have to then do the onboarding or make the products or deliver the services and uh you know most cases what they do when they do it how they do it how they take those steps is dependent upon information that was captured in the deal pipeline or inputs that the sales team was able to collect so they're basically taking that hand off from the sales team within the deal Pipeline and then actually doing the work right so it when when you look at it this way the deal pipeline has an opportunity to be a major inflection point in the growth of your company uh and we would argue that the deal pipeline should be the single source of Truth for growth in your company right just the way we say that the CRM should be the single source of Truth for customers the deal pipeline can and should be the single source of Truth for growth and it can be more than again this procedural requirement it can also Foster communication improve visibility uh reduce friction and create efficiencies facilitate handoffs from one team to another and significantly improve our ability to understand and analyze growth through reporting so that we understand not just so we view growth as more of just okay how much and when but rather where is it coming from why is it happening in what areas are we strong and what areas are we weak and really understand and diagnose growth so that it can be extrapolated and done more intentionally moving forward so this is the premise so we're taking this very trivial innocuous thing in your deal Pipeline and we're saying make it better it should be more and it's not that hard so if if you accept the premise that a deal pipeline is more than just that and can and should be an instrument for growth the next question comes what should we expect from our deal pipeline and what should we do about it so this is kind of like the meat of the presentation we're going to go through some like really specific concrete examples right now gotcha okay uh one of the first steps that we always think about when we are optimizing our deal pipeline is how are we going to get those deals started how are we going to get them into the pipeline to begin with so on that slide that CJ had at the very beginning the visual representation of a deal pipeline you saw the different stages and the cards and at this point hopefully you've already set that up in your pipeline you've established your Milestones maybe even your fields or your properties for the data that you're going to gather but again how are we going to get the deals in there to begin with and of course you could have somebody manually do them but depending on the size of your company and your sales team and your organization that could be a full-time job let alone right then and there so how can we make that more efficient how can we automatically get deals into your pipeline well as any good marketer or web developer would know forms are probably the most efficient and the best way to do that and we'll talk about that in a second there's some other areas too like maybe you've set up a chat bot on the site and through a series of questions you've gotten it narrowed down to I need a proposal or I need a quote ready for a demo software something like that right you can automatically get a deal set up in your first stage or maybe another stage down the line of needs needs proposal or scheduled demo software something like that but we've already automatically then started the process and through form submissions as well you can automatically create a deal and get that that pipeline rolling um you can also automatically assign those deals to the correct people I think that's a huge step that a lot of people Overlook depending on your forms depending on the questions you're asking in those forms or in this case the the information you're collecting you can get those deals to the correct people right from the get-go so depending on industry service of the deal and where the deal is coming from maybe you've set up a booth at a trade show maybe it is a demo software and you have people that are just stronger in that area they can walk through your your sales and service or your software is better than others and they're they're going to close those deals at a higher rate so you can get those to the right people at the right time um it also helps you with automatically communicating that information internally and externally so we know as web developers and marketers when somebody fills out a form we want to maybe trigger an email out to go to them right away thank you for your submission somebody will be in contact with you that's a pretty basic thing but what about internal communication making sure all that information you collected gets to the right person whether that be the sales rep their manager different department heads or anybody and now we've now started to create some visibility into the deal pipeline as well so we know what's coming in as CJ said marketers marketing and sales their job is to get information into the pipeline and then maybe move it along and we started that process as well um obviously we're saving time as I just said with without uh having to manually create deals and also it establishes consistency right away with the sales process so sales reps sales managers can understand what they're going to receive they are prepared for it they're ready for it and they can kind of begin their their whole process of moving that deal closer to the close to one stage so uh once you realize the ability to create efficiencies by creating deals automatically then it's like okay well how do you improve the way that you update in advance deals and one of the most important things that you can have in any deal Pipeline and this really impacts marketing too by the way and that is so often overlooked is the idea of requiring your sales team to enter information in the pipeline in order to move a deal to each stage right there's so much valuable information that is discussed and captured when a deal is being worked and that data is really valuable for Marketing sales customer service so what you do is you list out all the stages in your deal Pipeline and then you literally just make a list of okay in order for somebody to have reached this milestone in the sales process what information would they absolutely had to have understood collected whatever every single time and then you make your pipeline require anybody who uses it to put that information in there so for example if you have like a needs and a stage four needs analysis completed right you should require that rep to put in the industry that the the prospect is in the size the what their pain points are maybe the deal type the source of business right things that are incredibly valuable for a bunch of different people and there's no way you can complete a needs analysis let's say or a discovery or whatever you call it without collecting that information so when you when you bake this into how the deal pipeline is configured and designed you've created a systematized way of gathering information that you can aggregate you can use this for reporting but also for doing internal uh communication and notifications where you can send updates based on that information we'll talk about that later yeah actually we're gonna we're gonna talk about that right now uh escalating deals that haven't been updated for a significant period of time so you guys might be sitting there and saying CJ Phil we got it we don't have a problem with collecting information our Milestones our deal stages are Rock Solid we've they're they're tried and true we we know what we like we have it it's all set up our problem is that we consistently run into roadblocks with moving those deals from stage to Stage uh whether that be through lack of activity lack of communication or not organized you know a variety of different reasons um what if you could escalate those and send out notifications internally and externally which I'll I'll mention in just a moment to make sure that some sort of activity or some sort of motion is taking place on those deals so imagine a scenario where you have a deal and it's been 60 days and they haven't been emailed they haven't been called so that card in your that you're looking at has just been sitting there for 60 days and nothing is happening on it I mean if as far as they know it's over I mean we should do something with that right like some sort of activity should happen whether marketing creates a piece that can automatically trigger to go out to them to try to re-engage them how about an internal task notification to that sales rep and their manager or supervisor saying hey you haven't contacted this person in 60 days when you send them an email give them a call schedule a meeting drop by their office or a sales manager can see this go to the sales rep and say hey why haven't you called this person is there something going on oh I just don't have the time well let's move that to somebody that does have the time let's give that to somebody else on the sales team so that they can nurture that deal along to at least take some activity and maybe the the reality is it's just they're just not interested they've ghosted you for 60 days and there's maybe a reason for that well then at that point we should get it out of the system right we should move it from that stage it's in and let's just automatically move it or push it to closed lost set the reason for that close loss deal which we'll get into in just a moment as lack of activity for more than 60 days so now we know that this deal is probably just a lost deal and that's okay that happens it's not 100 win rate all the time but we're organizing and keeping our deal pipeline a little bit cleaner which goes along which goes a long way I mean at best you'll prevent opportunities from slipping through the cracks so things aren't just going to get lost in the shuffle um but and at the very least you'll prevent your pipeline from from having a bunch of stale deals just sitting there you'll keep it cleaner and organized and really what we call pipeline Integrity or deal pipeline Integrity where um everything's clean and organized and you know like just pulling it up what's what everything that's in specific stages are really there for a reason they're not just there simply because they haven't been moved in 30 60 90 days or whatever the case is so another thing is that think think about it this way right because marketers and sales this is something that they're often required to uh task together especially when you get into account based marketing right a lot of us in here work for companies that have longer product purchase Cycles right you whatever product or service you sell usually requires a buying team one person can't make the decision by themselves they have to do research they have to maybe compare against other competitors it takes a long time to make a decision maybe months maybe years right so whenever you have a long product purchase cycle you have sales teams and by extension marketing teams that um you know experience lows in the sales process and people sometimes struggle to figure out when to follow up the right way to follow up what to say right you kind of want to keep those deals alive and you want to show that you're thorough and and helpful but you don't want to like cross that line to be annoying and pesky right so sometimes it could be really really hard to pick your spots when to follow up when to engage especially during those long sales Cycles right where you're playing that long game running that Marathon well in situations like that the more information you can be armed with the better and the reality is your your deal Pipeline and your CRM as a whole has the ability to provide you with useful information about your prospect so one example right here let's say your prospect who's a contact associated with that deal visits your website or maybe more specifically a specific page on your website like your pricing page don't you think as the sales rep trying to close that deal or the marketing manager who may influence that deal with automated emails or or other little things to help nurture them don't you think you would want to have that information right doesn't mean you have to just like go right in and be like hey I saw that you visited our pricing page no but the more you could be armed with knowledge about what your prospect is thinking and doing the more valuable you can be at engaging them in closing opportunities your deal pipeline should do this for you so I've mentioned a couple times already about as a sales manager being notified of specific things and want to dive a little bit more into that if there are any sales managers or sales reps here today you know that sometimes it's difficult to be aware of where everything stands with your team or in your pipeline without it having to man you know walk up to that person and say hey how's it going with this or or what's the status of this um which we know can get a little kind of annoying and you don't want to seem overbearing or micromanaging it'd be nice to get that information automatically so when some of those certain Milestones are reached or deal stages are reached um with those neat with those deals we can trigger automations to go out notifying managers of that situation so for example a software demo is scheduled it's helpful to know that you can then approach your salesperson and say hey I see you scheduled this software demo is there something I can help you with you're now opening up coaching opportunities for your sales team which is huge and we all know that that's value we're now opening up that growth system that we've we've talked about um other other sales process other formal Milestones like needs analysis completed or a proposal sent maybe you need to review the proposal make sure there was no errors make sure the pricing is correct without having to go track that sales person down you can have it automatically as well sent to you so that you can review that proposal before it makes its way to the prospect on the deal and then sometimes some things just need to get tasked out maybe something happens at a certain stage and somebody else needs to step in and do their job and as a sales or marketing manager now you are kind of made aware of those you can delegate and designate that information to the right people make sure they're getting the correct information they need as well so they can properly do their job and just again keep that deal moving along to that closed one stage and sometimes you just need to stay in the loop and I think that that really is just the the whole point of this is you need more insight creates come some some more visibility without having to um kind of walk up to somebody and Bug them in the middle of their day now you kind of have that Insight without having to do that all right this one might be my favorite one except for maybe requiring properties to move deals into new stages when we think about the sales process it's usually very linear even though in reality it's like all you know up down left right you know all these variables but regardless when we think about the sales process in a linear way we usually think about when deals are created when deals close and we usually think about that in the terms of closed one except for the fact that most deals are closed lost the vast majority of companies right more than 50 percent of deals that are created are not converted to accounts so we should be really mindful of that so here's some advice for how to configure your closed lost stage first of all capture a closed loss reason ideally you could have a drop down select or a multiple select where people can select one or or a handful of different reasons why it was lost we try and and suggest do just make them select only one reason if that works for you the reason why you could do this is this is so valuable for reporting it's really important just as it is to understand where deals are coming from source of business right and how to cross-reference that against other variables like industry or size or what products they're interested in but especially when they lose we want to know why a good a good leadership team should be able to analyze that and look for commonalities between close loss reasons and other things again like industry like size what products are we really successful at selling versus the ones we struggle with oh you know what when um when a company is in this industry or this size and looking for this uh this is going to be really important otherwise they're going to not right capture that close loss reason analyze it make better decisions that could lead to improvements in your product could lead into improvements of your uh sales process then very simple win back possibility yes or no is this worth another attempt sometime in the future and if so pick the date and then your CRM will automatically send you a task whenever that date arrives maybe it's six months from now a year two years from now whatever it is but if the if there is a win back possibility choose a follow-up date then get that task that says hey CJ remember ABC demo company well you said you wanted to follow up with them on this date here's a little information to jog your memory right now you're systematizing those win back attempts and you're making sure that they don't fall through the cracks and of course while this person is in this category this segment the marketing team can make sure that they're at least getting like the monthly newsletter or invitations to webinars where it's like hey look we get it we need to respect your decision we're not going to jump down your throat but we will remind you that we exist and drip little bits of value to you throughout the process so that when that follow-up date arrives months or years later it will be significantly more well received amazing opportunity with clothes lost one of the things CJ did mentioned my primary responsibility for the gist is account manager and helping the clients that we bring in kind of get their system set up and in place and it's amazing to me every time that we go through this process with a new client that maybe already is using uh in our case HubSpot they have a closed deal a closed lost deal stage but that's it they're not using it in any other way other than that and that just always blows my mind but um we've talked a lot about closed one and when a deal is closed one what happens after that obviously you know we've collected the payment we've signed a contract but beyond that what's going on um one thing that we can't stress enough and that I want to make sure is is communicated here today is that you should never really build or design your deal pipeline without consulting your customer service your onboarding team your implementation team your production team whatever you want to call it without getting their input first because they are the ones that are going to take the handoff from that closed closed one deal and then onboard the client get them set up get everything going that they need to do whether that's a product or a service um the last thing you want is any type of buyer's remorse or regret for signing up with you guys in the first place and if information is not communicated to them properly you're at risk of running into that situation and that's ever something every team and every company wants to avoid at all costs so maybe as simple as just making sure that the information those teams needed is required before that deal even moves to closed one that's the first first step so communicating with them before you design your pipeline asking them what is that information they're going to need could even be things like making sure specific types of paperwork are sent out to the client before they even make their first phone call so that that process has already started you're reinforcing consistency and you're aligning your teams as well so they're going to be more trustworthy of your sales and marketing team and your sales and marketing team are also going to trust them that they're going to take that client that they've worked so hard to bring on and give them a positive experience with your company moving forward to wrap us up we absolutely have to talk about reporting and there's not nearly enough time right now to go through with all the different ways you can have visibility into your deal Pipeline and by extension really visibility into the growth of your company but reports are super duper important uh which is the scientific term so marketing is going to want to know like what content influences the creation of deals right uh which source of business for example closes the most deals and by the way like what's the close rate on mqls what percentage of marketing leads that are passed to the sales team close and what's the average size deal I mean you can just go way further into that but just to give you an idea obviously on the sales side you're looking at forecasts and quotes and things like that you want to look at closed rate based on industry size of business pain points right that's something that you should capture and then deal insights right just looking at a global uh high-level view of all of your all of your deals Broken Out by certain variables new business versus existing deal type deal owner whatever on the service side right there may be situations where you would want to adjust the onboarding timeline based on things that was collected in the deal pipeline also these teams are going to be looking at things like average lifetime value and retention rate right so if they look at those things those are really important what if they cross-reference that with some of the information that's captured in the deal pipeline now you're all working together to identify who your ideal customer actually is right so there's just tremendous power uh in the reports what this ultimately comes down to is the premise that we're offering is your deal pipeline should serve as a single source of Truth for growth right it should be built to accommodate any person or team that impacts customer acquisition and growth which by the way is a lot of people and a lot of teams Marketing sales implementation customer service maybe your it team maybe your product team right all of these people impact acquisition and growth and the deal pipeline should be built to accommodate these people and also be built to accommodate all levels lots of pipelines are built to accommodate a sales manager and it gives them reports they need that's good they could see who who how everybody is progressing where they are to quota but maybe it's forfeiting a lot of the opportunity for the deal pipeline to be the tool that it is maybe it's clunky right so you want to make sure that it is built for everyone again a deal pipeline as we went over here and we're going to follow up with resources to make sure that everybody understands it deal pipeline does have the ability to be a tool for providing visibility into growth for the the entire company keeping people in the loop with notifications alerts updates Saving Time by automating things and creating efficiencies reducing friction communicating with your customer handing off from one team to the next and and following up on opportunities in the both in the present in the future and then finally providing significantly more visibility into growth which if you're paying attention will help you grow by understanding where growth is coming from and and how it can be achieved in the future so I hope that makes a lot of sense uh just to kind of wrap things up you may have noticed on the bottom we have a URL that just inbound.com 43 North at that page and hopefully it can be emailed out later or something on that page we basically have an overview of this whole presentation uh in some instances we can go a little bit deeper the biggest thing on that though is a workbook and I want to talk about that for a second before we wrap up so the deal pipeline planning workbook is an adaptation of a real workbook that we use with our clients who pay us to help them figure this out and design their crms and build their deal pipelines what this includes is it's basically a tool it's a Google sheet read-only you got to clone it and then you can customize your own right and it starts by helping you define what your stages are like what are the different milestones in your sales process what is the definition the the rule the criteria for a deal advancing into that stage what is they forecast or when probability of a deal reaching that stage then you brainstorm all the different like Properties or data points or basically information relative to sales that you want to capture and then it's not in the screenshot but there's a really cool mapping tool where you you list out all of your stages and for every stage you define okay what properties do we want to require people to input in order to move a deal into this stage what about escalations what about automations what about other things and it's really clean it's really intuitive our clients love it we use it with them so that's what you're going to get and there's two tabs there's an example and a blank one so you can look at the example which is somewhat similar it's not our exact pipeline but it's similar to the one that we use at the gist so you can look at that one for ideas and inspiration and then you can take the blank one and you can do it yourself again we've provided more examples on this page in terms of providing more context into all of the suggestions that we have made right so create deals automatically from form submissions and other triggers like we've provided some concrete examples of of how that could work and then the last thing I want to say is we are making ourselves available to anybody in this room or really anybody who registered if you have any questions if you want to do like a little quick session to walk through your deal pipeline planning workbook anything you want to bounce off of us you want to tell us how great our presentation was then just schedule this free consultation this is not a sales pitch disguised as a free consultation no we really do just want to help so you can book either 15 or 30 minutes it's on the bottom of that page again that's the just inbound.com 43 North so I want to thank the 43 North team everybody else thanks for listening thanks for having us um I'll open it up to questions [Applause] I really hope somebody asked a question oh damn I wanted to throw it yeah I want to throw it yeah thanks oh hey Chris oh um thank you for talking through uh I'm interested in how you work with your clients on broader strategies right especially for early stage companies wins and closing I think becomes a very important priority for them but you know in a world of limited resources especially for an early stage business you know you can see a lot of dollar things back in the area where you know maybe they should be focusing more on compliance and more on delivery than than I will so I'm interested in your guys thought that's a great question um probably could be answered in a variety of ways what I would say is especially early stage companies uh you you hear MVP minimally viable product right so you don't want to Take Years or months or even weeks to design your deal pipeline right like deals need to start flowing a deal pipeline obviously is not going to do Outreach for you networking lead gen but this is a perfect example where if you look at things like size of business source of business closed one reason close loss reason right right in the right in the pipeline now you can should be able to if you're running deals through and you're just spending just a little bit more time to make sure you're capturing that data you can provide that Insight where oh yeah compliance is an issue right we're learning that right now all of a sudden our deal pipeline is informing our sales strategy because we've uh uh you know we we've been mindful of that when we were building that does that kind of answer yeah yeah and I would to piggyback off that I would say one of the last things we talked about with the handoff to an implementation or an onboarding team that's where some of that insight into hey we're kind of lacking with some of the information that is uh being carried over to those teams or compliance issues or lack of paperwork or maybe we need to have this maybe we need another piece of paperwork created and signed as a result of compliance or as a result of something else if you are building those into the system right away You're eliminating the risk of having that pop-up is an issue later on I would say anybody else dare ask oh yeah we got one good bro Josh Allen no maybe just give it a second we have the other one all right I'm pretty loud all right um kind of a three-part question if you will so um you work primarily with B2B SAS companies and I'm just curious what channel is the primary one that you're seeing produce leads what's sort of an average conversion rate from a lead to an opportunity and then a win rate from an opportunity so lead the opportunity all right just so everybody can hear that what are the channels that are producing the most opportunities um what's the conversion rate from lead to opportunity and then opportunity to close uh channels that are producing the most uh organic properties so this would be your website so if you're you have a Content strategy or blogging you're doing things that help you let's just put it this way so um the the traditional marketing is like run ads on stuff right get in front as many people generate leads and certainly like that is effective like there's people who run Facebook LinkedIn Google ads whatever and that works right the problem with that though is that it's a faucet that you turn on and off right as soon as you you stop paying Those ads stop running it stops working right and so it it does not become that like permanent sustainable way to grow and when you think about it in order to do that you have to make um you have to produce content just to run For Those ads so it's content with a short shelf life right to run on somebody else's platform that you don't own or control that because of you know uh the way media is working usually those audiences just shrink and shrink and shrink because the age of mass customization um and usually it ends up increasing more and more right so if this was a socioeconomic study they would call this a poverty trap right it's it's a law of diminishing returns it's just constantly chasing that who's got the best Channel who's got the best whatever it doesn't mean it doesn't work I I have clients Partners whatever who have success in paid advertising but what is what works the best and what is most reliable is um having a having a Blog that ranks high on Google because when you get that high ranking you can take a you could conceivably take a vacation for a month or two months and that that blog is still going to rank it's still going to get traffic people are going to come through people are going to inquire same would be true for other properties so like having your own uh podcast or your own YouTube series right those those content and assets that you own or control uh so uh those are the best and then Distributing them consistently and thoughtfully so LinkedIn obviously is like very successful as far as the conversion from uh lead to opportunity that really depends on in my opinion like what is uh what is your definition of a lead um is it a subscriber or is it somebody who downloads a Content offer or is it anybody who does actually like inquire that for like request a quote or a demo um so I'm gonna have a hard time answering that question I would say anywhere from two percent to twenty percent um depending on the business I feel like would be good and then um you know in terms of a deal in the pipeline to close you know I think I I personally think like you know 20 to 40 percent in that range is pretty good um but again it depends if you're qualifying the right opportunities um and setting the right expectations it should be fairly good but I definitely we work with a handful of companies uh that you know close at close to 40 50 percent um and we're kind of in that range too so I would think that would be good enunciate um so first off great presentation um the tires for CJ too because we had a consultation back in the spring that was great too um for a business like minds or contacts I'm a marketer for a company where we have multiple business divisions multiple tools and things like that so I look at something like a deal pipeline thinking we're going to need multiples like it's not give me one me pipeline things like that can you guys speak a little bit to the value of having a single source of input and how that kind of helps the team uh consolidate buy-in for a deal Pipeline and making sure everybody's on the same page one it's nothing like that yeah so in terms of uh I want to take the buy-in part first so um if if you root like attribution reporting in your deal pipeline that suddenly makes the deal pipeline way more valuable to marketers right so if the reports that you show that says like hey how many mqls do we generate how many of them close total revenue if that's pulling from the deal pipeline well then you know marketing team the marketing team is going to be is sure going to make sure that the deal pipeline is going to have those reporting metrics so um same thing with sales right if if they can't physically move a deal to closed one um than without capturing the information that they need to capture that's required of them maintaining that deal pipeline Integrity then they're not going to close deals they're not going to get commission checks and the same is true for facilitating that handoff to implementation or onboarding so if you structure your deal pipeline the right way you will get buy-in but not just because uh it it's enforced and important for people's jobs but because also all the things we talked about how it can help you with those you know warm lead notifications or the closed loss reminders or the automated handoffs like if you just do a little put a little bit of effort into it it actually makes everybody's life easier and so that's that's really where the buy-in comes in uh the first part of your question was on like one or multiple deal Pipelines nobody wants our world is already far too complex so if you could do one pipeline or the fewest amount of pipelines possible do it that said there are scenarios where you need multiple or where you need to consolidate multiple into one um you know I I've had a couple of clients in the same exact industry one of them wants one pipeline for all deals one of them wants to break out net new in one Pipeline and current client upsells in another right so it's it really does come down to preference ultimately it's only as good as how well you use it kind of like a diet or a workout regimen right it's all about discipline you don't have to you can like have a different property inside of a deal pipeline that says like deal type or products and services so they could be those like little properties that you capture on deals and then break them out that way so you don't need to create a new pipeline for every single thing but uh really the case where you would need to create multiple pipelines are when the Milestones are different when it's a completely different sales process that has different steps different Milestones that's really when it needs a new pipeline great question thank you