Deal pipelines for product quality

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hello hello hello it's kyle van vorst with boris.com and today we're going to be discussing the deal stages that i typically suggest when running a sales organization let's dive right in all right everybody so i want to discuss briefly the steel stages that we typically suggest to our clients that they use to track their sales pipeline at each stage of the funnel now this is not a one size fits all approach it works for the vast majority of our clients but sometimes you need to customize some things so what i've put together today is a good starting place and it's going to work for 90 percent of you and i'll tell you some adjustments along the way so i'm actually going to share my screen we're going to walk through it and then we're also going to discuss how all of these flow together it's going to be great you're going to love it i promise and if you do it would be super helpful if you liked subscribe it helps the channel a lot it also tells me to keep making content like this all right enough of this let's jump in all right nothing like a google doc to get us kicked off here am i right so here's what we're looking at i'm going to walk through each of these stages give some definition of what the stage means and then the exit criteria and what exit criteria criteria is is what has to be true in order to move a deal to the next stage so let's start in the qualifying stage the qualifying stage is really the first stage in this sales process and the sales person is meeting the prospect at this point maybe that call was set up by an sdr and the goal the objective here is for the sales person to qualify that prospect as being a good fit for the solution and worth continuing the sales process so this is really common if um there's a lot of qualifications necessary for your solution to be a good fit if you sell maybe a really transactional product where it's kind of anybody can use it this is less useful of a stage but if that qualification is necessary then it should be done here i will note sometimes qualifications are more simple and you combined qualifying and then this next stage here totally up to you to customize this that fits your business best but typically i see most companies do this qualification step as part of their process and we typically suggest it unless there's a good reason not the exit criteria from qualifying is that the qualification call was conducted and a discovery or demo was scheduled so that's that next step that's key here and the reason why we have the exit criteria next step being scheduled is because i don't want the sales person to say that a specific deal wasn't qualified but i'm still going to do a next step just in case if you're going to do a next step you've now qualified that deal that's something really important so the next step here is discovery or a demonstration it depends on your type of business this is the second stage you're doing a deep discovery about the needs of the prospect and or a demonstration of your actual product and how it solves their challenges the key here is that the salesperson is actually having a real sales presentation on this call and they've already qualified that this is a good opportunity so if you have an sdr function there that is no longer relevant here because they've already been qualified the exit criteria for this discovery slash demonstration stage is they've conducted that call the prospect indicate that your solution meets their needs and the third one you have scheduled the next step if any one of these three things are not true we don't move this to the next stage and that next stage is evaluating now this is an optional one it depends on how complex of a solution you have this stage is for when the prospect says yeah we're evaluating your solution and there's a lot of questions that come from that maybe there's specific functionality that's necessary maybe there's some custom solutioning that has to be done if you're in more of a complex sale this is a stage that we typically use and the exit criteria for this stage our technical requirements are agreed upon okay we have to agree on the technical requirements we've identified the scope whether that be a poc a proof of concept or the solution itself like we've clearly identified what we're going to be using remember this is a more technical much more complex sale so we have to agree on this uh this scope and then the third one is we have a meeting scheduled to discuss pricing and then you get to move it to negotiation this is where the sales person the prospect are going to be negotiating over the contract right we've set up a time walk through pricing the contract once that pricing is agreed upon and then the contract is sent then it moves into the stage that's called contract sent i like this stage a lot because these are the highest priority or most likely deals to close and everyone should have their eyes on the contract sets if we've sent them a contract we should expect a quick turnaround i like having a separate stage there's a lot of transparency and then there's no questions about contracts being sent or what we're waiting for it's a very clear stage while you're waiting for the signature the deal will stay in this stage it moves out of the stage if the prospect signs the contract and the onboarding process has been initiated i urge you to have the sales reps initiate the onboarding process and that might be sending an email connecting the account manager whatever it might be initiate that process before flipping it to close one and i do this because sales people get very excited they love marking things close to one and sometimes the prospect is left without having initiated the onboarding process and most of the time that's fine because the sales person's on it and they're you know going to make sure that it gets done but i have seen it go go south plenty of times so i suggest making that part of your process then it goes to close one that's a closed deal and if it didn't close at any point in the process it goes to close lost maybe they went dark maybe they're you know they chose a different vendor the pricing was too high whatever it might be it goes to a closed loss stage and i suggest having a field in your crm that says close lost reason so the sales rep can select from a drop down why they close loss because sometimes it's features or functionality and that's a good thing for the product people to be able to see so those are the stages let me show you quickly how they flow together now this isn't the best flow chart okay i created this in um in google instead of like lucidchart so bear with me but i think it's going to get our point across qualifying at any point in this process it can go to close lost so that's what all those arrows to the left are signifying we are qualifying discovery slash demonstration evaluating negotiation contract sent and close one and then i added the little text of all the exit criteria it's very simple and if you follow this process and you adhere have all the sales drops adhere to this process you're going to have a lot more success managing your sales pipeline and also forecasting those sales and that's the key folks if you want to forecast effectively you're going to weight a percentage probability of a deal closing to each one of these stages it's going to help you with your forecasting but it's also going to make your sales process a lot more transparent for everyone in the organization this helps with communicating this helps with motivating right and this also helps when you're transitioning sales reps like maybe a sales reps moving to another part of an organization or a different organization you're going to be able to transition the deals by having clear deal stages you're going to have a lot better communication everyone's going to have the transparency they need in order to understand what our deal volume is and where we might land on the quarter so i definitely urge you to do this awesome thanks so much for watching remember to like comment and subscribe and i'll talk to you guys soon