Managing your pipeline for product quality

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hi my name is Josh Wanda and welcome to the sale sub shop today I would like to welcome you to part three of our conversation with Mike Ivana president and CEO of Piper manager welcome Michael let's talk about the metrics a lot of people want to know what are five metrics you could share with us for measuring whether we have a healthy fight one when I hear about five metrics that can measure the health I have to recognize that every company is going to be different and a company that is for instance in the b2c space is going to have a greater comfort in numericals but to me the metrics aren't really anything compared to the story that's going to show the qualitative issues of any opportunity if you can start bearing down into what it is that each person is doing and how the client is responding that to me is far more powerful and it gives you a way to really investigate acceleration accuracy all these other things that are really important in working a sales process but in terms of five metrics I'm afraid I can't help you with that one macton what behaviors should salespeople adopt to improve the pipeline process and give great attraction in the marketplace the the behaviors really are about getting out there and being very proactive you know this this is a pitch toward yes of course everything in marketing is important but what is really getting traction in the marketplace is a great person who can be there as that outside adviser who knows so much about the industry that the customer just doesn't have time to understand you know the salesperson understands the aspect that they can control and they can come in with tremendous advice as well as some tangential pieces that the customer hadn't considered this gives you an opportunity to not only engage with the customer and and help them but it's also a Crim tremendous relationship builder when the in the Challenger sale they talk about the multiple behaviors that are out there as far as the relationship seller you know all the different types that are out there the person that is out there in basically in the customers face willing to say I disagree with you I know something about this and I think we can do better than where you think you're going that seems to be incredibly powerful tell us about change management that leads to pipeline acceleration what needs to change is first of all the expectation that salespeople can change instantly you've got a wide range of personality types from the person straight out of school that's really anxious to do things right and can't help tripping over themselves to the salesperson who is really seasoned and thinks anybody coming at them when the new idea is basically insulting them and saying they're not good enough and so they've got barriers up like crazy what you need to do is not attack them directly or try to change everything at once that's one of the things that's so difficult about sitting down and having people go through two days and five days just of straight training what you need to do is break what you want people to do down into discrete chunks because people will change if you do it a little at a time and there's some great change management expertise out there and every one of them will say what you need to do is first of all set that goal and then work backward to understand what each one of those little steps are and make sure that as you get halfway down that that course that you said you aren't forgetting those first things that you did because it's so easy to forget the first stuff because you get all wrapped up in whatever the new stuff is so if you want people to change break it down understand what the timeline is that you can make a change in say it's six months and think of all the things that you wish people would do differently and just do it a step at a time start easy I mean in our world we start with the nurturing process what can you do that's really different in helping people to make sure that nothing hits a pipeline unless it's qualified really well so instead of starting with a great big form our opportunity form is miniscule it just says do we have access to decision-makers does the client have budget for this are we going to have any profit we're gonna have access to coaches and if you can just get people to do that you've already got a forecast that you can start to rely on much more than you ever did before because now things are getting qualified properly and so each stage moving forward if you can think what is it that once we've got it nurtured properly and it's it's qualified properly what begins that say demo process reliably and focus on that so that people can understand alright we're gonna do this this and this and then six months from now if you're tracking it right if it's built into a CRM system you've got a place to always go back and go boy you were really doing well in March what happened there oh you kind of forgot this this and this and now you've got again that's Six Sigma we can go back and start focusing on that again to make sure that that habit isn't forgotten as you keep adopting the new habits my top final question how do salespeople get inside the place you begin is like any place else in the organization if you invest in training it's going to come back to you in countless different ways and one of the things that you can train people on is how to stay on top of a particular topic you can also use tools that help people to communicate new insights and these insights are nice if they're in a great big bucket someplace but they're also kind of crazy if you're trying to look for something if you want to have a real dialogue wouldn't be nice if you had something that created that insight within a context of a particular place in a sales process so that people are reminded not just to ask particular questions but also they have helpful things that other people have learned right at hand as they get ready for meetings as they get ready for calls that insight again because it's a team sport much more than an individual sport needs to be something that can be fostered in as much as anything in the weekly meetings the salespeople have yes you can spend a lot of time just reviewing deals but if you've got a system that already shows the health of the deals shows the full story of the details you don't have to spend as much time on what you used to do and instead it can be a free-for-all helping people to understand aspects of the organization things people are learning things people are hearing from other customers Mike I want to thank you for collaborating with us today and share your expertise with the members of the sales op shop thank you very much you you