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all right this is the last session that we're recording this afternoon and then we're going to get into a quick workshop afterwards we're gonna go through reports and dashboards then we're gonna keep it interactive get you to download some stuff from the app exchange that we talked about and then we're going to finish off the afternoon with the customer success and building revenue through customer support so now we talked about a lot of theoretical ways that you can gather information about leads prospects and the sales pipeline or the sales funnel qualifying things like that all of this feeds into what's referred to as a sales pipeline and really the pipeline is just all of your opportunities gathered into one place with an amount or value attached to them and it's not a single value but it's multiple values so it's the value of the overall deal but then it's the percentage likelihood of it closing so that's gonna be something that we'll talk about here shortly but one of the things I want to start off with is it this stage for companies like yours and as the Kaiser companies grow I want you to start setting an expectation that you guys measure this stuff that the CRM is a single source of truth for your organization decisions are made based on what's inside of the CRM I can't stress this enough if everyone understands that expectation from the day you start it's way easier than trying to put the horse back in the barn after it's out right if you try to view if you adopt it you know in year three and go okay now we go to CRM and everyone has to try to change their behavior and do this now this way what I'm suggesting to you guys is at this stage is the right time to adopt and embrace the use of the CRM and make it your single source of truth so sales pipeline this is one of things that we talked about this morning right overall when your leads get qualified and they have passed and become an opportunity I want you to create a process for the team but both the team and the management need to understand what this process means how things are gonna happen how things move through the funnel develop a common language right we've talked about this for the last two days now what's a lead make sure everybody understands what it is what's an account what's an opportunity what's a contact write clear definition for anybody who's in the organization so they understand what it means because the worst thing you can have happen is having one set of expectations here and someone saying something else over here and miscommunication causing bad behavior what's the sales pipeline when does a lead become an opportunity again Greg touched on that this morning using the band process that's one of many processes we use it I mean it's not bulletproof but we use it because it's easy and for you know inexperienced salespeople they can understand the system quite quite easily defining the steel the stages of the sales process gonna be different from every organization different industries but you basically you can define them into several stages each stage has a waiting and we're going to talk about that in a couple of minutes can't stress this enough honest putting honest data in is the only way the accuracy of the information you can get out of the CRM right so the more honest and I tell this to people over again there's no there's no good sense in putting false data in there because it's just gonna bite you in the butt all right it leads to making poor decisions and you're gonna be making decisions in the future based on what the sales pipeline looks like what the percentage likelihood of closing a deal is it may be the difference between hiring someone in this quarter or next quarter all right so if everyone understands that the information that is in there is accurate then you can make informed decisions that you after this session we're going to work on creating dashboards and leveraging pre-canned reports and forecasting right this again all of these data points that we're helping or getting encouraging you guys to put into your system are all going to show up in very nice-looking canned reports and dashboards that you can look at every morning and Greg and I used to do this when we went and we went into live lens very first thing we do every morning pull up the dashboard look at the activities look at the and it almost became sort of you know one of the things that we did over coffee said hey you know what does this activity look like what is the you know what are we doing on the customer support or customer success side what the engagement level looks like when the renewals coming up these are all things that are gonna you're going to pull out of your dashboards and reporting again if it becomes you know part of your morning routine or part of your process all that information is just as your fingers touch you actually said what I was gonna say okay that that happens so the common language Aleve we're gonna reinforce the things that we've told you in the last couple days again for for the purposes of this exercise and for everyone in this room you guys by now should know a lead is a person you have information about or who has expressed an interest in you right leads can be qualified or unqualified right one leave one record all right qualified or unqualified one lead one record when does the lead become an opportunity anyone yes once they've become qualified they have budget they have authority they have need they have timeline you may or may not have established a competitor an account the qualified lead can become an account one account can have many associated records including opportunities contacts etc you have question that's actually a really good question so if if you were to exactly follow what we prescribed yesterday as soon as the leaders qualified you would convert that into being the account but in some organizations they may have a process where a lead becomes qualified and it gets handed to the sales team and sales has 24 hours to choose to convert that lead or to hand it back and so you may have that period I guess a window where sales can choose whether or not they're going to accept that lead or not and so that's where you would there's there's a number scenarios where you might a situation like that but that would be one example does that make sense talk a little bit about that in marketing qualified leads this morning it's the the validation process or time again I said you can associate one account can have many associated records opportunities contacts etc familiar with account based selling or account based marketing I mean I'm gonna drastically oversimplify this is but you know for us we may pick the top 200 customers or the top 100 customers that we're going after and each one of those accounts may have multiple contacts within them and we're gonna say and they'll pick up you know Starbucks is the account that we're going to try to sell into we're gonna look for multiple ways in there so the you know the parent account maybe Starbucks there may be child accounts associated with it we may be looking for different ways in but we are going to focus our efforts we're going to have a campaign based selling or marketing around a specific named account that would be a situation where an account account based selling or account based marketing would be working parent and child relationships we could probably spend an hour talking about this but I think an oversimplified version Gregg would you like to say that it's kind of you know I think it's well how do you how would you over how would you simplify the parent-child relationship I mean the easy example would be a large multinational where you have coca-cola worldwide would have a child account which is coca-cola United States or you know you may get a massive company like Chevrolet which has many different brands under it that are all separate incorporated entities and actually I don't know if that's true or not making assumptions to their corporate I'm not sure but that would be an example of where you would have child accounts yeah the example that I like to use is franchise a franchise system so where there's the corporate headquarters and then individual franchisees may be owned by separate ownership groups things like that so contacts we talked about this again a contact can have multiple an account can have multiple contacts and that just makes sense right where you can have multiple you're trying different within the organization to reach out to build a connection fill out as much information as you can about them and then opportunities an account can have multiple opportunities should always be qualified can be a different stages in the sales cycle right and each stage has a corresponding probability of closing and that's what I touch that on off the top all right when you're looking at your sales pipeline is the total value of the deal just multiplied by the stage that it's at which gives you an up you know a weighted average or a weighted value of the upper of the pipeline perfect example so we talked about the different stages in this case this is one of the examples that we used recently so prospecting qualification needs analysis value proposition proposal quote negotiation so each one of these stages has a likelihood of close attached to it so you know typically in a funnel situation prospecting is the first stage so there's lots of different opportunities that are at the prospecting stage and the likelihood of those closing is 5% and I'm arbitrarily picking out maybe in your industry it's 10 percent or maybe it's 1 percent but the point is that's the widest part of the funnel that's where most people fall in that very first stage second stage is qualification alright so you may be trying to qualify them as an opportunity qualifying them as a proper buyer so you you've you've worked them through they've they've moved from being a lead to a opportunity so they've met one qualification criteria or the bank qualification but you may be working them through a little bit further and trying to get more information and discern is this a $10 deal or is it a hundred dollar deal alright like these are the things that you're gonna be working through in the process at that stage maybe there's a 10% likelihood they needs analysis you're diving a little bit deeper you've had a couple conversations with them you know James and I have a relationship now we know that he's got budget we know he has Authority his timing isn't he's not entirely certain on it but roughly we're pretty sure it's gonna be like a $100 deal right now I'm going to be going through and working James and say this is what our product is this is match your needs this is a stage rat oh great we've got agreement or alignment on this 20% maybe moving to 50% now you're at the value proposition stage this is the right product for me you agree to this we can deliver what you need perfect here's a quote or proposal I feel comfortable and confident that based on the conversations that James and I have been having there's a pretty high likelihood that this deal is going to go forward doesn't mean that we're gonna get it 100% of time but 75% of time when I reach the proposal and quote stage with people just like James we close the deal I think it's worth noting there that initially the probability closing the deal for most of you you're not actually going to know what that number is and then over time again because you're using a CRM you're able to run reports and say ok and of all the opportunities that we got to the proposal quote stage this year what percent converted into sales 60% ok I know that now I can update that and that's what we're gonna work with as an assumption looking forward and that's you know you're gonna be able to do that very easily you can run that report once you build it once in Salesforce and a minute it's as simple as pressing a refresh button but initially you don't have any data to do that with so it's somewhat arbitrary initially as to what those percents are going to be yeah and I think the probably the takeaway like I said there's as many stages as you want to make them and the probability or likelihood of closing you're just going to get better at over time but you know I would suggest early stage less likelihood of closing later stage higher likelihood of closing the greg's point you know proper use of the CRM is going to be able to give you that exact number and the more you do it the more often you in business the finer point you get on that and then ultimately I want you to look at the last one right close one fantastic great move on to the next stage closed lost this is one of those ones where a lot of companies like oh crap we lost the business move on to the next one but why don't you think about is why did you lose we're gonna come back now I'm gonna talk about that a few minutes but I want you to keep that in the back of your mind I want you to track all through the whole process because those the process there's tells and every one of those but first I want to talk to you about in the absence of closing deals right so many people money count many companies at this stage you don't have a ton of closed deals you're working through how long is the sales cycle how long is this going to take but you know how much do I have to have in my pipeline before it spits out a closed deal at the end but in the absence of that measure activities all right you're measuring activities but don't get fooled by them and we touched on this a little bit this morning when we're talking about how you're working leads all right a lot of people will create activities and create a lot of fluster around what they're doing don't perceive busyness as effectiveness all right I like to say that emails are good phone calls are better and demos are the best and really what we're saying in there is with your new salespeople or with yourselves as new salespeople I want you to not to get fooled by the activity that you're doing but measure all of the activities that you're doing and then look at them and say what's providing the best bang for the buck how are we what should we be focusing more on we need to be doing them all but if you have a salesperson that is only doing emails they're probably afraid to pick up the phone if you're not getting to the demo stage that may be indicative of some other problem you may have and what we've got here is a pipeline success formula all right so sorry for some of you but there is math involved here what we've got here is QP v which is the qualified sales pipeline value right what's the total value of the pipeline is divided by the average sales cycle velocity we're going to talk about velocity here and then times by the average sales win rate so for every hundred deals that you have every hundred opportunities how many are coming out the other side is a win again to Greg's point earlier we're gonna be tracking all this stuff through your CRM you're gonna be very easily be able to tell me exactly what those numbers are because all of that stuff is happening in this year your question well I would suggest that they are between the queue and the be mathematically no I don't know it doesn't matter there you go it's gonna work out to the same number anybody else let's pause here for a second so qualified pipeline value the key is qualified misrepresentation hurts everyone right this is what I talked about in the fray off the top about being honest honest T equals accuracy leads and inquiries don't count they lead to bad decisions so everyone gets excited when someone submits something a form on their website or just randomly calls it out of the blue if you get fixated too much on that it'll start leading to bad decisions and I don't want you to be doing that all right when is an opportunity must be Bank qualified right these are the things these are the habits that keep you in a good place is there a realistic chance that these people are going to buy at the end of the day based on the conversations you're having be honest with yourself is there a chance that they're going to buy and then ultimately and this is going to sound weird for companies at your stage do you want them as a customer there is such thing as bad customers I think we alluded to it yesterday when we ran the numbers on one of the customers that we are largest invoice customer every month we were actually losing money on when we work out all the math so there are times when you can actually decide okay probably don't want these folks as a customer or we need to change the expectations around that if anyone did velocity how long does it take to close a deal from the time they get past from marketing to sales to the time you have a decision made closed one or close lost how long does that take right your CRM is gonna be able to tell you that very succinctly down to the day good news you're also gonna be able to break it down a little bit further and this is why the honesty and accuracy in reporting is so important as you're moving them through stages how long does it take to get from one stage to the next you know are you too long in qualification are you too long and needs analysis right the bad news is the longer it sticks in a particular stage the less likelihood there is to move forward and sometimes it just needs to be you know kicked a little bit to move forward and there's a bunch of different ways you can do that but as a you know as a founder or CEO or someone managing a sales group you may want to look at may you definitely want to look at the different stages and how long you're in each stage and be honest with yourself and you know take the sales person to task how come it's been this long in this stage what can we do to move it all right and sometimes it's simple things and very honest things like the decision maker went on summer vacation or Joe got fired okay what do we do now is that still should that still be at this stage now based on the information that we have if the answer is yes great what can we do to move it forward the answer is no what expectations do we have to reset now I want to repeat the question [Music] well if you if somebody knows how to do that you could do that that might be over engineering a solution I think for most of the companies here something like Six Sigma might be a bit of a big pill to swallow you know again from foremost the companies here it's what is the minimal viable something something that you can do at this stage I don't think Six Sigma has ever fallen into that category anything speaking of a guy who's worked for a company that is deployed that type of thing but you know what might be better is you know could we apply some kind of agile or you know variation of agile methodology to this or you know how can we do that so you do need to figure out some kind of math log method dalek methodological that's a logical solution to incrementally improving it but how you do that I think is really going to depend by on the company one thing I will say though now that I've like and the attention from John is you know for cloud kettle we're incredibly biased towards SAS companies that's what we service or we service a lot of sometimes companies platform-as-a-service and so most of our clients you know live and die by M R R so how much money does each client hand over each month and you know if you're working a deal and that deal is worth $120,000 which would probably be pretty exciting for most companies in this room you know if it's worth $120,000 as an annual contract that means it's worth about $10,000 a month and that means that every day that deal doesn't close you're losing 333 dollars ish so when you're thinking about things as a founder you're talking to your sales people like you know hey Steve why isn't this deal closing like ah you know what some other stuff came up I just couldn't make that phone call today it's like that's great you just lost me $333 and you know sometimes you have to keep your partner in business honest and we have the that couldn't work together for a long time and sometimes you have to know instructor sales people because they don't intuitively understand that every day they don't close that deal the company's losing 100 200 whatever that number is depends on the size your deals but a $40,000 annual contract that is five days late that's hundreds and hundreds of dollars that your company lost because that salesperson was a little too busy and didn't have time to make that follow-up call and that happens in real life people are really busy at startups so you know you do really have to pay attention and sales velocity and measure that and make sure everybody understands that if you're billing on a monthly or an annual basis or some kind of subscription cycle any day that deal doesn't close this day you lost money a deal that's worth a you know 100k that closes one week late is still not worth 100k anymore you've lost some of that money especially you're in a super cashflow sensitive situation and you're taking out loans or accepting investment in order to supplement your revenue when you're doing that that deal not closing may not just be the amount of money that you lost in that week of revenue or whatever the case may be it may also be that you had to give up 5% of your company in order to get enough cash to keep the doors open yep those are all very real scenarios that we're describing to you one of the things I did want to mention is what can be done to move an opportunity all right so Greg's talking about a deal getting stuck in the amount of time that it's costing you and then money that is associated with that sometimes there's things that you can do as a salesperson or an organization just to unstick an opportunity it may be introducing someone new all right hey our VP of Sales wants to talk to you or we have a new feature that we're releasing and our product person wants to talk to you about that because we think it's really important to how we perceive the value is for our product is to you or in some cases and we've done this hey I'm going to be in New York next week I'd love to sit down to meet with you face to face or are you going to this event love to see you basically find some compelling reason to unstick the opportunity and move them along so again make it compelling and add a new person into the mix these are ways that you can you know kind of graciously or great gracefully unstick an opportunity and then the other thing and this is hard and it is really hard with salespeople when is an opportunity no longer an opportunity all right salespeople will always tell you I can get them I can get the mind closed I'm gonna close the next month yeah Joe you said that three months ago you know at some point you have to decide that this is no longer really a deal and it's ulta it's not the salesperson who's gonna make that decision in most cases but I go back to honesty equals accuracy so if and we did this a lot right if it's something that's stuck in and out in a stage for too long we just decide that's not real that deal is dead or we'll wind it back to an earlier stage and if the salesperson can revive the deal revive the opportunity then we're happy to bring it back up on the in the pipeline but in the short term we have no longer we're no longer making decisions based on that piece of information yeah sure either or if the if the deal isn't completely dead right if you're just moving it back from let's call it Prosser let's call it negotiation back to qualification and that could be a sin it could be a bunch of different scenarios it could be a you know a change of contact or something else where you need to restart the sale process not a net new opportunity but if you decide that it's completely dead then it may be a whole new opportunity and for a lot of organizations that would depend on the organization so you know so one organization compensates their legion people on every opportunity that's created and then they get a bonus if that opportunity turns into a sale whereas we deal with another one where they actually give their salespeople an extra pump if they create a net new opportunity and so in this case if you reopened the old opportunity the lead gen person gets the bonus whereas if you create a new opportunity unfairly the salesperson gets the bonus so there's not really a correct answer a lot of what we talked about for sales ports there's definitely right and wrong things to do but there's also a lot of nuance where it's like okay some of the process has to be tailored towards what your compensation structure is and how that works and one of the last things you want is that somebody on the team is feeling like they're getting robbed from Commission's and that cost is a huge amount of friction that startups are well sales teams in general I would say yeah alright your sales win rate talked about this briefly before but I want you to track all possible outcomes all right so you win fantastic that's great high fives all the way around or if your competitor wins boo that sucks here's a little piece of advice and I give this to everyone that we talk to and most people go really and if you lose a deal to a competitor take the time swallow your pride thank them for the opportunity to try to win their business ask them why you lost the business and I've been doing this for 20 odd years now almost and I always do that and I could count on one hand with fingers left over the number of times people have said no I don't I I can't remember in the near past a time where somebody did not agree to have that phone call and explain to me why we didn't get the business in this really important at this stage for you guys to understand if you're losing to a competitor what's the reason and there's a few there's a few reasons you're gonna want to do that right it sets you up for the next time right if I keep losing for the same reason well maybe this is a feature I need to add now right or if you know about the future fallacy you realize maybe that isn't the case true but you might say okay we need a competitive kill sheet for this scenario because we keep losing against our competitor because XYZ we're gonna build into our competitive kill sheet that if we know they're being investigated we're going to bring up the fact that they cannot do that this thing these are the little seeds that you plant but the other thing that I think is important to to put out here for you is if you you know if you grace it if you're gracious in defeat and leave that door open and keep those communications going you can check back with them in six months because maybe it didn't work out for that competitor and if you've left that door open even just a crack and you've been gracious in defeat they would be interested in perhaps talking to you all right and then maybe that thing that they told you that you didn't do or the reason that you lost you now do better or now do differently or they decided that hey those guys were jerks and it really didn't matter that we wanted that piece these guys seem awesome let's go with them instead or give them another shot or that person goes to new company and needs to buy your solution all over again true enough and oftentimes listen we buy from people we like right so it's always good to be positive be gracious and be inquisitive prospect implements an internal solution right sometimes if you were selling into large organizations that may become a pet project for someone else Wow you know what we really thought we needed this is a solution but then we ended up talking to Bob over in tech and well he's provided this this solution for us again I go back to the earlier comment if you come back and you say why did we lose and he's and they say yeah Bob and tech and Bob and IT is gonna do this it's gonna be his personal project that's actually good news because you know what bob has a short attention span it seemed like a good idea for Bob at the time because he was on the bench and wasn't doing anything else but eventually Bob gets put onto another project and guess what Bob's interest has disappeared he's no longer interested in doing the project you've left that door open you can come back check in and you know three or six months and hey we were talking in September and you know you decided that bob was gonna do this project how is it going as luck may have it Bob no longer works here or Bob is doing a different project oh shoot you know what John I've been meaning to call you guys back we really like your presentation but you know they wanted to do it internally and I was dead set against it but now Bob's doing something different so yeah you can pick up that conversation with you again so again leave the door open figure out why you didn't win the business that's really important and then the other thing and this happens a lot status quo or do nothing we thought it was a priority there was another garbage can fire we forgot about it entirely six months have gone by and oh yeah right that was important in September it's now April it's still important I forgot all about it because we got distracted by something else so again you leave the door open you're friendly you come you check back in in three six months and it gives you an opportunity to just sort of reengage with them and say hey really liked what we were doing conversations we're having love to have a chance to talk to you again more often than not very friendly very friendly and well-received so why is the information important well probably one of the biggest reasons least of which is you should be you know how you're running your organization but a lot of investors are gonna wanna know today this is the way that you're thinking at this stage for a lot of folks you you're gonna be sort of pitching business or you have already pitched business and saying hey I'm looking for some investment they want to know that you're thinking this way these are little measures that they'll be able to be asking you hey what's your sales pipeline look like we talked about this yesterday you know I would go in every time I was going to pitch I would come in with reports that had been run that morning so my pipeline accuracy was up to that day like 8:30 a.m. that day and I could walk through any given stage and say you know we have $600,000 in the value in the in the value proposition stage that is made up of these four customers and this is what I think the likelihood of closes for those all right it's it's um it's your ability to talk intelligently about those things which will showcase to possible investors that you're on top of the business directly impacts cashflow right you're going to be making decisions based on your CRM and the information that's in it that pipeline and the likelihood of it closing that will determine how much money marketing gets when you're gonna make a hire in engineering or sales like if there's accurate information in there and you're honest when you put it in you can start making key decisions based on that and again cash flow is king at this stage for a lot of companies because you know it's the amount of money coming in that it will fund the ability to do these things to help you your company grow so impacts marketing activity right when you do stuff how much money you have to do those things all these things are important in impacted by the information that's in your CRM any thinking with that and then sales activity right when are you gonna make other sales hires do you have enough bodies on hand to satisfy the leads that are coming in all of this thing all of these things are being directly impacted by the information that's coming out of your CRM and I think if I can probably leave you if you want final thought is if you build this process in an early stage and it's adopted across your organization and everyone understands that the honesty that goes into it honest reporting will impact the decisions that you make CRM will be able to give you all sorts of reports and dashboards and really give you the pulse of your business in a meaningful way that will allow you to grow effectively and efficiently and raise money if you have to hire in the right way or the right sequence and be able to track and and find intel on the different stages of your organization our salespeople being effective our marketing folks being effective things like that so this kind of brings us to the end of this portion we're gonna break out here in a second and start doing some dashboards and report building so pre can reports forecasting dashboards does anyone have any questions before we wrap up I went through a lot of stuff pretty quickly there that's you do you have any suggestions for integrating my contact information and other information for people who aren't necessarily sales targets but who are gonna be really helpful in pushing the pipeline like people at industry groups or someone at a government regulator or something like that yeah we we talked about that briefly yesterday and those people may not necessarily be sales leads but I would create accounts for them and then you would have a category or that you could then attach them so maybe their partner or some other means influencer influencer would be a great one so then you can start running reports on how many influencers do I have what has their impact been if you're using a marketing automation system you may want to put them on a read list that says you know always send them this information never send them this information all right there's a there's a couple of different layers of sophistication you get it can get into there but largely if you're looking about you're looking at influencers and other folks like that create an account and then build out from there other questions all right anything you want to add before we wrap you know perfect all right thanks guys we're gonna take five minutes here we're gonna tear down the lights and we'll start moving in on canned reports and dashboards