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- 20% of the sales process of your time selling is customer facing time. 80% is everything in between. Isn't that crazy? When a mentor sat me down and explained that to me, that a lot of the sales activities that really makes deals happen is not just face-to-face with the customer. It's everything you do in between, it blew my mind. And that's when we had to start to get serious about our sales methodology. We had to get serious specifically, about our pipeline management. And once we did, once we got very serious about defining how we manage our pipeline, we started to think about the right things to manage our pipeline so we can actually drive growth. In this episode, I'm gonna walk you through my three principles, you absolutely need to know to transform how you manage your pipeline so you can close more deals, increase your win rates, and accelerate your growth. Intro. (upbeat beat) What's up everybody? Welcome to Unstoppable. I'm TK and on this channel I help SaaS founders like you grow your SaaS businesses faster with an Unstoppable Strategy. Now if you're new to the channel, be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon. That way you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode with the TK Energy. If you're already part of our community, if you're a part of my SaaS Go-To-Market coaching program, welcome back. It's really awesome to see you over here. Now, I remember when we were switching from being a self-service business to a sales-driven business. It was awesome. We had bigger deal sizes. More cash was coming in. We had better quality customers. Like net, net everything was great. But behind the scenes, we had to wisen up really fast on defining a sales methodology, on actually managing our pipeline. All of a sudden we had numbers to hit. And we had some smart mentors that sat us down and walked us through it. I'm glad they did, because we weren't thinking about it. So in this video, I'm gonna walk you through exactly what you need to know. The three principles you absolutely need to know to manage your pipeline better. So you're excited to dig into it, go and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm and let's dig right into it. Now, number one. Principle number one is this may be obvious, is have a CRM. And a lot of people argue about, well, we're not, it's too early for us to have a CRM. It's just mean, if it's founder led sales, where I only have five sales reps. You should just start with a CRM. The sooner you start with the CRM, the better off you're going to be. Now, if you are not ready for a full blown CRM, maybe you just want a spreadsheet. Or maybe you want an Airtable or an Asana. But all that matters is there's one place where you write down your actual deals that you have in place. Because you will not be able to keep it in your head. And you will not be able to manage your pipeline effectively. Now, the biggest reason to actually invest in a CRM is you'll actually be able to manage your pipeline and also get the statistics you need to better effectively define your sales methodology. And those stats, those analytics come in really handy coming out of a CRM. These days, the CRM I recommend is HubSpot. That's the CRM that I recommend. It's free to get started. And that's what I recommend inside of my SaaS Go-To market program. I'll also link below, I have an affiliate link tkkader.com/hubspot, if you wanna go sign up. By the way, this is not paid for by HubSpot in any way. I just really like those guys and I use the product myself and the founders I work with use it. That's why I mentioned it. Okay. So, you should start with a CRM. And that's principle number one. Principle number two. And this is where it becomes really clear on why you need the CRM beyond the analytics and the metrics is that it actually helps you define the different phases a deal goes through. And this is super important for pipeline management. Now, let's just start with the default. The default here is you have an opportunity, right? It's basically a discovery call. Someone raises their hand, maybe they download their manifesto. And they clicked through the link. Or you did an outbound and the respondent said, yep, let's get on a call. Or they went through a Calendly. Whatever it may be. Whether you're running an unstoppable sales funnel or an unstoppable mini funnel, eventually they'll say, yep, I wanna get on a call. And that's when the discovery call gets booked. Now, as you work through this sales process, eventually you're gonna win the deal, right? And they're gonna sign up. Here's the thing. Here's the biggest thing to understand. Not every deal that actually books a call is going to end end up actually buying, right? Generally speaking, if you have four deals, you're gonna get maybe one of them to actually buy. That's just the law of numbers. The law of probabilities. You're not gonna get a 100% win rate, right? So one out of every four deal is what's gonna win, especially in the early stages when you're really being purposeful about what to go after. Right? So what that means, it means a couple of things. Number one, you have a certain win rate, right? And understanding that not every deal it's going to be one means that, you know, there's a certain probability in a win rate that you're gonna have. Now, right now, if you're not tracking your deals, you may not know your win rate. If you start tracking it, if you have a CRM, it'll tell you your win rate. And more importantly, you'll start to understand why you win and why you lose. Because you'll also start to track the deals that were lost, right? So you can have a lost column. And you can start to look back and say, we lost these deals. Let's understand why. Let's maybe we engage with them because it's been six months. Maybe they're ready to buy now. Already you can start to see the benefit of this. So that's the first piece. The second piece is you will start to realize that in order to get a deal from discovery call to actually one, you'll go through certain phases. That's essentially your pipeline. So let's just be realistic, right? Like if you were in a mid market SaaS company, right? And let's just say, you're doing 20K deals. 20K deals. The the stages, you're not gonna have a lot of stages. The stages you're gonna go through, ideally, is there's gonna be a discovery call. Then there's going to be a demo. Then you're going to send a proposal. And then, they're either going to buy or they're not going to buy so that (indistinct) win or you'll lose. Here's where the real power of pipeline management comes in. As you start to actually measure these deals and track these deals and manage your pipeline in a CRM, you'll start to see that out of the four discovery calls that you had, maybe only two of them will go into a demo. And after the demo really only, well, let's just say three of them, for example purposes. And then by the time you do a demo, maybe only two of them will actually be sent a proposal. Because they'll say after the demo, like, yep, send us proposal. The third one will just kind of disappear, right? Stuff happens. Or they say, this is not what we're looking for. This doesn't fit our needs. Whatever it may be. And they go into the lost column. And then out of that, you'll see that one of them gets one, right? So what you start to understand, which is the real power of having the CRM, let's pick cool here. Cool number here is, as you go from each of these stages and define these stages, there's a certain percentage that exists between each of these stages. And this is super important because let's just say at the end of this quarter, you are expecting to close, I don't know, 15K of MRR, like, right? Like you're planning on adding 15K of a new MRR to your book of business. Well, in order to actually hit 15K of MRR, you'll have to ask, well, what is my average deal size? And based on that, you'll actually be able to tell, well, in order to create 15K of MRR, I need to book with a certain average account value. I need to actually make sure that this quarter, I need to actually have this much dollars of pipeline. Are you guys starting to get this? So let's just say, it's this ACV and a certain win rate. Based on that math, you will actually have to generate roughly three to five X amount of pipeline. So whatever your number is generally speaking, you're gonna have to generate three to five X that number in terms of pipeline. Meaning, in order to get a certain number of one deals here, you need have three to five X the number of discovery calls. In order to have a certain number of dollars booked, you need to have a certain number of dollars booked in terms of discovery calls with that same type of customer. Are you guys starting to get this? This is the power of pipeline management. Number one, once you start to do this, you start to be able to forecast saying, you know what? I've got two deals in the proposal stage. And we're the end of the quarter. So roughly we're only gonna be able to add, I don't know, half of this dollar amount in terms of ones. And we think here's where the number is gonna come in. All of a sudden you're able to forecast where the quarter is going. Let's just see you in the beginning of the quarter. And you can look at the pipeline. And you look at well, I have a certain number. Do I have three to five X pipeline coverage? If I don't, that means I need to go work with marketing and figure out how to generate way more pipeline really quickly. Otherwise we'll never stand a chance of hitting this number. You'll also start to understand, you know what, our percentage conversion from demo to proposal is very low. So maybe we need to revamp our demo. By the way, if you want a framework to follow on how to craft a perfect demo, check out this video. You don't have to go right now. I'll link to it below. But the whole point of this is once you start to actually establish a CRM, you start to think about these second order things. You start to understand, what's my win rate. You start to think about, what are my stages. You start to think about, what's my pipeline coverage. This is where the sales driven model really shines. The people that really understand these levers and these metrics, and know how to turn these knobs and dials and know how to optimize the discovery calls and their demos and how to send the proposals, they're the ones that really start to create these revenue generating machines. So that's principle number two. I have a third one for you. Let me just pause here for a second before I go to principle number three. If you're starting to see the power of pipeline management, if you're starting to see the power of establishing a proper sales methodology, can I just get a, yes, in the comments below. And also smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. It just loves it when you do that. And so do we. So does my team. It's just awesome. And also look, if you are figuring this stuff out, I know I threw a lot of concepts your way. If you are at that stage where you're building out your go-to market machine, whether it's generating leads or actually having a proper sales methodology, this is why I quit my SaaS Go-To-Market coaching program. From everything that I learned in the ToutApp journey and the Marchetto journey. We did self-service businesses. We did mid-market. We did enterprise. I've crafted a playbook that you can follow step-by-step with my coaching on how to build a go-to-market machine both on the marketing side and the sales side. And I go in depth into some of these things. So, if you're interested in following the steps and doing it a lot faster and reducing execution risk, be sure to check out my go-to-market program. I'll tell you more about it at the end of this video. I'll link to it below. But right now, let's go to principle number three. Principle number three is once you have the CRM, once you've defined these clear stages, you need to do pipeline reviews. And what this means is that you need to set time aside. If you're the sole sales person, you need to actually have something in your calendar where you actually review your pipeline. If you're the sales manager or you're the founder managing the salespeople or you're the VP of sales, you actually need to set aside time for pipeline reviews. Ideally, one-on-one with each of the reps. But also as a team. This is super important. And when you're doing these pipeline reviews, there's essentially three key questions that you're really thinking through. The first one you're thinking about is what is my forecast, right? The first question you wanna ask is, okay, given the number of discovery calls I have and the percentage probability on each of these things, what's my forecast? Like based on the probabilities, this is pure math, what do I think I'm gonna end up at? How much new business am I really gonna add based on the pipeline I have. And by the way, if I have a certain number, do I have the three to five X pipeline coverage? Pipeline coverage meaning, if you have, say, you need to close a dollar of business, you need to have three to $5 worth of pipeline. Otherwise you don't stand a chance. This is kind of rule of thumb in B2B SaaS. So first thing you should look at is, what's my forecast? Am I gonna hit the number, or I'm not gonna hit the number? Where am I gonna land? Right? That's what you wanna do. Then you wanna zoom in a little bit and you wanna look at every single deal. And you wanna ask, is each deal in the right stage? Meaning, do I truly have it discovery call? Have they confirmed? Is it a decision maker? Is it not? Do I truly have a demo booked? Have they confirmed? Do I have the meeting? Are the right people involved? You wanna ask, are we literally in the right stage for each of these deals? Do you wanna kinda go deal by deal? And this is a great opportunity to research the deal, look at the company, look at the key players, make sure you're involved with the right people, map the accounts out. All those things are super important. And then once you do that, and the third thing you need to do is what do I do next? Literally, in order for me to move this deal to the demo stage, or this deal to the proposal stage, or let's just say I've sent a proposal. In order actually moving to win, what do I need to do? Do I need to connect with them on LinkedIn? Do I need to make sure they're the decision maker, or connect with the decision maker? I have identify that's not involved right now. Do I need to just send them a reminder email? Do I need to drive some urgency? Do I need to give a referenceable customer? This is the third stage of every pipeline review. You need to ask, what do I need to do to move them to the next stage? What this allows you to do is first look at the macro view of your entire pipeline and your ability to hit the number. Do I have enough deals? Or do I need to go work with marketing or myself and prospect and get more deals? The second thing is are each of these in the right stage? It helps you actually update each of these deals. And you can move them around. And the third thing. This is the most important thing is for deal by deal, you can figure out what do I need to do next to actually get them to the next stage. Not win the deal. That's important, but just to get them to the next stage, how do I move them? And as you start to grow out your sales process, you will start to add maybe more stages. Like maybe IT and security review is a big one in your space. So you can add that stage. You can start to map out the stages. You never wanna have more than eight. More than eight becomes too complicated unless you're doing multimillion dollar enterprise deals. And even then, you probably don't need it. But you need, you'll probably add a couple more stages as you start to really define the sales process to make sure that the right things are getting done. And when you do that, few things will happen. Your win rates will go up. Your forecast accuracy will go up. You won't be that person like, well, we're gonna hit our number. And then you go like, nope, we didn't hit our number. Like, well, did you not know? It's like, what was wrong? You'll be able to actually better partner with marketing to make sure you have the right amount of pipeline being generated. And also, you'll be able to accelerate your growth because you will have a proper sales methodology. A pipeline management in place to actually drive this. Now, that's what I had for, those are my three principles. Have a CRM, have clear stages, do pipeline reviews. So those are my three simple things you can start with to make sure that you are actually establishing a sales methodology. Now, if you're in this stage where you're building pipeline and you actually need to build more pipeline and you're actually running a model where you need to actually manage the sales process, then you want a playbook to follow. Then I invite you to check out my SaaS go-to-market coaching program. Inside of this program, I give you the step-by-step framework to follow to build out your marketing side, your marketing piece, which is how do you actually get your ICP right. How do you actually build your manifesto? How do you actually generate leads? And then also the sales side. How do you run your sales calls? How do you craft the perfect demo? How do you make sure you have proper pipeline hygiene? All these things, we go much more in-depth in this, along with my coaching. So, the program is invite only. It's application-based. How that works is you go to tkkader.com/gtm. And you just fill out a little survey. And when you fill out that survey, we'll get on a call. Once we get on a call, we'll figure out where you are in the business and see if we can actually help you, given the challenges you're facing. And based on that, if it does seem like a fit, we'll get started right away and we'll start working together to help accelerate your growth. This point, you just get on a call with me. Founders hate getting on calls with salespeople, that's what I've learned. So you just talk to me. But that's why we also have an application process to make sure you're the right fit. That way, we're not wasting anyone's time. Lastly, if you got value from this, please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. I drop a video like this with actionable strategies to grow two to three times a week. So be sure to the subscribe button and that bell icon that way you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode. And if you have a fellow founder or a team member, if you're part of a WhatsApp group or Slack it with other founders, please share this video. We wanna help as many people as possible, as many founders as possible, grow their SaaS businesses. And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you are with us, yours is gonna be unstoppable. MTK. I'll see you in the next episode. (soft music)