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hi my name is Josh Wanda and welcome to selling power TV today we have the pleasure of meeting with Frank Donnie is the senior vice president of product management at richardson Frank what does you a pipeline look like right now well you know our pipeline is actually larger than it has been in the past because what we have found out is really about july of last year you know the market change from a push to a pool tech to a pool type of marketing where we'd have to actually pull in our opportunities down and we actually have to spend more time qualifying knows getting the information sure that there are quality opportunities before i actually put them into the pipeline so in reality we have two pipelines we have a nurturer pipeline and we actually have the sales pipeline and in the nurture pipeline marking takes more time spends more money than actually for the qualify and gather the more information for the sales people so that they can then take a look and ensure that those are quality opportunities that they're going to spend their time on what about the action part of the pipeline when we look at that by pipeline we actually have eight stages in our pipeline that we go through the first stage is basically qualifying and looking at the particular opportunity and determining whether it's an opportunity that is right for the organization and one that we are going to actually work through the particular pipeline so you know that part of the pipeline is very strong and is actually getting larger because of the fact that deals are also taking longer to flow through the pipeline so we actually have a velocity issue because deals are taking longer because there are more decision-makers and actually decisions are being made different where before where you could be have decisions made a director level and now being made at the CFO or a particular higher level and add some lengthening the pipeline because many times now financial decisions are made based on committee so what do you recommend to sales managers on how to engineer the pipeline for greater success yeah I think part of it too is for so they have to understand the client's buying behavior because a company's pipeline how they want a manager pipeline is dramatically different than the buying behavior the organization so and that differs from company the company so they have to be very flex understand the buying behavior of their brother opportunity and fit it then into their companies buying behavior especially you have to have very strict policies inside the CRM system that they have to fit into they now have to be much more flexible than they've ever before because the buying the buyer now directs the process not the seller yeah that makes sense but how do you recommend that people manage to pipeline that's nurtured by marketing yeah well that part is actually we actually have five stages and that that we actually go through from what we call responder which is an organization that responds to a marketing piece or actually comes into our website and we actually nurse them through we nurture them through a combination of email messaging and actually tell a follow up and actually engage them in a specific dialogue where we look for key buying characteristics whether they have a budget Authority need time frame and trust and Trust is a big factor as well have they used Richardson before so we look at those particular characteristics we actually score them and the higher the score the higher the quality of the opportunity and then with that moves right into the sales pipeline I'm just curious how do us sales people pick the low-hanging fruit in the pipeline well it all comes down to the information that comes in with the opportunity and usually there's paragraphs and paragraphs of information about the opportunity so the salesperson can look at it and make a couple determinations you know how long we'll take the actually sell the opportunity is an existing client or previous client or is it net new so then they can actually look at that and they also compare it back to their existing pipeline and the book of business that they have to determine where it particularly fits in how much work and energy and effort it's going to take how much do you connect to social networking sites in your company we connect in two ways on the marketing side and also on the sales side and we look at it in the marketing size because we're looking to get our particular name and actually our thought leadership out there which is more about Richardson talking about the needs in the marketplace in particular issues that organizations currently facing and on the sales side the salespeople have to reach out more than ever before to connect with people we're basically the older methodologies that used to connect with people is much different because if they now can use the intern in particular sites like LinkedIn to be able to leverage other contexts that they have people that they've known in the past to then build relationships virtually and start there first and then they can actually earn the right to have a conversation with somebody over the phone how do you go about reaching the sea level decision makers well many times it's very hard to do and the marketing side because you can't pick up a phone and directly call them it's very difficult to to do that so basically we reach them through a couple different ways first of all it's thought leadership right actually going out and talking to our clients first looking at the needs and looking at the particular issues that they're facing and basically create content that is very compelling to those executives and ensure that those that content gets in those executives hands to basically prove to them that we understand their business and again earn the right to be able to have the conversation and then we can actually contact them once we sent them information and they've been able to consume it and and at what point do you get to see of Richardson involved in the sales process well it depends on where it is if it's in Hawaii he gets involved very early however typically it ends up happening after they've gone through the first three stages of of the of the pipeline itself which is basically we're actually going through and looking at the solution that fits the particular need and then we want to actually engage the executive levels to start building the relationship at that executive level well thank you Frank and now I understand how Richardson becomes more successful with this pipeline if you want to get more information go to Richardson com