Empower Your Public Relations with a Sales Pipeline for Public Relations

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I just wanted to focus the conversation for a moment on a topic that I think we all spend a lot of time thinking about which is pipeline you write a lot in your book about pipeline and about you know there's there's an interesting slide which I don't know if we can if we can put it up where we're actually talking where we're looking at how much time sales organizations spend talking about pipeline correlating to the amount of revenue growth that they have but there are valuable types of conversations around pipeline as you talked about and then there are less valuable conversations about pipeline can you sort of talk about how this activities based approach that you are focused on plays out in terms of discussions between reps and their managers around the pipeline sure so the pipeline is a big deal it's a big deal in organizations we just completed a research study with the sales management Association which is a great organization and check it out and it was really around pipeline management practices now if you think about how important the sales pipeline is in most sales forces it's pretty put so we we found that in the survey we did 72% of the organizations expected their sales managers to be meeting with their salespeople more than once a month to discuss the sales pipeline and the average pipeline meeting lasts 53 minutes so if you think about all the sales forces 72 percent of those are asking the sales managers to meet with the reps more than once a month another 12 percent I think was just once a month there's been 53 minutes on each of those conversations with their 12 sales reps you know this is this is a big deal and so what we're trying to do is can I add some clarity to exactly what it is the people are doing and should be doing during these conversations that almost every Salesforce is happening and as the chart you just had up there shows you know spending more time on this in a productive manner actually does lead to improve sales performance yeah you can see almost a linear relationship when you look at that chart that you know from less than one hour to one hour to two hours three hours to four hours a month spending with your reps discussing the sales pipeline and you know it does have an impact there's something subtle here is that after you get to around three or four hours a month it looks like the effect settles out so you know should you be spending eighteen hours a month staring at the sales reports no probably not should you be spending no time looking at the pipeline no probably not but there's a there's a comfortable number there that it does make a difference that you're spending time discussing it and then but I'll draw another distinction between the types of discussions that take place when people have sales pipeline meetings you know the worst of the worst is when you sit there and stare at the report and basically inspect it and there's a lot of this that goes on in sales pipeline meetings so sales person sits down the sales manager sales manager or salesperson do if we pull out their their pipeline report and they go one by one by one by one down down the list of opportunities you know is this still a real opportunity is there still gonna close on time can I move the can I move the percentage from eighteen eighty percent to ninety percent can I move the target wind a closer end so it gets into my forecast for this quarter now that type of inspection is not very valuable what is valuable is that the sales manager sits down and says let's just take a couple of opportunities here that we think you know we have a legitimate opportunity to win let's dig into them very deeply now let's make this a conversation around coaching not inspection there's a very big distinction between inspecting what someone's doing and coaching someone to do it better in the future and so you know the story here is these sales pipeline meetings are the primary venue that a lot of companies have for coaching to take place it might be the only one on one interaction that a sales manager has with a sales rep at all in some companies and so you know our our charge is to try to improve the quality of those conversations so that at three four or five hours a month that you're spending with your sales reps reviewing the sales pipeline aren't just scrubbing data but actually improving the likelihood that those deals are gonna fall out and walk the win column not to not the Lost