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foreign hey good morning to those who are out there on the west coast good afternoon to those of you here on the East Coast with me um I'm excited today to talk about kpis it's one of my favorite things to do as a salesperson is actually track the activity that leads to the success I want so we'll talk more about that in a second but I like starting off the day with a tip for those of you showing up early and on time um Hey Garrett I see you're always uh popping in early and we traded some stuff in there but my tip for you today is very simple I just uploaded our May Federal directory a small business specialist this this has over a thousand names numbers and emails of federal buyers out there or small business Specialists out there and um has over 100 different sblo or company large primes and their sbos in there but we just added another 100 names since the last update in March so the May issue just kind of put out I think yesterday so you should be seeing emails about it or messaging go into my LinkedIn profile there's a post I did this morning you can click on it go get it for free it's a download it's like I don't know 150 200 pages so it's a ton of information I would argue that it's easily worth fifty or a hundred thousand dollars if anybody tried to put it together I've spent years building this amassing it and a couple years ago we said you know what let's just put this out for free the government should be doing this they're not and so we will do that I encourage you to download it I encourage you to look for your Target agencies maybe reach out to them use that information and it's start building some of those relationships and also let me know if there's any updates we just put out this directory yesterday the day before right and within an hour I was getting a couple of updates from government buyers right because they're in there downloading this as well small business specialists in the Navy some in the Army who are coming back saying hey this person retired this person took your place here's their name and email and phone number so it's awesome it's constantly being updated but if you see any errors when you're doing Outreach make sure you let me know um Okay so let me go ahead and turn my caption off and some of this other stuff so we can get diving into today's training today is going to have math so if math hurts your heads hang on uh but I'll try to guide you through it um what I'm going to go through actually is what I teach customers when I work one-on-one with them for weeks and months as we go forward and really helping them go to the next level graduating at a small to large I'm going to try to shove all of that into 30 minutes so hang on and then come back and and watch it at slow speed or something but let me share my screen here really quick this week I'm doing all screen sharing okay today we're going to talk about the federal market sales Pipeline and in particular we're going to be talking about kpi's key performance indicators um and the thing to keep in mind about key performance indicators is that they're measuring your success of of your sales efforts and the idea of kpi's key performance is it's not measuring um unnecessary performance right it's not unnecessary performance indicators it's not wasted performance indicators it's key performance if you perform these Key activities you're going to lead to sales success and so that's the whole idea right behind kpis is measuring the success of your efforts not uh tracking on anything else and this is really important I've been at sales for decades and this is a classic thing with us sales people people who truly uh you know just built a career on sales and you're in there we get measured sometimes doing the wrong things in in the company is encouraging that measuring activity that's not related to sales so what I call administrative tasks but it's important to remember that what gets measure gets done so whether your company is measuring you or whether you're measuring yourself make sure you're only working on the things that if you do them it will lead to your sales success an example is giving me excessive reporting requirements on something another example that I personally hate is a capture plan that's in a PowerPoint and it's got all these slides that is way too complicated for a salesperson whose primary talent and skill set is talking to people engaging them in discussions and learning about goals and conversations so it's really important for us to pay attention to that we're measuring the right things and as we go through this if you haven't you know been aware of this already there's some reasons you want to pay attention to why pipelines are so valuable in the first and foremost is that they're the accurate prediction of the revenue you're going to achieve it's not just setting goals but when you look at your pipeline and you can trust your pipeline then you can predict how much money you're going to be making this year Revenue recognizes what I call it right how much money is coming in this year how much is coming out next year and the year after based on your pipeline how strong that pipeline is and so pipelines are really important and also because they're not just used by you from a sales perspective business developer capture but it's also used by leadership small business owners and other leaders it's used by HR if they're thinking about Staffing and recruiting that takes time Talent acquisition is one of the biggest challenges in the government and Industry and so it takes time to find the right people to join so they need early heads up and the pipeline gives them that early heads up they're like okay this is the type of work I'm looking for a subject matter expert on or a person who can come in and do that it's Service delivery as well they've got to prepare to you know do I need to shift around team members to put in experienced company experience person on a new project and backfill an existing project things like that so it's used by other people in the company and the last thing is it really helps you focus your efforts if you don't have a pipeline most importantly just having it forget about the fact that it's great right if you don't have a sales pipeline then what we end up doing sometimes is everything we're going everywhere and doing everything we're targeting not even targeted right we're just going to every single agency where we're reacting to every single opportunity we think it's good when we say hey we just put in 50 opportunities or we're doing 40 responses a month that's everything everywhere all at once right and we don't want to be doing that that's good for the movies it's not good for a sales pipeline so you want your efforts focused down and a pipeline helps you do that if you don't know who I am my name is Neil McDonald I'm the president of the govcon Chamber of Commerce and I want to welcome you to my daily federal sales training where I provide tips for Success on the federal Market I spent 20 years as a small business owner and since 2018 I've been teaching people like you that Government Contracting is not a secret it's just a process when you follow a process A to Z you're going to have repeatable predictable results and that's what I want for you that predictable part is what I just talked about a minute ago everybody needs predictable results in your company put your company name into the chat with two or three keywords so buyers me and others in the community can remember who you are or begin to learn who you are and see if there might be a a connection or a Synergy and also let us know if you're open to connections on LinkedIn I'm absolutely open to connections on LinkedIn from anybody in the govcon space so Reach Out connect with me um and and certainly let others know if you're open to that last thing is I just wanted to thank the sustaining members of the govcon Chamber of Commerce with your support we're able to put out things like this directory and keep it updated uh frequently throughout the year and so through your support we're able to do that because we don't get funding from the federal government we don't get funding from large crimes we're self-funded for the sustaining membership and I just want to thank you on behalf of all the small businesses out there and everybody else actually who are benefiting from this um work that we do in the training we provide okay so let's dive into talking about um I want to talk about two main things leading indicators and lagging indicators as it relates to sales and the reason I want to talk about these is because they impact the kpis I want to share with you today and how you can look at your pipeline and put it in a place that it can be measured on a regular basis so leading indicators are things that are predicting future success I want to give you seven examples here so LinkedIn engagement right and these are no particular order but LinkedIn engagement one that just popped up for me right away this is a leading indicator if you put stuff out on LinkedIn and you begin to get people to engage with you then pretty soon that's an indicator that you've reached your buyer or you're reaching your buyer and you want to do more of that so LinkedIn engagement to me is not just your engagement with somebody else but your ability to get your buyers and teammates to begin to engage with your content if you're not getting engagement then you need to look at what you put on LinkedIn and say well am I putting stuff out there that is what related to what we do so that people begin to engage with my content um calls made so this one's just fundamental right how often are you picking up the phone in the seven step process for federal success that we teach Outreach is step three and so that's the calls me a major picking up the phone calling new people you're leaving voicemails sending emails Etc but you're doing this Outreach you should be doing a certain amount of calls every single day don't measure it on weeks the leading indicator am I doing a certain amount of calls every single day averaging for example 5 or 25 a day if you're a full-time business developer or capture you should be making 25 calls minimum every single day new you set aside an hour you do those calls and then you move on with the rest of the activity for your day but when you do that that's a great leading indicator um to the relationships you're going to have and the meetings you're going to have so introduction meetings are the output of making those calls in bullet number two if you're making calls you're gonna have introduction meetings but introduction meetings are a great leading indicator of your success because if you're able to get in and meet with strategic teaming Partners you might be able to subcontract under or agency buyers getting into the program office Etc if you're able to have these meetings that is showing you and the company that hey we're doing the right things that are going to lead to success um number four strategic relationships established right how many strategic relationships do you have established and you want to measure that um in strategic relationships are ones where you have recurring meetings scheduled every two weeks you're touching base with somebody if it's a federal buyer person maybe you've got them on a rotation every four weeks but every two to four weeks is how often you should be contacting somebody who's in that strategic relationship uh stage or state and that's step number four in our seven step process right when you have strategic relationships that leads to sales success because when you have an opportunity you need to ask questions about it you want to shape that opportunity you can go back to those strategic relationships so you want to have a certain amount of strategic relationships available I've done a lot of training on strategic relationships that I talk about exactly how many you should have so go watch that previous training um opportunities in the sales pipeline right this is a fundamental leading indicator of your sales success how many opportunities do you have in the pipeline and how many at different stages will tell you how likely you are to succeed going forward in reaching your Revenue goals and so we'll expand on that further in a minute but winning proposal scores so I I said death to the P win right and the reason is because and you'll see me actually bring P win back but too many of us use P win probability of winning score or or percentage whatever you want to do we use P wins as if it's an indicator of the work we're doing it's not but a winning proposal score is when I I coined and I created and it really is just defined around your your capture activities are you doing the right things on opportunities to move that opportunity closer and closer to a win for you right that's the fundamentals of captures shaping an opportunity so that you have the most best chance of winning it right and so the leading indicator will be how uh looking at your winning proposal scores across your pipeline do you see them increasing right it's not that hard to look at it is that number higher than it was last week or last month right if you don't see your winning proposal scores going up then there's a really good chance you're not doing the activities that will increase it and those two things tell you that you're probably not going to be winning as much as you want but if you're winning proposal scores are going up then you can predict that success is going to go up and the last one I want to talk about are conversion rates and so this is and I'll show you more detail in a minute but basically we're talking about if you put an opportunity into your pipeline and it's unqualified and you move it to qualified how many of the opportunities that were unqualified you're doing some work on them how many of them converted to qualified the reason that kind of thing is important is because you start getting the better you can get that percentage you have a higher percentage moving forward to the next stage the better you can make that happen it means the better you are at identifying opportunities and it's the same stage there's same thing with each stage as you go from stage to Stage maybe in the beginning one out of every 10 opportunities moves to the next stage but eventually it should be one out of every two or maybe two out of maybe three kind of thing right you're increasing that and so you want to look at your conversion rates both on the capture stages moving forward as well as just opportunities in the pipeline how what percentage converts to a sale to a contract Award right so those are leading indicators that are really important and I'll show you how I track them in a graphic um in a handout so uh we'll take a look at that but these are the ways to um predict your future success if you're following along with what I said do me a favor in the chat pause for a second and put leading indicators into the chat or comments so those were leading indicators talking about future success and then lagging indicators are really afterwards right it's kind of measuring that success and so I just wanted to throw down four quick examples and and I'd welcome anybody wanting to say here's more examples of lagging indicators but the whole idea is are you recognizing the revenue that you want if you're getting the revenue that you want especially new Revenue kind of quarterly instead of one big huge contract but new Revenue let's say quarterly there that Revenue recognized will be a lagging indicator of whether sales efforts are done correctly another lagging indicator that will lead to contract Awards of the number of proposals you've got out the door and are waiting for Award right so that's a lagging indicator of the efforts that you've done at least you've got them out the door sometimes we struggle even to get proposals out the door eventually you want more and more of those proposals to win but at the moment we celebrate the fact that we even got them out the door and in a very obvious lagging indicator of sales effort success is contracts awarded right whether it's subcontracting or prime contracts awarded is a clear uh sign of doing the we're doing the right thing in our sales efforts and so we want to keep increasing that this is where I was talking about you don't want to measure one big sale value you want to measure the number of times we're winning are we winning uh you know at least once a quarter and that's a reasonable expectation right you might not be at it yet but you should expect to win a new contract at least once a quarter subbing Prime eventually you should be expecting to get it once a month and the whole reason it just sidebar the whole reason you can do it once a month is because for the two years previous you've been doing all the right things you need done enough activity and you've really got a handle on your pipeline movement that you are able to sit there and predict that there's going to be something once a month because maybe you've got four proposals potentially being awarded in that particular month you're thinking about well if you've got four for every month you can eventually predict that you're going to have one a month it's not uh don't worry about where you're at or where you're going so much as measure where you're at and track the progress last one I want to give you is customer retention and this is measured in two main ways one is uh with option years right making sure you have the option years coming forward for Service delivery the people delivering on the project or the contract they're responsible for profit and loss right and profit is maximizing let's say billable rate or or profit margins in there but loss is um you know maybe not spending the 10 million that you had for that contract year or one million right and then uh it's also about losing the option here so throughout the year you can't just take those option years for granted so customer retention is really important in that sense and it's also important in the recompete you should be looking out right frequently businesses get caught up in losing the recompete and it generally is because they take it for granted and so as important as new sales is customer retention or that recompetition or recompete is vital in there so these are just some lagging indicators as you go forward I'm going to move into the sales pipeline I want to show you about that but if you understand leading indicators and lagging indicators you're in these lagging ones I'm talking about put those in and let me know that you're um just tracking so put lagging indicator into the chat so I want to dive into the pipeline I talked about this earlier um in this week in training and I talked about it many many other times in the training we've done if you're not aware we've done over 300 training since March last year and so a ton of training out there that you could find and many of it is on uh the sales pipeline but I do it in different ways and so yesterday the day before I was talking about in text here I want to show it a lot more visually and um instead of some animated thing I just want to walk you through it kind of goes from the top to the bottom to the top to the bottom right and walk with me if you can I'm going to quickly explain the pipeline worksheet here that I use and just to give you a heads up then I'm going to come to this sheet and show you how to manage your numbers even a different way so this one here when an opportunity comes in and it looks like a fit it's in an unqualified stage and what we're really trying to do is qualify it um basically confirming that our company is a fit for it and I call that gate zero right you can call things pretty much anything you want but I call it gate zero because gate one's got a little bit more effort to it but you see these stages one and two I call that business development because what you're really trying to do is find opportunities that are slam dunk opportunities for your company and get it in the pipeline what I have found and the reason I use this unqualified is I found a lot of people doing a lot of work sales people on opportunities to qualify them before they get them in the pipeline and the reason this is bad is because no one knows you're working and when I was teaching business developers and capture managers is get those opportunities in the minute you think they're worth anything and you're going to be spending any amount of time like an hour for example because if you start spending an hour here and an hour a year here that adds up to eight hours to 40 hours right and you and your company want to track on the fact that you're looking at these opportunities and it also helps you begin to figure out well why did so few of the opportunities move forward to qualified as an example um so I'm going to come back to these green numbers and ignore them for one second but then from stage two to stage three this is the gate one area and you're going from qualified opportunities to pursue and I'm not going to go in the depth of how to do that I've done many trainings on how but what I wanted to point out is that when you're going from qualified to pursue right here I've got gate one one out of three what this means is at the moment this Baseline and your numbers can go up or down either way this Baseline is great Baseline by the way you use it if you don't have anything else and then adjust as you go forward um but one out of three what it means is one out of three qualified opportunities that I have and I start reaching out to the client trying to get more information to go to pursue one out of three will move forward to pursue and two of them will be abandoned they'll be abandoned because once I got in there I find out that you know the the opportunity is not real or I dig more into it it's like really not fit for us whatever it is it doesn't matter I'm saying two out of the three will be abandoned um and and uh so as I move forward right I've got one out of three and it's the same ratio as you see going forward from pursuit to bid and you'll notice on the bottom and I know I'm going out at a real fast pace somewhere down the line of if people want I can do a much more advanced training like eight hours of capture development or capture management but the idea is unqualified qualified or Business Development pursue and bid our capture this is where you're working with a customer to shape that opportunity so you can win and so the likelihood of moving a pursued opportunity our opportunity in the pursuit stage to the next stage which is Bid is one out of two every two what I'm saying is for every two opportunities that reach pursue one of them will move forward to bid one of them something will happen right blah blah blah um and so you can see that pattern going forward on gate three you've got in a bid you're you're doing pre-proposal activities you're working on team agreement you're doing solutioning whatever um but what I'm saying is gate three The Proposal is going to drop the RFP will drop and one out of two of what's in bid will move forward for multiple reasons you don't have enough time because you have too many opportunities in the pipeline um somebody on your team your team just blew it off and sent them out here the RFP changed significantly and you don't want to be part of it anymore whatever it is right one out of two will move forward and one won't and that'll move in a proposal and you win it and the idea is when you write proposals it could be the same thing because sometimes you work a lot on a proposal and then something happens and you're just not moving it forward so you might start the proposals and by the way my numbers are very conservative I'm doing it here on purpose for it to be very conservative and so you can see the the pattern here going from proposal to winning award to lose what I wonder the reason this is important before I go to this next slide is that I want you to see these green numbers based on these ratios that I'm saying one out of three opportunities in qualified will move forward in the pipeline I'm saying one percent one point zero three percent of your qualified opportunities will win so theoretically if you look at your pipeline and there's let's say a hundred dollars worth of opportunities one dollar will move forward so when I'm predicting the revenue one dollar of it is moving forward and it's the same thing as we move forward you can see I'm being very conservative here in my numbers and the reason I'm saying 25 up here awaiting award is because I'm making the assumption that when I get to a really good State one out of every four proposals that I have submitted and I'm waiting on will be a win if you can't get at least one out of four something's wrong and you need to look at your process and prove it but if you can get one out of four you can begin to get down to one out of three anything more than one out of three is unrealistic right it's it's direct award it's it's um you know contract vehicle doesn't invite people that's unusual but a normal thing below one out of four one out of three that's pretty aggressive really aggressive independent of whatever anybody says out there um okay so let's move it into here about uh looking at the pipeline but looking at it a little bit differently so over on the left hand side in this box I'm talking about the chances of moving an opportunity forward through the pipeline so when an opportunity comes in what I'm saying is that it has a 33 percent of moving forward hopefully that makes sense right moving forward in the pipeline and we continue to work on it compared to abandon it's either moving forward or we abandon it um and so 33 percent of it is qualified then I say basically after that uh 50 chance if it's in Pursuit if it's in bid or if it's in proposal 50 chance that it'll go forward a 50 chance will abandon it this is important because it gives me my percentage ratio right below this where I say weighted value by stage and I know this is a little bit crazy math but basically what I'm saying is if an opportunity is inqualified and one out of three move forward then that one moves forward but now it has a 50 chance and then it moves forward and it has a 50 chance its chance of survival is Slim right it's one percent but the idea is as you start moving forward the chance of survival gets bigger and bigger these numbers can absolutely increase they should be um uh you know significantly increased for example for me in my last company when I had bid it was a hundred percent moving forward I knew I was moving forward when I had proposal it was a hundred percent I was never unaware of the opportunity that uh when it came out in RFP I was like oh my gosh things have changed capture is about knowing what's going to change and having those relationships so right now it's really conservative but you could see this percentage um in the middle you just see it as a dollar value and um right here I'm basically saying the P win this percentage win over here one percent or six percent or 25 percent it's over here and so if I'm looking at um those percentages divided by the total contract value which I know I'm beginning to lose you um but it's you should be able to track that and I want to slow down because I'm doing this so fast I'm gonna do this handout right so if you're in this training live today I'll give it to you otherwise it's only available to the sustaining members but if you're in this training and you're hanging around listening to me talking about the math I'll give you this because inside of this um uh worksheet that I hand out it's actually got a spreadsheet and then you just plug your numbers in and it becomes really easy me explaining it in a couple of minutes is pretty hard but basically what I'm trying to say is I don't want to have a pipeline and go oh that pipeline has four billion dollars in value what I want is a realistic expectation and so 4 billion quickly becomes 40 million dollar pipeline like I have four billion dollars worth of opportunities in the pipeline but the likelihood of me winning anything is like 4 million or 40 million depending on how big you are right and so it's much lower this is facing reality about the likelihood of winning opportunities going forward but how do you do it right and so just putting some uh metrics in there and some weights you'll be able to do it and so um anyways one other thing I just want to show you as it relates to that is if you look at the bottom um you can see that I lay out a sheet and and uh Gus if we've got another training where I spent longer explaining this one sheet I want to do it because I'm starting to realize it's a lot of information for one 30-minute session and so I'll try to do either another session or just a whole course for the sustaining members but the idea that I want you to see is that um down here I have uh pipeline value right PV and the idea is here it's pipeline value is sitting in there over here it's total contract value and you can excuse me proposal value but you can see me walking it back and what I'm trying to say in here is that if you want to make 5 million start on the right hand side then you need to win a 25 million dollar sale because most contracts are five years right so five million dollars a year gets you that 5 million in 2023 Revenue if you want to win a 25 million dollar sale you need to submit 100 million dollars worth of uh total contract value out there because of that 25 win rate and then backing that up in order for you to get 25 win rate there of 100 million you need at least 200 million dollars in proposal value these are the proposals you're writing and getting out the door um I recognize that what I'm talking about is super complicated and I want to come back and do another training on this so let me know in the chat if you want to learn more more about this you just like it at a slower Pace because even me listening to you I'm like all right this is pretty aggressive for me to push into 30 minutes but if you're interested and you put it into the chat I'll do kind of an invitation only one where the people are interested I'll walk through this and maybe we'll take an hour and just go through this actually using examples for your company or something like that um okay so the one thing to know to really remember even though we got to the sales pipeline in those kpis that I want you to track track on the leading indicators right because they're going to tell you if you're doing the right thing and make sure you're measuring those right things I gave you seven examples and then lagging indicators right these are proving that you're doing the right thing and when you track on those you'll be able to look back if you're not seeing the results you want you'll be able to look back and identify where in your process you might be having challenges that if you fix those challenges you'll start having the success that you want so again that's a uh that's what we talked about the quick task I have for you is take a minute and go look at your leading indicators and say am I actually tracking leading indicators am I tracking the number of new phone calls I make every single day so I'm making at least five for example all right so if you get value from these trainings become a sustaining member today by the way don't forget to um download the directory the May 2023 directory of small business uh professional small business specialist hospitals et cetera sbos from large primes that's on our website you can go download download that for free but it's a new updated version it's awesome um if you're already making money and you want to go to the next level you want help with things like I'm just explaining consider our BD accelerator it's a 90-day Workshop that accelerates your BD activity and capture activity but it's for companies already making um subtraction having some traction ping me on LinkedIn if you're interested and remember Government Contracting is not a secret it's just a process let me know in the chat if you want that um deeper diet by the way