Pipeline report

Pipeline report shows number and value of open opportunities by stage of the sales process.

I know, I know — this is an obvious one, right? Well, as we say in Czech republic, repetition is a mother of wisdom.

Let’s dive right into it. What are the problems the pipeline report aims to solve?

Problems:

• Missed sales forecast (not enough sales before the pipeline was not full or mature enough)
• Low utilisation of the sales team (sales reps don’t have enough to work on)
• Poor experience from the buyer’s perspective (this could be due to too many opportunities a sales rep has to handle or due to the sales rep spreading their attention unevenly)

Measure:

Probably the best way to determine the health of a Sales pipeline is a combination of the following metrics:

1. Number of opportunities a sales rep should manage at each time (to stay busy but not so much that they would struggle to dedicate enough attention to each of the prospects),
2. Expected revenue in the pipeline. Expected revenue is the amount of an opportunity weighted by the typical conversion rate from a given stage to the close. For example if 25% of your quotes convert into a sale, an opportunity in a quote stage which is worth £100k has got the expected revenue of £25k.
3. Ratio of opportunities within the pipeline — it’s not that helpful if your pipeline is worth hundred times of your target, if it will take twelve months to close the first deal. The opportunities need to be spread across the sales stages and preferably stacked towards the later stages of the process.

Actions:

What are the actions you could take to improve the health of a pipeline?

• Adding more leads in
• Helping sales reps rebalance their pipeline, so it matures sustainably
• Rebalancing workload among individual sales reps
• Streamlining bottle necks in the pipeline (shortening steps that take too long)
• Progress opportunities that have been waiting in a certain stage for too long

Questions:

What questions do we need to answer to determine which action to take?

How many opportunities of what value does each sales rep has in each stage of their pipeline? And how much does it differ from an ideal state?

Data:

What data will we need to answer the questions above?

• Number of opportunities by sales rep and by stage (open opportunities only)
• Amount + Expected Value (i.e. Amount x Expected conversion rate from a given stage)

Example:

Let’s see how a pipeline report looks like.

Four simple elements:

1. Pipeline visualisations showing Volume, Amount and Expected value by stage. While looking at value you should be looking for the shape of the pipeline — is the ratio of the stages right?
2. Drop down so you can pick a specific sales person (or a specific team or type of products)
3. Overall expected value of the pipeline (for the selected sales rep)
4. Drill down — when investigating their pipeline one of the most beneficial actions a sales person can take is to progress an opportunity that has been sitting in a certain stage for the longest — you can see on the example I selected the stage Contacted which filtered the individual opportunities on the right hand side and at the top are those that haven’t been touched for the longest — why haven’t they been Qualified yet?

In Summary:

Sales Pipeline report is one of the absolute must haves.

In order for it to fulfill its purpose, make sure it’s filterable and drillable and in the drill down display the time of last activity or length an opportunity has spent in a given stage.

It’s a report that’s highly valuable to individual sales reps (to cross check they are on top of all their opportunities), for their team leaders all the way to the Managing Director to validate there are no “dead opportunities” stuck in the pipeline.

This is the report that brings everyone on the same page. It’s the lifeblood of a company.