Good morning. A pipeline stage is meant to record something the buyer did. Most of yours record how the call felt.
Sales.
The Sales Operating Review
Of the deals sitting in your pipeline this morning, how many are in their current stage because the buyer did something you could show a stranger — accepted a dated plan, cleared the security review, sent the paper upstairs — rather than because a rep came off the call feeling good?
Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana, founding partners of Vantage Point Performance, went looking in Cracking the Sales Management Code (2011) for what a sales manager can actually manage, and found that nearly every metric a company reports sits in one of three tiers. Business results — revenue, margin, market share — get reported but never managed; nobody has a lever marked revenue. Sales objectives — market coverage, customer focus, product focus, capability — can be influenced. Only the third tier can be managed directly: call management, opportunity management, account management, territory management, and how the force is enabled. Most managers spend the week pushing on the first tier, which is the one tier that won't move when pushed. Cash that finding out and you get a test rather than a dashboard: a stage must name something the buyer did, in the past tense, that you could show a stranger. Everything else on this page hangs off it. Day 50 gave you the monthly review for the whole business, and this is the sales page inside it. It isn't Day 173's negotiation review either — that one grades how you ran each deal, while this one asks whether the machine producing the deals is covered, staffed and honest about why it loses.
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