Most companies use a CRM to monitor the opportunities in their sales pipeline. Some of the metrics that we recommend sales managers consistently review with their salespeople include:

• Number of qualified leads
• Conversion rates for key sales process steps
• Close rates
• Average deal size
• Sales cycle length

Effective sales pipeline management involves setting specific times to review these key metrics with salespeople and coaching them for skill improvement. Ideally, a scorecard is established that allows a sales leader to track improvement as they review these metrics quarterly with their team. This discipline should not be overlooked and remains a key differentiator for highly successful coaches. If a sales manager does not know the quality of their pipeline, how can they help their people improve, and how can they forecast business for the company?

Assuming these metrics are available, here are some things to look out for in sales pipeline management sessions, with the end goal of improving pipeline quality and coaching the sales skills of your team.

Beware of Stuffed Pipelines

Having a “fat pipeline” can result from an overly optimistic advisor or relationship manager. They call on a prospect and come back thinking, “We really hit it off! They really liked what we can do... We have a LOT we can help them with.” Their deceptively full pipeline may give the salesperson comfort because it looks like they have plenty of opportunities, but in fact, it may be very misleading in terms of what will close. In other words, many of those deals in the pipeline are not properly qualified.

A sales leader plays a critical role in managing this problem with their coaching. The skill of asking great questions is essential. Tone and tonality are of paramount importance, and they must be firm and helpful. Questions like:

• What did you hear the customer say that leads you to believe they will be a great customer for us?
• When you asked them about the impact of not fixing this problem, what did they say?
• Who else in their organization will be impacted if they switch providers?
• What did they say when you asked about their decision-making criteria?
• When is the last time they chose a supplier that wasn’t the lowest cost?
• How much is in their budget to make this problem go away?
• When you asked them, “How do you envision working with us,” what was their response?
• How did they choose their current provider?

By asking great questions, sales managers coach their people by example. The questions listed above are the type of questions salespeople should be asking the prospect. Coaching sessions are similar to a sales call in nature. By asking great questions of their team, leaders find out where their people need to be coached. If they hear a salesperson say, “I didn’t ask that question” during their pipeline discussions, they need to find out if the salesperson is unable to ask those questions (they need more sales training) OR if they are unwilling to ask those questions.

During sales pipeline management sessions, as managers review and discuss the metrics, it becomes clear if the salesperson is prospecting enough and regularly finding opportunities. Sales managers will know if their team understands that prospecting is a consistent effort necessary for them to reach their sales goals. Coaches can guide them on how to consistently make calls, ask for introductions, and network among their target prospects.

It’s healthy to “flush” a pipeline regularly. Opportunities should move through or out of the pipeline continually. If a relationship manager wants to cling to an opportunity and defend keeping it in their pipeline, it is probably because they have nothing else to take its place. Coach them, encourage them, and challenge them.

The first step is to recognize that motivation is an “inside-out” job. When the topic of motivation is discussed, we typically think about incentive compensation, sales contests, and recognition programs. All of these certainly encourage sales teams to focus on selling because they are rewards. However, you will gain true engagement and enthusiasm if you create an everyday environment that encourages each individual to identify and visualize their own internal motivation.

Do you remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs pyramid? The bottom two largest tiers are Physiological and Safety because these are the most basic needs of every individual, including salespeople who are starting at the bottom and working their way up to self-actualization. They must first have income for food, shelter, safety, etc. Only once they have attained all of these basic necessities can they turn their attention to the higher tiers of Love/Self-Belonging, Esteem, and Self-Actualization. This still holds true and is an important concept in building a high-performance sales team!

To put it another way, salespeople do not care about corporate shareholder value unless they are shareholders themselves. What they care about is food, shelter, clothing, recognition, paying for college education or weddings, saving for retirement, etc. These are personal desires and make up the vast majority of things that are important to people. So, the solution is to create an environment where this internal motivation can take place. (See The Dream Manager book by Matthew Kelly.)

Creating a Culture of Goal Setting and Recognition

This means that it is up to you to help your salespeople identify what is important to them. Make the effort to set up time off-site that is dedicated to planning and spend time developing each individual’s dreams and goals. This is time that you will spend on your business instead of in it. Take a day or two to help you and your team take a giant step forward to plan for the future and help them achieve their personal best performance.

Create a process where people can establish personal goals because this is where the motivation comes from. This is also where the passion and desire come from. Hence, this is where the business plan must come from. Very few companies spend time understanding the personal goals of their people, yet they are the basis for any salesperson achieving their goals.

You might position this as though you are the coach and the salespeople are players on a competitive team. Each of you has a part to play so that the whole team wins. Salespeople will usually understand and relate to this because they are competitive by nature. If someone does not get this, they may not be suited for selling. Selling requires desire, commitment, and a need to win.

Create an environment where people get a chance to unplug and sit down to outline their goals and dreams, and establish timeframes, attaching financial values to these items. Once you have attached financial values, you know what level of prospecting and selling activity is necessary for each salesperson. You will also have a much better idea of what realistic standards look like.

Reward yourself and your salespeople when they achieve success. So, as your people go through and identify their goals, and as you sit down as an individual salesperson to identify your goals, be sure to identify how you will reward yourself when you achieve them.

In some ways, salespeople are like kids in that they want to be recognized for their successes. In almost every home in America, we have a kid’s Hall of Fame, otherwise known as the refrigerator door. Every time one of the kids does something great, they come home through the door and look for attention: “Look at this. Look at my art. Look at the A on my science test.” And what do we do? We put their success on the refrigerator door, where everyone can be reminded of this accomplishment.

Somewhere, you will want to create a theoretical refrigerator door for your salespeople to recognize their successes. A visual reminder, even a poster board with a graph and names that is posted where all can see, is a great way to keep everyone motivated and to reward those who deserve recognition.

A good sales manager will also have a system for helping a salesperson get back on track and correct problems that have led to failure. For instance, you must have a conversation with Jane, who did not reach her prospecting goal for the month. You will ask her, “How important is it for you to succeed?” “What do you need to do to fix this problem?” “What kind of process or program could you put in place to get on track to succeed?”

Assuming that Jane has desire and indicates she is willing to do the work, you will say, “OK. This is what we are going to do. Every Thursday at 10 a.m. for the next four weeks, I am going to come to your office and listen to you make prospecting phone calls.” Then, you must follow through each week. This is the kind of discipline and structure that will get Jane back on the road to success. This is also the kind of hands-on coaching necessary for building a high-performance sales team.

Read more in our free eBook - The Extraordinary Sales Manager!

From Listening to Leading. Customer-Centric Strategic Planning

From Diana Jennings, Director of Global Experiences at IBISWorld

When I first started in a client-facing role, I received a piece of advice that has stuck with me ever since: “Listen more than you speak.” 

While it is important to enter client conversations with a clear plan to add value, you must also bring a willingness to truly listen. By occasionally setting aside my own agenda, I found it easier to understand the customer’s real needs. Although I’m no longer on the phone with customers daily, I still believe that listening to your customers is critical to any business function, particularly strategic planning. 

Being a customer-first organization is not just a catchy slogan, it's a strategic imperative. At its core, customer-centric strategic planning means aligning your business's goals, products and services with your customers’ evolving needs and expectations. Yet customer centricity goes beyond just implementing their feedback – it’s about deeply understanding their pain points, preferences and aspirations, and using that knowledge to drive every decision you make.

Over the years, customer centricity has evolved from a buzzword to a fundamental part of strategic planning. Initially, it was about addressing customer complaints and providing good service. These days, it has morphed into a comprehensive approach that shapes entire business models and drives innovation. However, this shift hasn’t been without its challenges. Some companies still struggle to integrate genuine customer feedback into their strategies, often focusing too much on internal processes or short-term gains.

The key to successful strategic planning lies in achieving synergy between industry research and customer insights. By combining these two sources of information, businesses can develop a more holistic view of their industry and customers, leading to more informed decisions and better outcomes.

What is customer centricity?

A customer-centric business approach prioritizes customers’ needs and preferences at every stage of their interaction with the company and within the business’s internal processes. It means designing products and experiences that aim to not only meet but also exceed customer expectations. 

The purpose of customer centricity is to build long-term relationships that foster loyalty and advocacy. When customers feel valued and understood, they’re more likely to stick around, recommend your products or services and contribute to your business’s growth.

Some of the most successful businesses in recent years are known for taking a customer-centric approach, resulting in a loyal customer base, high customer satisfaction, a competitive edge and, ultimately, revenue growth. However, a key aspect of customer centricity is continuous listening. Customer expectations can change swiftly, making it critical to consistently monitor satisfaction metrics and be prepared to pivot when needed.  

How to center the customer in business strategy

Creating a customer-centric strategy involves understanding both macro trends across your business’s industry and direct customer feedback. By combining this data, businesses can develop products, services and experiences that truly resonate with their customers. Here is how to effectively use industry research and customer feedback to create a customer-centric strategy:

Gather industry data

Begin with a thorough analysis of the industry and market landscape. Starting at this macro level helps to understand the broader trends and competitive dynamics within your industry and adjacent industries up and down the supply chain. Is there a product or service with a growing or declining market size? Does that growth or decline present an opportunity or risk to your business? What are the most successful companies in your space doing? This industry-level research will provide the context needed to frame your customer-centric strategies effectively. 

Start tracking customer-centric metrics

Every business leader has their own set of performance metrics at the forefront of their minds when they consider long-term strategic plans. However, there are foundational customer satisfaction metrics that every business should monitor to effectively measure their customers' sentiment.

These include Net Promoter Scores (NPSs), Customer Satisfaction Scores and, if applicable, customer retention or renewal rate. Having a read on metrics like NPS and monitoring fluctuations in these scores can provide early indicators of any underlying problems across your customer base that warrant further investigation. 

Gather customer feedback

Depending on what stage your business is at, this step will likely require the most effort. Start by conducting interviews with new, existing and former customers and run quantitative surveys to gauge their experience with your organization, your organization’s support network and, of course, your product or service itself.

Structuring your customer interviews to be more open-ended typically returns the best results, so listen actively and document their needs, pain points and suggestions. You can combine these qualitative interviews with more structured surveys to collect feedback from more customers.

Analyze the data

Gather all the available data you have on your customers, including satisfaction metrics, qualitative and quantitative feedback and any other customer data you may have. Depending on your business, this could include support desk tickets, usage trends, user behavior trends and revenue performance metrics like renewal and churn rates.

Once you have aggregated all your data, you’ll be able to leverage data analytics to gain deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences. Use this data to identify patterns, trends and correlations that can inform your strategy. 

Chart the customer experience

Begin by mapping out your business’s customer journey stages and the key touchpoints within it. By identifying how customers interact with your organization, from their initial discovery to purchasing, using and retaining your product or service, you can demystify the journey and shed light on how customers really engage with your business to determine potential pain points. 

Understanding where customers encounter the most friction allows you to address these issues effectively. For instance, if you’ve identified that prospective customers struggle to discover and learn about your offerings, it’s time to involve sales and marketing. On the other hand, if customers use your product once but don’t become repeat users, it might indicate a gap in product-market fit or the support they receive from customer success teams. As a strategic leader, assigning ownership to these problems ensures they’re tackled head-on, paving the way for a truly customer-centric approach.

Create customer personas

Develop detailed customer personas to represent the distinct segments of your customer base. Creating these personas will allow you to identify each group’s specific needs and preferences so you can tailor your strategies effectively. These personas should include firmographic data, their goals when using your product or service, typical behaviors, pain points and challenges they face.

Once you’ve developed these personas, you can start segmenting your customer data and satisfaction metrics to help your teams prioritize where to focus. Is your NPS dropping for one persona specifically? Are you overserving or underserving one persona in a particular touchpoint across the customer journey? Having these personas mapped out will provide a comprehensive understanding of your customers that you can consistently reference when building products or enhancements and prioritizing long-term strategies. 

Cultivate a culture of customer centricity

This stage is about fostering a customer-centric culture at your organization, and the first step to that is communicating what your customers are feeling and why with stakeholders across your business to help them stay connected to customer needs. The customer must be considered in all areas of your business and at every level to really achieve customer centricity, not just within your client services and customer experience teams! Product, marketing, operations and even developer teams must be connected to customer problems and understand what’s important to your user base to make decisions centered on the customer.

The most successful companies do this by establishing a brand promise or even a set of principles that serves as a commitment to what their customers can expect when they interact with the company and, ultimately, the experience they’ll receive. Your brand promise should be based on what’s most important to your customers and can serve as the north star that internal teams and stakeholders look to when making decisions.  

Embed the customer as a pillar of your strategy

To truly keep the customer at the heart of your business strategy, it’s essential to make customer insights a cornerstone of your planning and prioritization process. This means constantly reviewing feedback and making strategic decisions around product development, marketing, sales and customer support priorities with these findings in mind.

A key aspect of this is ensuring it’s a continuous, dynamic process. Establish regular review cycles where your teams assess the latest customer feedback and industry trends to adjust your strategies accordingly. Establishing an ongoing process ensures your strategies remain aligned with evolving customer needs and preferences. This approach not only keeps your business focused on its customers, but also positions you to anticipate and meet customer needs proactively, driving long-term success.

Common obstacles and how to overcome them

Implementing a customer-centric strategy can be challenging. By understanding and addressing these common obstacles, businesses can navigate the process more effectively and ensure a smoother transition to a customer-centric approach.

Siloed Departments

Break down silos by implementing regular meetings and shared goals that emphasize customer-centric outcomes and foster cross-departmental collaboration. Encourage knowledge sharing and ensure that customer insights are accessible to all departments, not just customer-facing staff.

Resistance to Change

Address resistance by clearly communicating the benefits of a customer-centric approach and providing training and resources to help employees understand and embrace new processes. Highlighting success stories and quick wins will build momentum and demonstrate the value of customer centricity to those that’re still unsure.

Data Overload

Implement advanced analytics tools to sift through large volumes of data and extract meaningful insights. Focus on key metrics that directly impact customer satisfaction and business performance to simplify data reporting and make it accessible and actionable for all stakeholders.

Limited Resources

Prioritize customer-centric initiatives that offer the largest impact while leveraging technology and automation to optimize resource allocation. Collaborate with external partners or consultants to gain expertise and scale efforts efficiently without overburdening internal teams.

Final thoughts

The journey toward true customer centricity is continuous. It demands constant monitoring, evaluation and iteration. However, the rewards – loyal customers, sustainable growth and a competitive edge – make it a journey worth undertaking. By combining industry research with customer insights, businesses can create strategies that are not only effective but also resilient in the face of change.

Next time you find yourself in a meeting discussing long-term priorities or your business's strategic goals, strive to be the voice in the room advocating for your customer. Are we considering the customer here? Does this plan align with our customers' expectations? If we can all commit to making the customer the guiding star of our strategic plans, we’ll remain agile, relevant and dedicated to exceeding their expectations.

Source: https://www.ibisworld.com/blog/customer-centric-strategic-planning/99/1127/

1. Know and Focus on Your Target: If you are familiar with the 80/20 Rule, you know that the majority of your revenue comes from about 20% of your clients. Spend time defining their profile and determining how to find and reach more of them. You may have several profiles; for example, we work with both banks and insurance firms. In my outbound sales efforts, however, I must focus and put on one of my profile hats. If I am looking to increase my outbound lead generation with banks, I need to think about where bank CEOs spend time, what they read, their biggest problems, and what my message to them will be. LinkedIn, Google, associations, and competitors are all great resources to help you refine your prospect approach. This is not a one-time event; you should always be gathering industry information about your target.
   
   
2. Do Your Research: Think about all the irrelevant emails you receive and dedicate yourself to not being one of those senders. There is a place for mass emails, but here, I’m speaking of one-to-one outbound lead generation. Once you've determined that a particular company is worthy of outreach, find out everything you can about them. If you have a resource like HubSpot, you can see other connections within the company. If you utilize ZoomInfo, you can pull down contact information and even org charts to help customize your outbound sales efforts.
   
   
3. Customize Your Outreach: We are not big proponents of systematic emails – you will have a greater chance of being noticed if you customize your email or call with something you know is on your prospect’s mind. I do outbound calling for bank and insurance associations, and every single time, before I reach out, I visit their websites to see what’s new and what events they are working on. It takes time, but it makes my message more relevant. If you are working within an industry, you can use information you’ve learned from one company for another. I religiously read our industry newsletters and competitors’ marketing messages to my target as it helps me be smarter and more relevant with my outbound sales outreach.
   
   
4. Don’t Expect a Response: We all know that our increasingly virtual world has increased the likelihood of being ignored. Yesterday I sent out 11 custom email outreaches and heard back from 1. Today, I will follow up with all 11 and send out 11 more. In a couple of weeks, I will reach out again, further refining my message. Some prospects never respond, which may mean they are not a prospect, or at least not right now. Your outbound sales strategy must include being resilient and persistent. Let’s face it – you have to prove your way in the door, find a connection, and give a compelling reason for that person to engage with you. Don’t expect a response, but be thrilled if you get one, and…
   
   
5. Respond Quickly and Efficiently: This might go without saying, but your level of enthusiasm and timeliness in responding is critical. Don’t overwhelm the prospect with everything you have. Answer their questions and offer one additional helpful suggestion – what has worked for others is always a good idea. This is a conversation, not a sales pitch, so focus on how to help. If helping your prospect solve a problem is always your goal, your outbound sales strategy will be effective.
   
   
6. Be Excellent with the Details: Try to minimize the back-and-forth communication by anticipating what the prospect will need. Make it as easy as possible for them once they are engaged. Be the resource that makes them think, "Wow, that was a great experience, and I got what I needed." Deliver what you promise, and remember the adage: don’t overpromise and underdeliver. Give them more than they asked for.
   
   
7. Don’t Forget to Thank Them, Follow Up, and Build the Relationship: This may seem obvious, but think of your outbound lead generation strategy as a pipeline to others. Thank them, ask for feedback, and see if you can help in any other way. If you feel confident they were pleased, ask for a testimonial, a Google review, or an introduction to another company. If a salesperson truly understands your business, provides an excellent solution, and is easy and efficient to work with, wouldn’t you want to help them grow their business?

Creating a winning sales pitch that gets a decision 100% of the time is all about the qualifying process that salespeople follow. They certainly must have uncovered a compelling or multiple compelling reasons to take action from the prospect. There has to be pain or what we call severe mental anguish over something that is either a problem that exists today or a problem that will exist if action isn’t taken. Or there is an opportunity that has to be leveraged. That problem or opportunity has been monetized. The salesperson must also have identified that the prospect has the capacity to invest and has shared the decision-making process. The salesperson must have a solution that meets their specific terms and conditions. All of that contributes to creating a winning sales pitch, prior to presenting.

A salesperson’s ability to create winning sales pitches can be evaluated by checking their close ratio closely and understanding what contributed to the wins and losses. Salespeople and their managers must identify the choke points in their qualifying process. What are they hearing from the prospect at the pitch? What are their objections to buying? What are they ‘thinking over’? How often are they losing to the incumbent, not talking to the decision maker, or facing a money objection at presentation time?

To close 100% of qualified buyers, salespeople must also have the right attitude about the presentation. Attitudes are driven by beliefs. If they don’t believe that they must uncover all of these issues prior to pitching, then they will not gain a decision, and if they do win it, it will mostly be luck, which is not a winning sales strategy.

Salespeople should start preparing for their winning presentation as they are qualifying the prospect. That’s right, preparing starts at the very beginning of creating a winning sales pitch. Too often, salespeople make one of three assumption mistakes when it comes to presenting a solution:

1. They make assumptions that because they have extra features and benefits in their solution, the prospect will want them even if those come at an additional cost.
2. Assumptions are made about price—salespeople too often assume that every prospect will make a decision based on price. We know that is not the case. Or worse, that the price is not important to discuss prior to presentation.
3. They assume that prospects will be honest and not share their ‘stuff’ with the incumbent. How often have they lost a deal because the other company lowered the price of their offering to match theirs?

How often do salespeople lose sales to the incumbent? In many cases, salespeople are not creating a new sale; they are gaining market share by taking business from the competitor. That means that virtually 100% of the time, they are in competition. They must find out more about that relationship and the prospect’s willingness and capabilities to end that relationship.

They must ask questions like:

• When you told your current advisor you were going out to shop around, what did they say?
• When you told your current advisor that you were unhappy and were going to find someone else to work with, what did they do?

Understanding this in advance helps a salesperson better prepare for their presentation to get a decision. Dealing with it before the pitch will help eliminate the “I need to talk to my current provider” objection at the time of close.

Money is always a factor. Unfortunately, many salespeople fail to approach this part of the discussion, either because they are uncomfortable talking about money, don’t know how to ask, or don’t believe it is relevant to their type of sales. Insurance brokers are notorious for believing they don’t have to ask about budget because the prospect is already paying premiums. But when they get copies of policies and do a risk assessment, the premiums are ‘blacked out’ in the policy. Why? Because the prospect is playing the price game to leverage the current relationship.

Here is a recommended approach to set up a winning sales pitch with the prospect:

• I will present a solution to solve those problems we discussed today.
• I will provide a solution that meets your specs and fits within the terms and conditions, including budget.
• I will be in a position to answer all of your questions.
• When I’m finished, I will ask you three questions:

1. Do you feel like I understand your business and what you are trying to accomplish?
2. Do you believe that I can help you accomplish your goals?
3. Do you want my help?

• When I ask that last question, you will be in a position to say yes or no. Either one is okay. I’d rather hear yes, but no is okay. What objections do you have to that process?

This is when the rubber meets the road, and the salesperson finds out if, in fact, they have a 100% qualified prospect!