For best results, the process of managing and using a sales or opportunity pipeline should be intuitive and harmonious. This means it should be constructed to optimize time spent working on opportunities, versus creating more need to spend time working on the process of managing opportunities. While this is aspirational for many, achieving it is fleeting.  Here are some of the practices and situations I’ve lived through over the years, that reinforces why I believe it’s critical to be a good pipeline conductor.

Fake It ‘Til You Make It.  

There are more individuals responsible for doing Business Development, than have been trained to do so, formally or informally. From what I’ve seen, this is largely not their choice. Little to no training means a greater inability to understand important processes, recognize terminology, or utilize important tools and resources. This unfamiliarity by many of those “doing Business Development” today, in my opinion, is driven by a lack of respect for the Business Development Life Cycle, or the sincere belief that “it can’t be that hard.” No matter the cause, it is a recipe for inefficiency that has companies spending significantly more time and more money to find and win business, than is necessary.  

Parlez Vous Business Development? 

Do you have team members with roles outside of traditional Business Development responsibilities who interact with pipeline information? The people who author it? Capture it? Use it for decision-making? This means they have direct or indirect influence on what happens in the pipeline to include how information may be interpreted. If they haven’t been guided or informed in how to view this information in the context of the customer’s activities or the company’s objectives, how effective will they be in supporting this aspect of growth. That guidance and context is what empowers them, and us, to understand what is right or wrong, up or down, air or water, and more. Just imagine you are the person receiving a message cited as being timely and important and to take action. Now imagine the message is written in a language completely unknown to you. This happens every day, and also contributes to companies spending more time and money than needed. 

Knight to C3 (The Dunst Opening) 

If you have never played chess, the first, and even the tenth time doing so can be daunting, especially if you don’t know the rules. Knowing how the various pieces move, when they move, and the outcomes of those moves is paramount to not falling victim to Two-Move Checkmate. The parallels between chess and establishing and working opportunity pipelines are many. Just like having rules for how the pieces move in chess, there are (or should be) rules for information entering, moving about and exiting from your organization’s pipeline. Does your current process have you making too many moves, offering an unintentional advantage to your competition? Do some leads linger too long in your pipeline when they should have been “taken out” in two moves? Are the same rules in effect for partner opportunities, or do your standards relax when someone else is doing some or most of the work? If the answer to this is Yes, my next question is Why? 

Pipeline Harmony 

Several years ago, I introduced GovCon Geek Squad and Bootcamp participants to Frankie the Doorman at “Club Pipeline.” Frankie is a fictional character representing the challenge filters at the entrance to a company’s pipeline, represented as the fictional Club Pipeline. If you think of your team as an orchestra, and items in your pipeline as musical notes, the beautiful harmonies you hope to produce are revenue and profit-generating wins. Processes like Frankie, the entry filters, are critical for keeping bad notes from getting on to your teams music sheets, and ruining the sound. One missed beat can throw off the tempo of productivity, resulting in lost focus (due to shiny objects), lost time, missed opportunities, and a lower team morale. 

The 3n + 1 Problem 

Also known in Mathematics as The Collatz Conjecture, it is highly regarded by mathematicians as a simple but widely unsolvable math problem where everything ends up in a loop. That kind of sounds like the movement (or lack of movement) in many sales pipelines. Consider this. How much time is wasted simply trying to figure out what the math means in some pipelines? 

In speaking with business leaders of growing small and mid-tier companies in Federal Contracting, I continue to find common ground with them in the area of pipeline scoring. In short, many of them have moved to eliminate the unnecessary calculus in their pipelines, and instead focus on getting answers to questions, and using those answers as keys to unlock their decision gates, right up to the response. Thus, they eliminate a step that is questionable in reliability, and costly when the clock is ticking. In a world where timeliness is a critical factor in capturing customers and requirements-based revenues, saving time without jeopardizing accuracy, is a win. 

Pipeline processes should be efficient and empowering, and they should enable your company to visualize its growth while you are achieving an upper-hand in the areas of knowledge and positioning. 

How do you create pipeline harmony in your organization?

Peace, Health, and Success,

Go-To-Guy Timberlake

For a PDF of this blog click here.