Pipeline Management. How to protect yourself from being locked into failure when inheriting a new sales team.

In my previous article I promised to share with you some tips about what you must do, when you inherit a new sales team to ensure you do not get locked into failure from day one. Reorganisations are a fact of life in all organisations, especially sales. You may have acquired the new Sales leader role, or the organisation has gone from a territory structure to a vertical one. The fact is you are going to acquire sales people that you do not really know and they all have a pipeline in CRM, that you have not had chance to evaluate, but you are expected to produce an accurate forecast and pipeline report.

You have no idea how accurate your sales team’s reports are. Has their previous leader evaluated them with regular rigour? To put it bluntly, the odds are that their pipeline and forecast will contain a load of dross. Sales people in the main, love the comfort factor of lots of deals in their pipeline. They know which ones are dross and which ones are real. Current statistics from people like CSO insights and CEB indicate that up to 70% of deals in a sales person’s pipeline either never happen or are lost. Your first task as Sales Leader of your new team is to get rid of the dross in the pipeline and identify the real deals. As soon as you produce a pipeline report and forecast and present them to your boss they become your property and your problem to deliver and you will be held responsible for their accuracy. How can you protect yourself from buying into failure?

I am indebted to a previous boss, Steve Cowie for this tip which has helped me substantially as a front line sales leader. However, it does come with political risk which I will illustrate later in the article. First job is to meet each of your sales people individually for one hour, to get to know them, ask about their YTD figures, issues, key deals and how they want you to help them. You close the meeting by diarising their first pipeline review for 72 hours. You let them know that you hold them accountable for the accuracy of their pipeline. You tell them that they have a 48-hour amnesty. They look confused and ask you what you mean. You explain that they have 48 hours to do what they want with their pipeline. They can add deals or take them off as they see fit. After 48 hours I am going to hold them accountable for the accuracy of the pipeline.

After 24 hours you will find that nothing changes. After 36 hours deals start to disappear, not the good ones, just the dross. Some new ones get added in. After 48 hours the dross that your new sales teams had as a comfort blanket in their pipeline, deals that they knew in their hearts they had no chance of winning, have magically vanished. You and they can focus your and their time on deals that you can win, saving valuable selling time and you will not be locking yourself into failure from day one. If the problem is inability to create pipeline, rather than qualification, you can address the correct issue with coaching.

Then you hold a one to one with each sales person, forensically examining each remaining deal in their pipeline. I will cover how to perform a forensic deal inspection in a further article. Once you have done all your one to ones, you produce your own pipeline report, replacing the inaccurate one that you may have received previously, with all the dross removed.

However, there is political risk. Your boss and the CFO may have a heart attack, because their pipeline coverage has now reduced, potentially drastically. Horror, a huge deal that your company could never win has also disappeared. So my recommendation is that you pre warn all interested parties that you plan the drain the swamp to achieve an accurate pipeline, which is in everbody’s interests. You may be pressurised to put some of the dross deals back into the pipeline. Yes, it does happen, but we are only fooling ourselves if we do.

So if you have just inherited a new sales team I strongly recommend the amnesty approach, followed by a rigorous one to one with each of your sales guys.

In the next article I will share with you some tips about how best to fill your pipeline

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