Avoiding mistakes in your sales pipeline strategy

In the 1960s, Xerox lost their dry photocopying patent and in response to severe losses in market share, spent USD$10mln towards developing an in-house sales framework. This internal sales methodology ended up being so successful that they set up a separate arm, Xerox Learning Systems to package this and sell this framework to external organizations. Among sales excellence trainers, this methodology is commonly branded as the Professional Selling Skills (PSS) sales program.

One aspect of this methodology that I particularly like is the emphasis on the pipeline management using the SPANCOP framework. This is because this part of the process is highly quantitative and intuitive in helping sales leaders improve their team’s sales performance.

However inexperienced sales leaders could misinterpret how the process works and prescribe the wrong solutions to generate results.

What is the SPANCOP pipeline management framework?

One important aspect of doing a business is the ability to hand out yearly salary increments for staff. To do so, the business relies on the ability of the sales organization to bring in incremental revenue every year.

Once your incremental targets are established, a pipeline management framework comes into play by allowing everyone in the team to understand how they can achieve those incremental targets.

The starting point of the pipeline management framework begins with the business inputting and qualifying their opportunities (number & commercial value) using the SPANCOP process (summary defined below).?

Measuring the SPANCOP process

Once sales practitioners have qualified their opportunities in their equivalent CRM system structured with the SPANCOP process, the quantitative magic begins.

3 KPIs are commonly used as leading indicators to gauge if the team can deliver incremental targets for the year. With that, a sales team leader will now have the quantitative tools in place to help their team meet their incremental targets for the year.?

No.1 mistake using the SPANCOP management tool

After investing in a sales excellence training program, management starts to expect immediate results and push sales leaders to deliver immediate performance.

This results in sales leaders making the mistake of pushing hard to drive up pipeline strength, reduce cycle time whilst trying to increase the hit rate at the same time.

After all, if one focuses on improving the KPI’s set in the excellence process, this will eventually result an eventual good performance, right?

Instead by disrespecting the triple constraint (time, people & money), sales representatives end up getting burnt out, losing existing business and eventually quit as no commissions are paid out.

Sounds familiar? Unsurprisingly, 65% of B2B companies (Bridge group study) find sales productivity their no.1 challenge.

Creating winning teams by driving sales productivity.

To facilitate winning teams, sales organizations should instead look towards operating on lean principles and minimizing wastage in the sales process cycle.

Looking at the simulation above and by pivoting your sales strategy around working "smarter" to reduce process waste/loss rates, you can generate best productivity returns for your sales teams.

Results tend to be most effective if sales leaders can reduce waste as early as possible in the SPANCOP process to generate best results.

Resolving these inefficiencies will lead to high effectiveness and eventually teams that outperform their targets. Top performing teams continuously improve by optimizing to generate exceptional performance.

Why? Because actionable and transparent sales coaching and strategic data devoid of decision bias is available to help the organization move forward.

In summary, whilst it is tempting to succumb to short term successes and just work harder, it is more important to be sustainably effective by looking at the right SPANCOP metrics to pivot your sales pipeline strategy for long term success.