As CEO of InsightSquared, I am extremely excited to share that Mediafly, the leader in sales enablement, is acquiring InsightSquared, creating a world-class revenue intelligence and enablement experience for B2B teams. Having spent three decades in sales and marketing leadership roles and been fortunate to witness several significant disruptions driven by technology, I am convinced of three things: We are on the cusp of advancements that will change the game within the revenue functions of B2B companies. Activity and engagement analytics are the keys to assessing the health of a deal and the strength of the overall pipeline. There will…
Ah, Groundhog Day. A day that has become synonymous with mindless repetition thanks to the cult Bill Murray movie. But for sales reps, that mindless repetition isn’t just once a year, it’s happening weekly in the form of Pipeline Reviews.
Sure the intent is great—to work as a team to assess deal health, align sales forecasts and keep opportunities moving. But the reality is a painful and mostly ineffective process that hasn’t changed in decades.
Here’s a quick play-by-play:
- Night before, each rep scrambles to manually enter data into Salesforce, update MEDDICC or their custom sales process rules, perhaps even fill out a quick spreadsheet or tool. They provide the absolute bare minimum of information required to appease their sales manager during the pipeline review. They also spend time prepping for the onslaught of questions they know their manager will ask.
- The manager who holds these individual meetings with their full team pulls Salesforce reports, which end up being out-of-date and incomplete before the meeting even occurs.
- Meeting time. Priority is given to the deals most likely to close that quarter. Often time runs out before they tackle early stages opportunities (that could use some nurturing). Instead, it’s drill down question time:
- What’s the latest with Acme?
- Have you done a demo?
- Did you send the white paper?
- When was your last phone call? Email? In-person meeting?
- Who’s the champion?
- Have you met with the economic buyer yet?
- Is your SE involved?
- What competitors are in the mix?
- How many contacts are actively engaged?
- What is your prediction for when it will close?
- Wash, rinse, repeat for every deal in your pipeline.
It’s a dreaded process and one that both managers and reps hate, but most sales pros accept it because they haven’t found a better way.
Until now. With InsightSquared, you will significantly improve pipeline visibility making it easy for sales managers to proactively understand the health of their pipeline at any time—without requiring the rep to spend a single minute entering data or preparing reports.
In a single view, a sales manager can see all activity related to an opportunity, automatically captured and written to the CRM (no manual entry required by reps!). InsightSquared’s Activity Capture goes beyond contacts, emails and meetings—to also capture key updates to sales processes, identify pain, personas and more.
Complete and Accurate Data is Transforming Funnel Reviews
When you start with complete and accurate data, funnel reviews turn from reactive to proactive. Managers can drill down into activities to understand level of engagement and timelines. Is this deal moving at the same pace as similar deals? Is the Champion responding at the right cadence? Is there an outlier or risk?
Managers can easily slice and dice data and activities by any filter—or combination of filters—and see the results in real-time. In one query you could include a Salesforce filter (such as amount or stage), a calendar filter (last meeting) and email filter (last touch date). It’s drop-and-drag, customized just for you.
Then you can correlate activities with outcomes to know how each action, and the combination of multiple actions, impact pipeline movement and stage conversion.
Together we can change pipeline review meetings for the better. Instead of repeating what just happened (Groundhog Day), spend your time looking ahead and working towards the close.
In our webinar series, “Ramp to RevOps,” we will walk you through the necessary steps to break the Groundhog Day cycle and pull ahead of the competition with data-driven continuous improvements. Catch the on-demand series here.
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