Using CRM to Build Skills, Not Just Track Deals

While few would disagree that standardization of a process is critical to a company implementing CRM and pipeline management, many still struggle to balance standardization with the need to customize guidance to an individual’s unique needs.

During pipeline reviews, managers are often left to compare individual pipelines to company averages (e.g. average opportunities per stage, average time per stage, or average close ratio).  And that presents a challenge to managers, as the guidance they give to their reps is based on what others do.  This means pipeline coaching conversations often sound like this – “well, on average, reps in our segment should have 3X their goal in their pipeline at all times to ensure they’ll hit their goal.”

But when you look at how individual sales reps manage their funnel, every rep is different.  They have different average deal size and close ratios, and they spend different amounts of time on deals in different stages.  So the number of opportunities they would need to have in each stage to hit goal would vary widely.

Not only does the lack of customization make the data and coaching seem irrelevant from a sales rep perspective, managers are equally limited in their ability to prescribe credible and customized action to reps based on how each of their reps uniquely manage their funnel.

To get over this challenge, we’ve seen companies use software like Crystal Reports to build an interface or tool that pulls historical data on each rep’s pipeline demographics and marries it with real time insight into rep performance at each stage of the funnel—comparing current performance to historical performance for each rep’s book of business.

One company that built this type of tool is SAP/Business Objects, who created the Pipeline Health Calculator. The system accounts for the unique attributes of a sales rep’s funnel, such as sales cycle length, average deal size, conversion rates, time per pipeline stage, and so on.

Managers now have data that is both credible and relevant at the individual rep level, and are now in a position to use the pipeline in a very different way.  Managers can look at this information and understand very clearly not only how an individual rep is performing right now, but also what specific behaviors they’d need to change in their reps to improve that performance over time.

The manager is now empowered to say “you have a lot fewer deals at this stage than you normally do – let’s talk about what might be keeping that from happening.”

Companies can also take this a step further, designing the system to prompt managers with potential coaching recommendations so that managers can quickly take action to close any skill gaps.  You’ve now got a system to help managers diagnose and prescribe action on a rep’s most pressing long-term development needs.

And to make sure managers stay focused on long-term skill development, design the tool so that it does NOT provide visibility all the way down to the individual deal level.  In other words, separate the tool that managers use for deal-level coaching from the one they use for skill-level coaching.

SEC Members, review the full case study from SAP/Business Objects to see how they brought these principles to life (as well as screenshots of the Pipeline Health Calculator tool they built).  For more detail, listen to this webinar replay we hosted with Michael Blanchette, Global Sales Enablement Manager for SAP/BusinessObjects, who discussed how they developed their tool.