Track These Metrics to Build a Viable Sales Pipeline

Track These Metrics to Build a Viable Sales Pipeline by SOMAmetrics

A common mistake I have seen companies make in analyzing their sales pipeline metrics is focusing on the tail end of the Revenue Realization Cycle (RRC). These include:

  • Closing ratios,
  • Sales cycles,
  • Forecasting what will close this quarter.

Focus on Sales Pipeline Metrics

Focusing on these elements of the sales processes keeps them from performing all the necessary upfront work. The work needs to happen prior to these stages. Champion boxers say that the fight is won in the gym, not in the ring. To clarify, if they adequately prepare for a fight and are in great shape, they have the best possible chance of winning the fight.

In the same way, companies that measure only the tail-end of the RRC are basically entering the ring unprepared and expecting to win the fight, simply by trying hard. Truthfully, unless they have very short average sales cycles (less than 1-2 weeks), their ability to impact the current quarter’s outcome is minimal.

For companies whose sales cycle length is longer than 30 days, the battle to achieve quarterly revenue targets actually started in the previous quarter. If they didn’t start last quarter, they most likely will lose the battle this quarter.

If you don’t know your Funnel Math or desired sales pipeline metrics (how many impressions you need to generate qualified leads that result in your quarterly revenue targets—as well as how long it takes to do these), you don’t know what to measure to support revenue objectives.

Demand Generation

How many impressions (touches, including number of emails; direct mail; ads; etc.) will it take to get to the optimal number of raw leads? How many to get to the right number of warm leads to hit your revenue target? Once you know the number of impressions required, you will need to understand the conversion rate of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Are your MQL-to-SQL ratios 10%, 5%, or less? Knowing these numbers are essential elements for creating successful demand generation campaigns and building an SQL funnel or pipeline.

SQL Funnel

How many dials, on average, does it take to get a conversation with a decision maker? Who cares? At the end of the day, if your Sales Development (SDR) team isn’t having daily conversations with decision makers, you aren’t going to build a sales pipeline or generate revenue. To achieve this, your team must make a minimum number of daily dials to reach decision makers. There are tools out there that track phone connection rates and enable your sales team to “log a call”. In general, these tools are good and can support the day-to-day sales pipeline management of your team.

However, we recommend that you focus on the daily number of conversations that your sales reps have with decision makers. All opportunities to speak with decision makers can move the sales process forward. Call logging tools don’t track this kind of data; you will need to build this process into your CRM (SDR CRM Field Mapping Resource Here). Building the SDR Fields and metrics into your CRM will keep your SDR’s on their game, and give managers insight into the activities that matter.

Building the Sales Pipeline

MQLs take time to be nurtured and developed before they become SQL’s. Therefore, you’ll need to build a SQL pipeline to support the Sales pipeline. Most companies have no concept of a SQL pipeline, which is usually 4 times the SQL quota. Normally, 25% of SQLs convert to sales pipeline, but your ratios may differ.

You’ll need MQLs and callers to build a SQL pipeline. These are the front-end Revenue Recognition Cycle numbers and conversion rates you will need to track, measure, and know definitively.

In addition, make sure that you have a SQL quota for each Teleprospector. Track the SQL funnel regularly in order to get an accurate picture of your SQL-to-Closed Deal ratios. Knowing these RRC numbers will help you meet your key sales pipeline and revenue targets.

Download the free CRM Field Mapping Resource here.


Read the book The Radical Pipeline Strategy: How to Grow Pipeline and Revenue by Optimizing Sales Development. This book outlines tested best practices and implementation strategies that I developed while rebooting and building 65 SDR and Inside Sales organizations.

Find out more about SOMAmetrics’ Intelligent Prospecting Platform and get free resources on our website at www.somametrics.com.

Navigating Complex Sales: Build a Sales Development Team to Support Pipeline Growth

complex sales cover

Companies that have complex solutions have additional challenges in meeting their revenue targets due to obstacles or delays. This is a major problem that many of our clients struggle with. SOMAmetrics specializes in helping clients address a number of issues related to complex sales. This article discusses some important points executives should think through when it comes to generating sales pipeline for complex solutions.

For discussion purposes, we will define complex sales as those that typically target large organizations (Fortune 2000 companies and government entities); poses significant perceived risk and cost for the customer; involves, at the very least, a handful of key stakeholders besides the final economic decision maker (i.e. CEO, CFO, CIO, a CXO); entails a complex sales process and decision making process; and usually comes about as a result of a company or division-wide initiative.

Assessing the Prospecting Process

To complicate things further, different titles may be in charge of the same initiative or drive in a given sales environment. This makes it difficult to determine where to begin the prospecting process. Hence, a complex sale involves research over time to uncover the moving parts and weave together a coherent sales strategy or assessment. The following are a few examples of information that this assessment may address:

  1. What is the driving issue/initiative behind the need?
  2. Who are the key stakeholders involved?
  3. What are the key pain points and concerns of each?
  4. Who has the most urgent pain, and therefore wants to see this taken care of sooner rather than later?
  5. From where is the funding going to come for this? Is it all in one place (department or division), or will it be shared, and how?
  6. Are there multiple decision makers? Who is the final decision maker?

These are only some of the early questions to begin assessing whether there is a viable sales opportunity for your complex solution.

Using Sales Reps to Prospect is NOT a Good Idea

Often, we find that companies rely on their field sales reps to find viable opportunities within large, complex organizations.

We don’t think this is a good idea. This task differs greatly from what sales reps are expert at: calling on prospects who have agreed to see the sales rep. Prospecting, however, requires making 10-15 dials just to reach John Doe, who might not even be the right person to start with. Then, John may only have time for a quick conversation and suggest the rep call Jane Smith. Twenty dials later, the rep finally reaches Jane, who adds more to the story and suggests calling Mike.

And this is only the first round of calls; there will be follow-up calls to multiple stakeholders to find out more about one or more issues.

It is not unreasonable to expect that 500+ dials might be made into a single account to determine whether there is value in moving forward.

The question here is: who is better at quickly and cost-effectively uncovering viable sales opportunities? A field rep that will make 10-20 dials a day, or a seasoned SDR who makes 70-80 dials daily?

The SDR Solution to Complex Sales

Our experience repeatedly shows that field salespeople engage in early prospecting ONLY when their pipeline dries up. This, in turn, makes it very difficult for companies to reliably forecast what their revenues will look like over 3-4 months out. Since the sales cycle for most complex sales products tends to be six months or more, this means that a company cannot reliably predict revenues outside of the current quarter.

Our recommendation is to use SDRs to build the sales pipeline for the sales team (Read “5 Reasons Why Your Sales Development Team Is Failing“). This avoids the yo-yo effect and makes revenue targets more reliable. In this scenario, a senior SDR will do all of the initial research to gather the coherent sales opportunity story and pass it on as a Sales Qualified Lead. This opportunity story is a synopsis of the key initiatives; which departments or divisions are directly involved; who the key stakeholders are; which CXO is driving the initiative; what the individual pains, concerns, and desires of the various stakeholders are; and what a reasonable timeframe looks like for making a final decision on the acquisition of the solution.

Choosing the Right Person for a Complex Sales Role

The right type of Sales Development Rep (use our free Top SDR Interview Questions Resource) to successfully perform this would have the following qualities:

  • Has experience as a quota-bearing field or inside sales professional who understands sales, particularly complex sales into enterprise account
  • Is very comfortable and successful at accessing and selling to CXOs
  • Has the right temperament to work alone as well as to enjoy interacting with others
  • Is an avid learner, always trying to learn more about his/her industry and what the pain-points and new concerns for the targeted CXO’s are
  • Understands that this is painstaking work that will require hundreds of dials and many dozens of conversations that may or may not lead anywhere, and still enjoys the hunt
  • Is results-driven and has a strong sense of urgency

This is a specialty area, and the right person must align to the job. Start with Sr. SDRs while you grow your SD Organization. Once you have nailed the messaging, processes, and metrics, you can scale with SDR’s who are less experienced in this role.


Read the book The Radical Pipeline Strategy: How to Grow Pipeline and Revenue by Optimizing Sales Development. This book outlines tested best practices and implementation strategies that I developed while rebooting and building 65 SDR and Inside Sales organizations.

Find out more about SOMAmetrics’ Intelligent Prospecting Platform and get free resources on our website at www.somametrics.com.

Grow Sales Pipeline and Drive Revenue Growth

grow sales pipeline

Grow Your Sales Pipeline to Fix Missed Revenue Targets

How can you grow your sales pipeline and consequently fix missed revenue targets? If you think of your total revenue operations, it is likely fed by four major revenue streams:

  1. New orders from totally new logos
  2. Reorders or renewals from current customers
  3. Upgrades, up-sales, and add-ons from existing customers
  4. New orders from entry into brand new markets.

In all but one (reorders/renewals), the key challenge is how to grow a sales pipeline of sufficient size and quality. It is also finding one that consists of informed decision makers who are actively searching for a solution within budget.

The fundamental thesis of this blog is that missed revenue targets happen primarily as a result of missed pipeline targets.

grow sales pipeline

If you are skeptical about this, consider the following research findings:

  1. New customer acquisition cost is increasing by an average of 10% or more each year.
  2. Over 100 million new businesses are started each year, worldwide.
  3. Partly as a consequence of that, nearly 80% of B2B companies change vendors within 24 months.
  4. Nearly half of sales reps (49%) fail to meet their quota—a trend that has been consistent for some 10 years now.


If we put the stats together, the story looks like this: competition is intensifying and competitors are stealing customers. So, we have to find opportunities for new customers just to grow at the same rate. This is forcing us to spend more marketing and sales dollars to acquire new customers, creating a spiraling cost loop.

Furthermore, we continue to design, invest, and build our sales pipeline management the same way we did in the 20th Century—and our sales reps struggle to meet their sales quotas.

Things were definitely different then. Buyers more or less welcomed sales calls because salespeople were a source of valuable information about what competitors were doing and so on. Then internet boom allowed for buyers to research this data for themselves, so sales teams became more a nuisance than an asset and were mostly shut out.

Fast forward to the 2010s, content and social media became king as B2B companies began to invest in their marketing efforts. And then the global pandemic hit and sealed the deal of a new sales process. Now, marketing is everything: ABM, demand gen, growth marketing, etc.

B2B Bottleneck

So, B2B companies created a bottleneck, an operational bow-tie with large Marketing spend and large Sales spend. They gave practically no spend or thought to what connects the two big operations, namely Sales Development.

Here is one way to think about this. Your marketing department is tight on time and resources on sales performance (as much as you spend there). So, marketing campaigns end up going after the Total Addressable Market (TAM) instead of a more focused Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM). You end up getting leads that are too small, too big, or in geographies you can’t really sell for whatever reason.

None of these will ever go on your sales pipelines, and yet these “leads” pass on to your sales reps. They become overwhelmed by all these leads just to find the ones that they can actually work with.

The Problem with your Sales Pipeline

So, you hire Sales Development Reps (SDRs) to help with that. Only, you hire junior people, provide them with basic training and lots of technology, and let them loose on these new prospects.

The problem now is different. You have someone who was just a few months ago working at Starbucks calling on a senior decision maker who has been doing this for 10, 15 years. It’s like a high schooler saying to an NBA player, “Let me show you some slick moves…”. It’s not going to work out well.

So, all the money you spent on your marketing gets throttled down in the middle. Good lead generation slips away because those tasked with following up and setting appointments simply don’t know how to execute social selling or talk to these people.

As a result, your sales organization has to do its own prospecting. They spend less time moving those in the sales pipeline towards a close. The end result is missed quotas and missed sales opportunities.

The Solution

The solution is to design your company’s revenue operations in such a way that you avoid the bottleneck. This allows revenues to smoothly flow from Marketing all the way to Sales, facilitated by SDRs who grow the sales pipeline for the sales organization.

Sales Development is a strategic revenue operations partner—equal to Marketing and Sales. It needs to be headed by a senior strategic thinking leader, and its members must be capable of talking at the level of senior decision makers in global companies.

Most importantly, your Sales Development organization has to grow the sales pipeline (not meetings) and should be compensated the same way your sales organization is—by how much it contributes to revenues. It’s time to really rethink our revenue chain, and redesign it from the ground up to meet 21st Century sales needs.