Janis Zech: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab. I'm here with Philip, and today's guest is us. Yeah. We're actually doing another solo episode, partially because we like it and partially because we were very lazy inviting guests in the last couple of weeks. But actually, that's stopping. We have a killer lineup for the next couple of weeks. Lots of fantastic guests already confirmed and scheduled. So you'll we'll be back to our old rhythm. Today, we wanna talk about deal and pipeline visibility. It's one of those topics that every go to market team touches. And as RevOps, it's our job to enable deal and pipeline visibility. And it's actually really, really hard to do because according to a stat from Gartner, around fifty three percent of sales teams state that they have poor CRM data. That's actually more than half the people think that the CRM data is bad. And obviously, data is often siloed in different systems, be it, you know, your email and calendar data, it's nested within your CRM, the conversation data might live somewhere else, you might have some enrichment data or contact data insights and intelligence that live in another system. So data quality is often a huge prerequisite and challenge to deal and pipeline visibility. So we'll start there. Then we'll go into deal insights and how to identify you know, deals at risk, and then we'll go into pipeline analytics. So these are the three main topics. With that, Philip, what are some of those areas? I mean, you see a lot of setups. Right? Like, within our customer base, prospects, people we talk to, like, what are some of the challenges on the on the data side?

Philipp Stelzer: Yep. I think, like, a simple way to break it down, I think, is and to put it into four different categories. So number one for me, and this is always what we try to solve first for our customers, is activity data. So making sure that you capture every email, every meeting, every contact that your reps are in touch with, and making sure that there is transparency and that this gets captured reliably. And reliably, I really mean, you know, you wanna have, like, ninety nine percent or more of those activities stored in your CRM so you can run reports on it, automations, flows, and so on. It's really fundamental, data that you need to have for both tactical and strategic decisions, so activity data is, always number one. Then the second topic or second bucket, I would say, is the conversation data. There's obviously been, like, you know, huge changes and improvements here over the last, you know, ten years or so in our in the way that, you know, companies and technology capable to capture that conversation data, and it's only becoming, you know, better and better. We also launched our own conversation intelligence solution just earlier this year, and it's, you know, growing quite crazy. So just making sure that you have a good understanding of what is actually discussed in those meetings, not just just capture the that the meeting itself happened, but also the content of that meeting. That that in itself, I think, is extremely valuable. And then the challenge here is to turn that into structured data back into your CRM. This is, I think, where a lot of solutions, you know, are still not providing a huge amount of value. So it's great if you have those recordings, but, like, the real challenge is to make sure that, you know, the next steps that are discussed in that meeting, sort of, like, the the discussion points that would have an impact on the projected amount, the stage that the opportunity is currently in, the happiness of the account that you're talking to, and so on. So I think it's, you know, part one, capture that conversation. Part two, turn that transcript data that you're able to create from that into actual updates and information that is, you know, structured in your CRM so you can retrieve it and again, use it for reporting automations, flows, tactical reviews, strategic reviews, and so on. So for me, you know, those are like the two key things that every business should review, how good of a job they are doing there at the moment.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. Very closely related to that is your qualification and sales methodologies. So often connected to the conversations, I would say. Right? Like, and also your activity data. Right? The contacts, whether you're multithreaded is often sitting within some email threads or calendar events that never get really manually created within your CRM. So ensuring that you have good process compliance for your MEDDIC, MEDDPIC, SPICED, or command of methods fields you might have in your CRM to ensure that this is not just in the head of the individual reps, but it's collaborative. It can be used in deal reviews. And again, I think CI tools, conversation intelligent tools, AI notetaker tools play a big role there because they can basically take the transcript data and extract those key insights and then populate it in a structured manner. Obviously, it could also be unstructured, right? So that's also absolutely possible. And if you surface it in the right way, it can be still very valuable. But making sure that you have not only the data, but also the understanding why this actually is important is obviously super crucial. And I think it's fairly easy to pick a sales methodology or qualification framework. It's really hard to operationalize it because it's a big change management effort. And then often it's also connected to your stage exit criteria, which I think would add as the kind of fourth bucket. Right? Like, so what are the key fields that you require at a given stage? And this can be lead stages, account stages, opportunity stages. Right? Like, this isn't exclusively bound to the opportunity object here, but I would say really thinking about process compliance. When do you open an opportunity? What is a qualified opportunity? What's discovery, demonstration of value, POC or procurement stage, whatever stages you have? And then ensuring that there's guardrails in place that don't slow your reps down, but at the same time give the information needed so that you can run the business in a reliable and repeatable manner. Right? And I think these are the four areas we see again and again. And, yeah, there's obviously a lot more to this. Right? If you have all the data here, it doesn't mean we have all the deal insights, which is the next topic we're gonna talk about. But those things are table stakes, and they're super crucial to ensure that you can actually have good deal pipeline forecast management in place.

Philipp Stelzer: Right. Yeah. And just two more comments I want to make. One is you know, capturing all of this data doesn't mean that you need to create a hundred custom fields in your CRM. Particularly in Salesforce, a lot of this is covered by standard fields, and we generally recommend the use of standard fields in these cases. If needed, then, do create more custom fields to cater to it, obviously, for specific sales methodologies like medics, bias, and so on. I think you would need to create a few custom fields, but don't overdo it. Right? Keep it keep it small. Keep it as minimum as possible, because, like, the more you add here, the more complexity you introduce into your CRM system, and that's not the goal here. Right? I think there's a lot of things you can calculate from some basic standard fields, and that's a good way to handle it. So don't add, like, ten currency fields on top of the amount fields. No one's winning because of this, and your sales motion is not necessarily going to become better. That that's just one comment, and I'm just mentioning this because it's we see it all the time. It's a huge problem, and it creates, like, a lot of tech debt for revenue operations, the admins, and so on. So change management is becoming even harder. The other comment I wanna make is just on, you know, capturing that data. A lot of, like, our most successful customers, they have also an incentive structure around making sure that the data is in the CRM. So maybe that is something worth considering. Some customers, they basically incentivize reps on filling in those fields reliably. It's not like a huge bonus, right, but it's a small one. Others work the other way, so they they detract bonus. If you don't or, like, the variable component if you don't fill in all the all the gaps in the data. So, also, something to consider. Right? So change management, it involves a lot of, like, people to and and it also involves education to make sure that everyone understands why this is important and what benefits there are for the for the organization, for the business. So just two short comments I wanted to just add in here.

Janis Zech: Sounds like a episode we could talk about that. There's probably many different opinions on this topic.

Philipp Stelzer: For sure. That's for sure. Yeah.

Janis Zech: Let's assume you have, you know, eighty percent of the most important data. Right? And you're well set up there. I mean, I think we've all lived through this reality where your pipeline coverage looks pretty good, and then in week five, six, seven, it starts to slip and stall. And suddenly, your pipeline coverage evaporates, And this very often is a reality of poor deal reviews and deal insights. And so the question is really like, how do you understand whether a particular deal is healthy to either execute against that deal at best quality or to have a conversation around risk and mitigation of risk. So I think that's really where we're coming from. And yeah, only forty seven percent of forecasted deals close on time according to a study from CSO Insights. I think that's pretty crazy if you think about it. And so, yeah, there's like ten deal signals we wanna go through and, you know, just share. And these are not fancy things, to be honest, but I think it's less about being fancy. It's about doing the few things really well. And so the first one everybody knows is clear next steps. And I'm not talking about the next step field here. It's about really understanding what are the next steps of the deal. Let's say we are in legal. Do we know by when do we get the red line back? Do we know what the next step is after that? Do we know who's involved? Do we know what the different stakeholders are that need to be involved on the security and legal side to then go through the entire procurement process and successfully sign it? And this is just one example of next step. It's often multiple steps that you have to think ahead and to know when, with whom, and what you're actually doing.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. I think this is a it's a really good one. Just don't write down, like, the next steps that you have planned. What are the steps the steps next step needed to close the deal. Right? So the other one the second one is activity levels. So just to have a good overall understanding of the volume of activities, you know, how many messages go back and forth, incoming, outgoing, and then also doing, you know, periodic checks on the quality of that is, I think, also important. So you wanna look at the overall volume, the aggregated data on a per rep account opportunity basis, but you also wanna check the actual content. Obviously, not everything, but, again, that's why you wanna have that data in your CRM, and you wanna have it easily accessible so you can actually do that.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Let's assume you have it properly mapped. Right? Like, I think one thing that is super helpful for reps, for example, is just to have a view where they see when was the last meeting, when was the last email, when is the next meeting, what's my email reply rate by deal. Right? And, again, this goes back to the data capture side. Right? If you don't have it properly captured and mapped, very hard to do. And this would be then more of, like, a a deal signal for deal execution rather than maybe deal deal inspections. Closely closely connected to that. I think third signal here is multithreading. So having a good understanding of, you know, who what are the stakeholders you're talking to, Who are they? Do you have all of them that you need? Are you only talking to, I don't know, like a business analyst, for example? Is this really the person that you can sell to? Maybe actually need to talk to the director level. Does this match your ICP? And so on. So I think just understanding multi threading actually will also, you know, has like a lot of impact on, you know, what actually are the next steps, for example, and maybe just like a fourth signal because I think it fits well. Do you have the access to power that you need? So the the multi threading part both on the email and meeting side is a great, like, gateway in order to understand access to power. So and and for that, of course, you also want to, you know, make sure that you have the contacts properly set up in your CRM. Hopefully, you're automatically creating them, attaching to them them to the account, to the opportunity that is the relevant one there. So yeah. Because in the end, if you don't have the decision maker available, if you don't talk to them, right, you'll never have, like, a proper handle on the deal. So that is always key to to work towards.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. And I think multithreading in the current times are just it's just super crucial. Right? Like, there's very few deals that get bought if you're not multithreaded these days. And then it obviously also comes down to the depth of your relation, right? Like how many meetings, how many emails have you had with different folks? Do you have like a coach or a champion? I mean, think about how do you surface that in a way that a manager looks at the deal and immediately knows that that's actually the case. Right? That's essentially what we're alluding to here in terms of visibility. Because, yes, I mean, probably the rep knows how many meetings he or she had with the different stakeholders, but you have really properly mapped out the buying committee. Do you really understand the velocity and depth of the relationship? And again, going back to the contact capture, the email meetings, and conversation capture, a lot of data is in there. And then this question, how do you surface it in the workflow so that when there's a deal review, the manager just looks at it and knows, okay, that's really, you know, what's happening as it's it's so important.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think statistics have shown that multithreaded deals are a lot more likely to close than non multithreaded deals.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. I always get excited when there's five people in a meeting because, you know, it means that obviously, like, it's more exhausting, right, to manage five people in a meeting, but at the same time, chances that you talk to the right people is a lot higher. So, yeah, always a good sign.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think the the fifth point here in terms of deal signal is is there, like, a very good understanding of the current pain points of the prospect? Have these pain points been articulated in a good way? Were you able to, you know, quantify them? And the reason why this is important, I think without pain, there's no urgency. Right? Without urgency, you know, like, the deal will just drag on. Maybe it's gonna close even if there is no pain and urgency. Right? But let's be realistic, you won't be really able to forecast that deal reliably. So that's a really, really important point in order to be able to actually put it into a proper forecast category. And if the prospect has a hard time with articulating the pain, then this is also an opportunity to challenge them and actually work with them on identifying their pain and coming up with a solution. So only because the prospect isn't able to articulate it, it doesn't mean they don't have a pain, but maybe they need some support. Worst case, obviously, they don't have any pain, then chances are pretty low that you're gonna close this. I think pain, understanding the negative impact that they're currently feeling, that is key in order to properly sell what your product actually can offer.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. That's such an important point. Right? Like, cost of inaction. And then I think what, like, is so crucial to remember is that there's this buying committee, and they have a lot of conversations if they're actually in market. Right? And you're not part of those conversations. So I think this, like, pain and cost of inaction is actually something that translates back into the organization. And if you think about I think this really becomes very clear when people spend half a million or five million. Nobody spends five million Well, okay, there may be some exceptional companies, but very few companies spend five million on a deal if they don't really have strong severe pain. And so I think this is just a different level. And there's different types of pains. But yeah, I think it's just such an important point and to surface that within deal reviews, within the deal segments is just super crucial. Maybe one more I want to mention is champion validation. I think we brought that up already. Do you have a coach or a champion? Do you have somebody who can basically project manage the entire project, really wants to solve it, has the pain, sees the cause of an action, and has the authority also to get you to the economic buyer or decision maker to ensure that this is actually set up for success.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think it's sometimes really hard for managers to actually know whether it's a real champion or not. And then I think, you know, this this is something where I think you need a conversation, actually. You you cannot just surface it based on pure digital data, but still, right, like, I guess, the, you know, things like how fast do they respond or, you know, do you are you on a, you know, SMS or, like, DM basis with them? And can you call them pretty much any time? You know, do they pick up the phone after the group demo? Things like that. Right? Like, there's bunch of things, and there's a lot of folks who've talked a lot about champions, so I won't go deeper into this, but obviously super crucial topic.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, really tough one to validate. Seventh deal signal, just to keep track of it, days and stage and the total push count for, you know, moving the close date into the next quarter or next month or whatever your sales velocity or sales cycle typically is. Pretty simple one, to be honest. You can create custom fields in order to track that. Weflow, for example, does it automatically for you. And I think it's just like a good signal, Like, if a deal has been moved, like, forty times, then, you know, maybe you have to reiterate how you set close dates. If this is, like, a common thing in the organization, so that's obviously really helpful. And then days in stage is also important because what you wanna do is you actually wanna track what's the average time and stage for an opportunity, you know, for those that actually move to close one at some point in the future. That allows you to create internal benchmarks, and you can then use these benchmarks and to then create, you know, signals and warnings and so on. So having a good grasp and understanding of this actually allows you to coach better and to react quickly. Right? So you need to have those benchmarks. Otherwise, you won't know what is good and what is bad, basically.

Janis Zech: Hundred percent. Yeah. Maybe an eighth one, and then you can do the the last two ones. Competitive situation. I I think, also super important that in the discovery in the beginning, relatively early, as early as possible, you try to gauge whether you actually are in a competitive situation because this really can change the velocity of a deal. Like, more competitors mean there's a bit more pressure, there's more urgency around the decision making, but it also means that your buyer or, like, the, the prospective buyer, like your prospect essentially, will probably have, like, a much better better understanding of the current landscape markets, basically, where you're operating in, than someone who's more exploring and it needs to be more educated. So if they talk to like five, six different vendors, they will know what are the pros and cons of these solutions, what are the features that are available. But it's also an opportunity to keep educating them in that direction to highlight where you are maybe better, where maybe you are worse, and to create transparency and trust. So it's a real opportunity to understand whether you are in a competitive situation or not. And it's always good to know, right, because, like, if you lose a deal because they, you know, talk to, like, three different vendors, other other vendors, and they went with another one, and you didn't know that you were in a competitive situation, there's a lot of things that you basically missed out on being able to do during the sales process. So simple one simple one to do. Most people are pretty transparent about it. I think there's no real benefit for a prospect to hide that. So always good to to ask them.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. And typically something you find in the conversation data, not in the activity data. So just extracting it and then, yeah, making sure that you populate those fields. And then the last last two are budget and urgency and procurement hurdles. I mean, again, I think we won't go into much further details on those. But maybe to sum up, right, these deal signals are essentially not all depending on, you know, the activity conversation data. Some do depend actually on your key fields or compliance data, your exit criteria. But all of those essentially let's assume you have all of those. You can start creating warnings with automations and alerts. Right? So you go from a reactive to a proactive mode. It typically informs the way you execute deals and then also how you review deals. And all this then in terms of visibility is layered up to the next level, which is essentially the health of the pipeline, which is the last chapter we're going to talk about.

Janis Zech: So how do you get good pipeline visibility? Which in our mind is now let's assume you have the list of deals. You look at the list of deals. You can very quickly see this one was pushed five times. This has been in the stage for sixty days and everything else has just been in the stage for five days. You know those are kind of the bad apples. But then how do you make sure that you actually know that on a more aggregated level to understand how healthy your pipeline is? And we have a few areas where we wanna go through and talk about those as well. Maybe, Philip, you kick it off and then we'll take it from there.

Philipp Stelzer: Sure. Sure. Yeah. So I think, obviously, the activity data, conversation data, framework data, all of this is good. I think for most of these reports, you actually don't need to have that many fields that you're tracking. Obviously, make sure that you have field history tracking enabled. Create regular snapshots of your opportunity data and your account data in order to be able to actually do this. If you are not able to set that up yourself, obviously, get professional help. Again, you know, solutions like Weflow automatically capture these snapshots for you. That's part of the service that we are providing, and, it can be of a huge help. Right? Because if you can actually track how things change from one hour to the next hour, from one day to the next day, from one week to the next week, that gives you a lot of insights. So, yeah, basically, let me start with, like, a pretty simple one. So just understanding the stage conversion rates. So if you understand sort of like how many days something like a deal stays in a specific stage, how many of those deals moved to close one? Where are, like, there are big sort of, like, break off points between the different stages? That's a pretty simple analysis to do, but the impact is huge because what you can basically say is, okay. You understand where are there, like, potentially big issues in my sales process. So if it always if you have a huge drop off between stage, I don't know, three and four or five, six, whatever stages you're using, that that obviously indicates that something must be going wrong there. So you need to spend some time and look more closely into it. And I think it's just something where if you don't track that, you're not able to come up with even that strategic insight of understanding that there is a drop off and that you need to do something. And then you can become more tactical and focus on operational aspects of your sales process again. But you need to do these standard analyses like, for example, my case, tracking the stage conversion rates because without it, you simply can't. You cannot make this strategic decision. This is, I think, what assessing pipeline health is all about. So yeah.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. Super important to identify leakage and then identify. And I think one way you can think of pipeline analytics and insights is you obviously have a bunch of different parameters, right, like your different territories or your different geos, your different segments or your different teams, right? And maybe there's no holistic problem here, but the European team has a huge drop off on the discovery stage. And maybe that's because there is a specific competitor that always beats them in the discovery stage. So that's something you want to know. And this is something you then can address and basically take back and think about, is that the right investment maybe? And so I think that's essentially where we're coming from. So think always about these different parameters. You should be able to slice and dice the data, obviously, drill down what is driving the data in terms of deals. The second one that is, I think, really important is how many qualified opportunities are created. That's essentially the starting point. We recorded a podcast episode with Robert from Camunda, ex CRO at Camunda. And I think we talked for five or ten minutes about what is a qualified opportunity. And I really love that because this is actually where a lot of your core metrics start. So when you basically open a qualified opportunity, disclaimer, this can also be stage two as the qualified opportunity. You can have a stage one that is a discovery stage and is actually not a qualified opportunity stage and then you just track it from stage two. There's enough people or stage zero, there's enough people who do that. But I think the point being, you need to have a very clear entry criteria for opportunities created. And then this is obviously something that essentially helps you understand how you're tracking. You should look at obviously the development over time. You should look at seasonality if you have that data. You should look at the different kind of sources and also conversion rates for those sources to have an idea of how well you're doing on the top of funnel side so that you ensure that there's enough top of funnel that then feeds into close won bookings.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. I think really key here, qualified, right? Just don't track all opportunities you're creating. Definitely have that qualification stage. Otherwise, your data will be a lot less valuable, I think. It's it's a really important filter. Yeah. Let me add, like, a third one and it kind of, like, feeds into opportunities created is understanding pipeline coverage. So what is your current coverage for this quarter, and how are you on track in terms of creating coverage for the next quarter or, like, the next year, like, the quarter after next quarter, and so on? I think this is always crucial. Don't don't follow, like, these generic benchmarks that some companies like to communicate. Like, you need to have coverage of 2x or 3x and so on. I think this is a dangerous mistake to fall into. So I think you need to understand what coverage you need to kind of, like, get to in order to, you know, reach your booking and revenue goals. It's different for every business. Even, you know, some companies have, like, a coverage of zero point eight only, but they still always make their end of year goal. So, you know, even that is something that, you know, theoretically is, it doesn't mean that it's bad. But, also, to be clear, without understanding what coverage you actually need to have, how would you know that you are lagging behind in terms of opportunities created? So this is, you know, really, really important to understand. Okay. In order to achieve two million dollars in revenue, I need to have a coverage of three million or four million, five million, or maybe just one point eight million or whatever. Right? If you don't know that, you don't know that, and then you will not know whether you'll lag behind. So, take that serious, but don't follow generic industry benchmarks.

Janis Zech: Yeah. A hundred percent. K. Next one is sales cycle length. Obviously, super crucial metric. Right? Like, There's another metric we'll talk about. This pipeline velocity and sales cycle length goes straight into it. And, yeah, sales cycle length is obviously, again, often different by the geo segment team. The goal is always to shorten the sales cycle length. So thinking about ways how you can shorten it. But really understanding I think this is all about understanding the reality and then you can basically decide on what to do with it. But yeah, basically, yeah, how long does it take on average to go from qualified opportunity to close one? And yeah, how many days do you need? And again, if you think about the argument Philip made, disqualified opportunity topic is just super crucial for that because if you start measuring on your stage zero, then obviously your sales cycle length looks very different. The other piece is if you have a lot of just stalling opportunities in your pipeline, that's another big problem. And this is another big, big reality. I think we all know that stalling opportunities, whether they are slipping or just hanging out there and doing nothing because reps don't want to close loss them, they'll basically have a negative impact on the actual sales cycle length, which I would say is a huge problem because then you cannot trust your data. So this whole pipeline bloat, unhealthy pipeline, unhealthy deals sitting in your pipeline that never make it anywhere, they'll skew your numbers significantly. And I think in sales cycle lengths, it's one of those metrics that, you know, are severely affected by that.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there's a lot more of these reports. Yep. You can go into velocity, pipeline velocity, pipeline win rate, average time and stage, understanding sort of, like, you know, like the flow of, like, of the opportunities that you have currently in one category, What happens by the end of the quarter? Have they been close won, close lost? Were they pushed? All all of these things, right, are extremely important, to track them. I think none of them are a silver bullet. You need to look at a lot of different reports in order to understand how your business is doing. You know, as mentioned, pipeline coverage is not necessarily everything, for example, or, you know, just looking at win rate, just looking at stage conversion rates, obviously, is not gonna cut it. So I think, you know, finding that balance between making strategic decisions, spending time on strategic assessments, and also the operational tactical piece of it, I think, is very crucial. But in the end, in order to do any of this, you need to have a good data foundation. You need to capture the activity data. You need to capture the conversation data. You need to capture the data around the methodologies you actually want to apply, and you need to track all these key CRM fields that actually allow you to make these calculations. So it's really, like, in the end, the mix of it, and you don't need to have everything right from the beginning. It's fine if you only have, like, three or four, you know, or maybe just two, like, basic reports to get started with, and then you work your way, you know, up from there. And as your business is gonna mature and become more complicated over time, I'm sure, so will be your, like, pipeline health assessment and deal review assessment. So and everything will become more complicated anyway. I think that's just the way things go. So, you know, spend time on, you know, keeping things simple and clean. We are definitely sure that it will always pay off in the end to make these investments, even, you know, if it takes some time to collect the data and getting everything into, like, a a good state. So, yeah, you know, I think, Janis, you put a lot of effort into creating these beautiful cheat sheets. There is also one that covers all these different reports both for deal reviews as well as pipeline health and more, also speaking about conversation intelligence in more detail. So, yeah, I encourage all of you to check out our viral superstar, Janis, on LinkedIn. If you don't follow him yet, definitely do because there's always, like, a nice knowledge bomb getting dropped about once a week, I think. Not trying to create any pressure here, Janis, but I think let's say every two weeks. Great. Well, then have a great start into Q3. That's all from my side. Thank you very much.