This year, many B2B firms need help meeting or exceeding their sales and revenue targets. This three-part series outlines high-impact initiatives that can have a durable impact on revenue growth.
“Data, I think, is one of the most powerful mechanisms for telling stories. I take a huge pile of data and try to get it to tell stories.” — Steven Levitt, Co-author of Freakonomics.
Marketing and product teams spend vast amounts of time, energy, and resources defining target markets and their related characteristics so sales teams can pursue the best opportunities to drive revenue and profit growth.
So, what percentage of your sales pipeline should be comprised of your target market “best prospects?”
We’ve observed that disciplined sales teams consistently achieve 60% — 70% of their sales pipeline comprised of the target market’s best prospects.
For typical sales organizations, only 20% -30 % of the sales pipeline consists of the “best prospects,” as marketing and product teams have defined them.
Disciplined sales organizations do three things very well to ensure that the sales pipeline reflects the best prospects :
1. Their CRM data and governance structure are focused on providing meaningful insight to sales, marketing, and leadership teams. They source, manage, and track industry, sub-industry, and other company demographic information that identifies which companies are their best prospects.
- They measure the percentage of their sales pipeline dollars derived from their best prospects versus all other prospects. They know poor and less desirable prospects are inevitable, so they keep tabs on how they consume resources.
3. Sales leaders, operations, and support teams take the opportunity (deal) qualification seriously. They ensure that healthy tension between functions helps prioritize resources and builds the “muscle tone” to say “No” to less desirable opportunities. The more opportunities derived from your target market, the more opportunities you get to qualify and advance through the sales pipeline.
We’ve helped organizations improve sales growth by 20% or more by shifting to measuring Pipeline size from target markets and best prospects and embedding the three points above into their sales and marketing team motions.
You can start the shift in your organization by asking your sales leaders and sales operations teams — ”What percent of our pipeline reflects opportunities from our target markets and best prospects?” Their answers might surprise you.