Dailah and Austin highlight several key metrics that RevOps should implement and monitor to assess pipeline health. These include high push counts, stage aging, and deals that have stalled in early stages for too long. Why? Regularly reviewing these indicators allows RevOps teams to quickly identify and address areas of concern, ensuring that the pipeline remains robust and reflective of actual sales activity.
Understanding these metrics allows for more accurate forecasting and better resource allocation downstream, like customer success headcount. It can also help surface enablement needs. Perhaps your reps might not truly understand how to stage their deals to support a healthy forecast. There’s also the chance that some reps are sandbagging opportunities in Salesforce.
There's also the odd but pervasive belief by salespeople that they will be penalized for marking opportunities closed lost - either by losing the account ownership or a "Closed Lost Rate" metric. Once you’ve identified the causes behind any reluctance to mark deals as closed-lost, you can recenter your attention on forecasting realistic deals and identifying opportunities that may require additional support.
"If you have inconsistencies in how your sales team is using and managing their sales deals, then it's going to make it really hard to figure out where to pour resources." - Dailah Lester
Jump to the clip to learn how forecasting problems can cause a big mess for staffing and pipeline coverage.
Align Salesforce stages with the buyer’s journey to ensure that each stage is clearly defined with specific exit criteria. This should mean that when a deal is in “Stage Three - Demo,” for example, everyone knows what work was done to get there and what needs to be done to move to the next stage. Remember to always date stamp your stage changes in Dynamics and Saleslforce so that you can understand your conversion rates and even identify reps that might need coaching to progress their deals. Yes, we know there's an opportunity history table, but it's extremely hard to repoprt on in-app. Creating flows flattens your reporting structure and opens up more dashboard options.
The panel debated whether sales reps should be allowed to move deals to previous stages. Austin suggests that flexibility is possible in smaller organizations where deal dynamics can change rapidly. However, Dailah argues for stricter controls, suggesting that backward stage movements should be managed by your RevOps people, who can wipe out stage dates to ensure accurate conversion rates.
“If you think you got ahead of yourself, it might be worth backing up a few stages. But if new signals are telling you that the deal might not close this quarter or next, it might be time to just unqualify the deal.” - Austin Brusse
Camela argued for a middle-case, allowing for managers to correct deals to encourage coaching and to continuously educate salespeople about why Closed Lost shouldn't be a scary outcome. Managing scenarios where deals might skip or revert to earlier stages should be approached from a practical perspective. Implementing checks and balances, such as automated stage validation rules, can help ensure that these movements do not compromise reporting accuracy.
Jump to the clip to hear about Dailah’s approach to stage reversion at Seeq.
Austin describes how automation tools like Rattle are used to send Slack notifications to prompt sales reps and managers for pipeline updates and deal risk alerts. These tools help sales reps keep their opportunities current, reducing the manual effort required to maintain pipeline hygiene. By integrating the tools already used in daily workflows, RevOps teams can ensure that pipeline data is always up-to-date, leading to more accurate forecasting.
Automation not only helps maintain data accuracy but also frees up sales reps to focus on selling rather than administrative tasks. This approach supports a more efficient sales process and improves overall pipeline management.
“Reps have a lot of work. So sending them alerts directly in Slack, right when it’s needed, is striking while the iron’s hot and will drive a lot more action.” - Austin Brusse
Jump to the clip to find out how Rattle helps with proactive automation.
Dailah shares how tools like Gong are being used to automatically log sales activities and calls into Salesforce. This "passive logging" that runs in the background and requires no intervention by the salesperson ensures that all interactions are captured without additional effort.
When auto-logging your calls, be clear about the keywords that need to be tracked so you can identify the type of call in Salesforce. Organize activities by demos, discovery, evaluation, negotiation—whatever is important to your business, it’s up to you.
“How do we make sellers' lives easier? How do we capture the information we want while meeting sellers where they’re at? Anyone who’s done RevOps knows, that sellers all do things differently.” - Dailah Lester
Jump to the clip to learn how to get the most out of integrating Gong and Salesforce.
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