FUNDAMENTALS OF SALES

PIPELINE MANAGEMENT
Ken Krogue
President & Founder
InsideSales.com
Matt Heinz
President
Heinz Marketing Inc.
Pete Gracey
COO & Co-founder
AG Salesworks

Introduction
from Ken Krogue
The next time one of your salespeople
yells, Show me the money, shout right
back, Show me the metrics. Effective
sales pipeline management begins with
the right data.
Matt Heinz, Pete Gracey and I put
together a webinar on sales pipeline
management. We show you how to
calculate how many leads and opportunities you need to achieve your sales
goals, and other best practices. We all
get asked about these topics so often
that we decided to package these valuable insights into this ebook.
Matt shares some eye-popping stats that
highlight the value of lead nurturing. He
reminds us that 60 percent to 65 percent
of inbound leads are qualified but not
ready to buy. He provides some practical
tips for treating these leads like longterm prospects and guiding them down
the sales funnel.

Page 2

Matt also offers up a proven framework

for documenting your lead management
process. You can do this by answering a
series of crucial questions, such as: How
does a new lead get assigned? What are
the assignment rules? How will we follow
up on each lead? Whats the follow-up
message? Plus a few more.

I had a lot of fun doing the webinar with

Matt and Pete. Theyre masters at sales
pipeline management. Ive learned a lot
from both of them. Im sure youll find
their sales wisdom useful, too. You can
watch the webinar here.

Pete reveals the power of using social

intelligence to target prospects and
nudge them further down the funnel. He
points out that automated email campaigns arent simply a marketing tactic.
He shows you how your sales team can
take advantage of automated emails to
nurture prospects with relevant content.

Ken Krogue President & Founder,

InsideSales.com

Happy selling,

I walk you through the seven rules for

improving contact ratios with busy decision makers. And we explore ways to
create urgency and leverage trigger
events to close deals faster.

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

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Table of Contents

Page 3

About the Authors5

Published by InsidesSales.com
34 East 1700 South
Provo, Utah 84606
877-798-9633

Pipeline Basics

Copyright 2015 All Rights Reserved

Introduction From Ken Krogue2

Metrics6
People and Problems, Not Products6
Prospect Engagement Funnel7
Leads and Opportunities8
Managing Referral Sources8
Lead Management Process9
Lead Scoring and Steps9

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Table of Contents

Page 4

5 Steps to Managing Your Pipeline

Seven Rules of Contact

What Happens After Success?10

Seven Rules of Contact With Your Pipeline15

Step 1. Tactical Outbound Messaging10

Immediacy15

Step 2. Email Marketing Automation10

Persistency15

Step 3. Fully-Qualified Lead Delivery 11

Optimal Call Times15

Step 4. Closed Loop Feedback 11

Time of Day16

Step 5. ROI Analysis12

Day of Week16
Direct Dial16

Learn the Variables

Caller ID16
Summary & Credits18

Key Players13
ANUM13
Circle of Influence14
Primary Qualifiers14
Urgency14
Trigger Events14

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Page 5

About the Authors

Ken Krogue

Matt Heinz

Pete Gracey

President & founder

President

COO & Co-founder

InsideSales.com

insidesales.com

Ken currently leads the Business Development,

Consulting, Education, Implementation and
Support departments at InsideSales.com. He
brings more than twenty-four years of experience in sales, development and marketing in
both domestic and international markets and
is a weekly contributor to Forbes.com. His
blog is the top-ranked blog in the world on
the topic of inside sales.

Heinz Marketing Inc.

heinzmarketing.com

Matt brings more than fifteen years of marketing, business development and sales
experience from a wide range of organizations, verticals and company sizes. Hes held
leadership positions at Microsoft, Weber
Shandwick, Boeing, The Seattle Mariners,
Market Leader and Verdiem. In 2007, Matt
launched Heinz Marketing to help clients
focus their business and customer opportunities and then scale a plan to execute their
revenue and customer growth.

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

AG Salesworks

agsalesworks.com

Pete founded AG Salesworks back in 2002

with his partner, Paul Alves. Their goal was to
provide technology to companies with high
quality and fully-qualified sales leads. In his
current position, Pete oversees daily operations of AG Salesworks, which includes client
engagement, personnel management, business strategy and across the board data
analysis with long-term strategic planning. He
is a prolific blogger, frequently posting to the
companys website and also contributing to
online video presentations.

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Page 6

Pipeline Basics
Metrics
Sales pipelines begin with the metrics.
Its difficult to manage a sales pipeline
without knowing what you need. We
use a very simple pipeline calculation in
which we take into account questions
like: How many sales do you need? How
many opportunities do you need to get
there? How many leads do you need to
get to that number of opportunities?
I often find companies that have a certain revenue number in mind havent
done the accurate math on how many
opportunities are needed in order to hit
that number. Between 25 and 33 percent
of opportunities in a B2B environment
will close at the expected close date. For
every three to four opportunities, one
will close, and only 5 to 10 percent of
qualified leads will actually turn into an
opportunity. If you do the math, you very
quickly get a sense for the scale of the
work needed.

People and Problems,

Not Products
We need to focus on people and problems, not products. When youre building
a marketing plan, I highly recommend
you do it with five questions that are
fairly straightforward and that focus on
the prospect.
Marketing Plan in 5 Questions
1. What/Who is your target?
2. What do they care about? What outcome are they seeking?
3. Where do you find them?
4. What or who influences them?
5. How do they want to engage and
(eventually) buy?

to know about this person to convert

him into an opportunity? He may be the
direct target you want to get to, but its
also important to understand the entire
ecosystem you are selling into. Everyone
within the company has a different role
with different ideas and approaches to
the same problem. Instead of talking
about your solution, speak to the problem that already exists. Translate your
message into their needs. In some cases,
the company knows it has a problem, in
other cases, it doesnt. If you can educate a company on a problem it didnt
know existed and you can quantify it,
then youre getting somewhere.

At the beginning of any sales or marketing challenge, we at Heinz Marketing ask

ourselves what success looks like and to
whom we are selling. What do we need

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

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Page 7

Pipeline Basics
Prospect Engagement
Funnel
Most companies want to take their prospects, put them in a sales cycle and turn
them into new customers. Marketing tells
us that for inbound leads, only 10 to 15
percent are qualified and ready to buy.
60 to 65 percent are qualified but not
ready to buy.
Most sales and marketing organizations
treat these prospects the same way. They
give all the leads to sales. Sales follows up,
finds that the vast majority are not ready
to buy, and then nothing happens with
that audience. This is where you get into
drip marketing. Nothing fancy involved in
this. Marketing automation is helpful, not
necessary. The important thing is to realize
most prospects are going to be long-term
prospects who need to be nurtured. Twitter, Facebook and other social media can
be used as early relationship builders.

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

Customer Targets (based on persona profiles)

Network / Open Community
Channels: Twitter, Facebook, Blog, LinkedIn
Goal: Drive Registration

Drip Marketing
Channels: Email Newsletters, CRM System
Goal: Drive Active Prospects

Active Sales Cycle

Channels: CRM, 1:1
Goal: Sell

New
Customer

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Page 8

Pipeline Basics
Productivity

There are different stages of an inbound

lead. At Heinz Marketing, weve defined
what it means to be at each of those
stages, and we have a next step and specific action items for sales and marketing
at each stage. Its especially important to
know the difference between a qualified
lead and a new opportunity. Enumerating that difference is the most important
part of driving better sales and marketing alignment.

Managing Referral
Sources
Its important to manage referral
sources. I recommend ranking your
referral partners on a two-part scale. On
a 1-4 ranking, rank their importance to

Importance

Leads and
Opportunities

1. Proactive

2. Reactive

3. Minimal

4. Dark

1. Elite

Monthly meetings
Joint pipeline
Gist
Twitter

Monthly meeting/
call
Gist
Twitter

Bi-monthly call
Gist
Twitter

Quarterly call
Gist
Twitter

2. Good

Bi-monthly
meetings
Joint pipeline
Gist
Twitter

Monthly calls
Gist
Twitter

Quarterly call
Gist

Quarterly call

3. Occasional

Quarterly meetings
Gist

Quarterly call

Email only

Email only

4. Minimal

Email only

Email only

Email only

Email only

you and their level of productivity. What

I mean by importance is, how good are
the leads theyre bringing to you? And
in terms of productivity, how active and
how proactive are they at bringing those
leads to you? With some referral sources
you may just do an email update from

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

time to time. But for referral partners

who bring you elite leads and are proactive about doing it, you may be very
aggressive. You will probably find that
you spend the majority of your time with
the minority of your referral partners.

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Page 9

Pipeline Basics
Lead Management
Process

Lead Scoring and

Steps

I also encourage you to have a strong

sense of what youre going to do with
incoming leads. You need to have a
documented process for what happens
to a lead in each stage. How does it get
assigned? What are the assignment rules
of those leads? Whats the expectation
of how it will be followed up? Whats the
follow-up message? Whos writing that
message? Whos delivering that message? What happens next based on
whatever reaction the prospect has to
that message? It may look like a complicated process, but if you dont have a
process like this, its very difficult to be
sure youre consistently and entirely getting all the value from the leads youre
generating.

Not every lead is created equal. Some

leads will tell you theyre qualified and
ready to buy, some will not. There are
ways you can score leads based on their
response to campaigns and activity with
your content. Even if you dont have marketing automation systems, you can do
basic lead scoring based on responses
to campaigns. And you can do a lot of it
within Salesforce and its campaign tools.
Stepping back and thinking about what
your strategy is for managing the overall
pipeline is what is important. The tools
are merely tools.

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

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5 Steps to
Managing Your Pipeline
What Happens After
Success?
What happens when you are successful?
Imagine your message has gotten out
there. Your campaigns are working and
now you have an active marketplace that
requires you to prospect further. Now
what? There are five things you need
to think about when youre about to
embark on or are currently teleprospecting your ideal customer profile.

Page 10

Step 1. Tactical Outbound Messaging

Before you go looking for fully-qualified opportunities to get on the phone, take
special care deciding what youre actually going to say to them. We call this tactical outbound messaging. When you are thinking about what a fully-qualified lead is,
theres one operative word to keep in mind: pain. Youve got to establish the specific
pains you can solve for a client with your technology and make sure your tactical
outbound messaging is personalized to that pain. Make sure youre using all the
resources at your disposal to know what to say to them and when to say it.
Social intelligence can also be huge in terms of tracking prospects throughout their
careers and leveraging that information. Leverage all the tools that are at your disposal, focus on pain, and create a tight message. This will allow you to get as many
people live on the phone for meaningful conversations as possible.

Step 2. Email Marketing Automation

Organizations are doing an exceptionally good job at the top of the funnel with their
marketing automation solutions. But this great technology, which automates a very
cumbersome process, falls off the map when a lead gets into the hands of a teleprospecting rep. This shouldnt happen. Every one of your reps who is outbounding
should have an individual instance of your marketing automation solutions fixed
into his or her teleprospecting plan. Dont stop incorporating your overall corporate
campaigns just because someone has gotten into the middle stages of your sales

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

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5 Steps to
Managing Your Pipeline
waterfall. Keep the content flowing. Keep the automation in place all the way throughout the process, until theres a point in time where your sales team has indicated that
this person is so close theres no need to be communicating with them in an automated capacity.

Step 3. Fully-Qualified Lead Delivery

None of what Ive mentioned matters if you dont have a tight definition of what a
fully-qualified lead is. Establish within your teleprospecting organization a definition
and adhere to it religiously. At AG Salesworks we talk about having deep and relevant
pain. You must be able to solve the issues within that organization and youve got to
be able to talk to a decision maker. This prospect then needs to voice how much that
pain is costing the company and how much the organization is willing to spend annually to solve those pains. Then, you schedule an introductory conference call between
the teleprospecting rep, the fully-qualified prospect and your sales representative
or account manager. Have your teleprospecting rep on that call and have him or her
introduce your sales rep as the expert that is still needed in this process. After that
call, the sales team should then assume all responsibility for managing that relationship. But its important that you define what a fully-qualified lead is, you stick to it and
you make sure youre helping your salespeople by facilitating that first scheduled call
that you book on their behalf.

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

Page 11

Step 4. Closed Loop

Feedback
While this process is good, it all falls
apart if you dont have closed loop feedback in place. If you dont find out three
critical things from your sales rep about
that first call, you could be in big trouble.
Those three critical things are: Did the
call occur? Was the qualification criteria
valid? and Is there a logical next step in
your sales process? A logical next step in
your sales process is not a follow-up call
in six months. Its an onsite in two weeks.
You want between 70 to 90 percent of
the calls you book to occur. 90 to 100
percent of the information gathered
needs to be validated. In our case, we
leverage InsideSales.com from a call
recording standpoint, so that we can

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5 Steps to
Managing Your Pipeline
back that information up. And then on the next step in the process, 80-90 percent of
the calls that occur with the information validated should have a logical next step. At
AG we term that Stage 1 Pipeline.

Step 5. ROI Analysis

Now youve got to actually close the loop and figure out whether or not youre achieving ROI. There is a way early on in your teleprospecting campaign to figure out
whether youre achieving ROI. In a 90 day period, for every Stage 1 Pipeline opportunity your teleprospecting team generates, assign your organizations average annual
sales ticket or average deal value to that opportunity and total that up over time. At a
minimum, in those first 90 days you need to see at least 50x of your teleprospecting
investment in the form of that Stage 1 Pipeline. Over time you want over 50 percent
of those leads converting to much deeper stages of your sales forecast. And ultimately you have to decide if theres an adequate amount of closed business to justify
the expense.

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

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Page 12

Page 13

Learn the Variables

Key Players
While there is a lot of data to go through,
the variables themselves dont start
with the data. They start with your
key players. Recently we got our best
salespeople in one room, and we were
amazed with what we found. We had
strayed a little bit, but after we dialed
back the results went up again within a
few days. You have to keep your eye on
the ball and listen to your key players.

ANUM
Next you look at the data. What is a formula for a qualified lead? In the old days
it was BANT. However, nowadays starting with the budget is like asking for W2s
on the first date. Its not the appropriate way to qualify early on. DemandGen
said in a 2010 research study for Genius
that only 20 percent of companies even
set annual budgets anymore by which

they make their purchase decisions.

While you need to qualify for money, it
should no longer be your first step. In
the newer model, the ANUM model,
you start with finding the person with
authority to make the decision. Then
comes need. The challenge your salespeople will face is most customers dont
realize they need your product, so you
have to educate. But believe me, if the
need is strong enough, the urgency and

Budget
Authority
Need
Timing

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

the money will appear. Dont fall for

the common methodology of qualification I call the RANDUM model. In this
model there is rarely any need, decision
making, urgency or money built into the
process at all. The ANUM model is the
same methodology you should be using
in your pipeline forecasting. If those
elements are there, you have a way to
manage your pipeline.

Authority
Need
Urgency
Money

Rarely
Any
Need
Decision
Urgency
Money

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Page 14

Learn the Variables

Circle of Influence

Primary Qualifiers

Another critical model is the circle of

influence. There are two little fields in
a database we love. Ones called Title
Type/Level and Title Function. Title Type
displays the level of this decision maker
in his or her organization. Title Function
describes his or her function or what hat
he or she wears. Then theres what we
call the circle of influence around these
decision makers. Everyone around the
decision maker has different needs. We
recommend you take the time to find the
messaging that works for these different
levels and use it appropriately.

InsideSales.com applied this method,

and our salespeople identified 12 primary qualifiers that would bring a 90
percent close rate. Weve analyzed our
own sweet spots, but what are yours?
The only way youll know is to ask your
best salespeople.

Urgency
Now well move to urgency, which
addresses where the customer is in
this continuum. Do they even know you
exist? Thats awareness. Thats what PR
is for. Do they have interest? Thats what
Marketing is for. Have they figured out
their need? Thats what Business Development and Lead Gen and appointment
setters are for. Are they committed to
act? Thats what Sales is for. Which stage

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

are they in and can you move them

along? You shouldnt be handing leads
over to the sales guys that are still at the
interest stage because interest is the
counterfeit of need.

Trigger Events
Some of our favorite companies are
InsideView and LinkedIn because both
companies are great for finding trigger
points. These would be events like hiring
a new CMO. We want to know about
these events in our potential clients. Are
they hiring key players? Have they just
taken money? Are they moving to a new
location? Are they struggling? Miller-Heiman teaches us that there are two really
important areas of motive that cause
action. One is growth and the other is
trouble. One of those has to be present
if you want to cause a trigger event to
occur with a buying decision.

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Page 15

Seven Rules of Contact

7 Rules of Contact
With Your Pipeline
The single biggest obstacle salespeople face is reaching and speaking with
busy decision makers. Only 27 percent of leads ever get contacted. If you
follow the next seven things Im sharing
with you, it is possible for you to contact 92 percent of your leads. Thats a
3.4x increase in results from the same
number of leads.

Immediacy
The average company responds to its
web leads in 39 hours. A few years ago, it
was 48 hours. Best practice is responding within five minutes, what we term
immediacy. If you do so, the odds of
making contact are 100x greater. The
odds of qualifying that lead are 21x
higher. Thats not 21 percent higher,
thats 21x higher. Now this is not just
Internet leads. It works at tradeshows as
well. My sales teams on the floor of the
tradeshow set up appointments for the
following week. If they can, they have
appointments right there at the show.
Do it, and do it now.

Persistency
The average number of phone calls a
salesperson makes before he or she
gives up is about 1.6. In reality, we need

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

somewhere between 6 to 9 phone call

attempts to make contact with a lead. I
recommend six for outbound and nine
for inbound response to web leads. At
that point, your contact rate goes up
to 90 percent. This is the level of value
you will wring out of the calls if you stay
persistent.

Optimal Call Times

This rule derives from a research study
we did in conjunction with FranklinCovey.
In this study, we found that sometimes
its better to wait before responding. In
one example from the study the best
time to respond was actually 3:30 pm
the day after the lead came in. That produced the best results for that company.
But you have to test on an individual
company level to find out what works
for you. Consider putting a field on your
website that asks for the best time to

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Page 16

Seven Rules of Contact

call. Ask people when the best time to
respond is, and theyll tell you.

Time of Day
In our Lead Response Management
Study we found that the best times of
the day to make contact with people are
8:00 in the morning or 4:00 to 5:00 in the
afternoon. If youre holding your sales
meetings at 8:00 in the morning, move
them to lunchtime and your reps will get
much higher contact ratios than they
would otherwise.

Day of Week
Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best
days to reach out if you want to contact
people. Fridays are great for making contact but not for qualifying.

Direct Dial
If youre calling people by their main
front desk number, youre probably not
going to reach them. Really good salespeople learn that on that first round of
calling they should research the direct
dial phone number, and that means
either a desk phone or a cell phone. The
results are a big deal.

Caller ID
If I reach out to you from a blocked, toll
free, or even a long-distance number,
chances are you wont answer. But if I
call you with a local phone number, the
odds of you answering are 57.8 percent
higher than with those other numbers.
InsideSales.com has a product thats
called LocalPresence that allows you to
call with a local Caller ID. People want to
deal with people nearby.

InsideSales.com | Heinz Marketing | AG Salesworks

38%

Increase In
Contact Rates
with

LocalPresence
Learn More
Have more conversations,
not just dials

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Page 17

Summary & Credits

When managing your pipeline, its important to understand your
metrics. How much work is actually needed to reach your goals?
Once you know that, remember to focus on the problems and the
people, not your products. Look at the whole ecosystem you are
selling to, and know that most leads will need long-term nurturing.
Define what a fully-qualified lead is, and have specific action items
for each stage of an inbound lead. Find your best referral sources,
and focus your efforts on them. Know what to do with your incoming leads, and create a way to score them. And, most importantly,
take a step back and look at your strategy. Being aware of your current strategy and working to improve your pipeline management is
crucial. The tools you use to get there are not.

CONTENT
Ken Krogue |
www.kenkrogue.com
Matt Heinz |
www.heinzmarketing.com
Pete Gracey |
www.agsalesworks.com
WRITERS
Mary Kremer |
COPY EDITOR
Alex Orton |
DESIGNER
Scott Humphries |

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