Hacking Sales: How to Build and Manage Your Best Sales Pipeline

Sales is an art and a science. Therefore sales management is filled with misconceptions. One major misconception is the ability to control revenue. As a sales rep or sales manager, you cannot control revenue. You cannot just go out and order revenue as if it was a delicious cheese pizza.

As a sales rep or sales manager what you can control is your activities, your objectives, and what you focus on. The Sales Metrics Chain defines how your activities flow into your objectives and how those objectives impact your business results.

To demonstrate the Sales Metrics Chain let’s say we want to increase top line revenue by 3%. How would we go about that since we can’t directly control revenue? How many new customers do we need to increase revenue by 3%? Let’s say that to increase revenue by 3% we need to secure 4 new customers per quarter. And how do we get 4 new customers per quarter? We need to do 16 more prospecting calls per quarter. And this, in a nutshell, is how the Sales Metrics Chain works. The chain flows both top-down and bottom-up. As a sales manager, you have the most control over the activities of your team. Activities are the easiest to measure and the easiest to impact.

When you are thinking about the types of activities you can actually manage as a sales manager, they break down into the below types:

• Opportunity Management

• Call Management

• Sales Force Enablement

• Account Management

• Territory Management

Let’s dive into each of these types!

1. Opportunity Management

As a sales manager, you need to help your reps with complex multi-stage deals. You need to understand on a granular level how the reps are managing this process. Instead of the classic “pipeline review” where you literally review the entire pipeline, the goal here is to get deep into specific opportunities and how the reps are managing the process. Any clown sales manager can do funnel reviews with their reps where they focus on BOFU (bottom-of-funnel) opportunities. But the best managers take the time in 1-on-1’s to truly understand and assist on specific opportunities at the TOFU (top-of-funnel) and MOFU (middle-of-funnel). The goal here is to improve the reps management ability by “working” on specific opportunities together. That said, here is the only sales platform you'll need to do so effectively.

2. Call Management

As a sales rep, your team must have sales call scripts. You should have a call script for every call in the sales process. Sales managers should do mock calls with their reps. You should record sales calls and evaluate them on an individual basis. Uber Conference is great for this because it will announce at the beginning of the call that “this call is being recorded” which is a low friction way to tell the prospect you are recording the call without sounding sketchy.

3. Sales Force Enablement

Providing on-going training to your reps. One reason we created Sales Hacker U was to help sales managers passively train their reps. Your reps should be reading 1+ sales book per month. Ideally, your company has a budget for this. That said there are a ton of free sales resources out there like this free Sales Hacker Accelo Sales Training Bundle.

4. Account Management

What are your reps doing to drive revenue from existing accounts? Do they have set account-based plays to drive upsells? As the manager, you need to define processes, reporting, and activity metrics in order to impact successful account management outcomes.

5. Territory Management

What is the organizational structure of your sales team? You need to correctly allocate the right resources to the right type of ideal customer profiles. Taking this one step further ideally you have named accounts tied to each rep so it is not a free-for-all.

A few additional points...

Reps struggle with time management. As a sales manager, you need to help them organize their daily schedule. This is basic stuff - but reps need to be using a business automation platform like Accelo that has task management and time tracking to help drive maximum efficiency around sales activities.  

Reps need to look 3 to 6 months out and realize today’s sales activities and prospecting will be closed deals in 3+ months. Focusing exclusively on BOFU means fewer deals down the road.

Great sales managers are great system’s builders and designers. You should be building a system that will work regardless of the talent working in the system. As a sales manager, your job is to work on the system, not in the system.

Too many sales leaders get stuck trying to close their own deals and end up spending a majority of their time working in the system versus working on the system.

Sales management is not easy. But with systems thinking and the right perspective you can be an absolute sales management rockstar. As Mark Twain said, “the secret of getting ahead is getting started.” So go make it happen.

Matt Smith is the VP of Digital for Sales Hacker. He also runs FullStackSales.com, a sales hacking services firm based in Los Angeles, CA. His firm specializes in e-learning marketplace development, e-commerce partnerships, and scaling revenue through digital product merchandising.