How to Use Pipeline Insights to Drive Strategic Deal Acceleration

The best revenue operations teams are tightly connected, share success metrics, and use the same lens for analysis and decision making. Our team is aligned around pipeline and revenue, and uses shared dashboards to inspect and prioritize deals that are ripe for acceleration.

Which current quarter deals need some love?

This is one of my favorite things to dive into, and a deceptively simple one. There’s a ton of disparate information that can be combined to make decisions around deal prioritization much easier.

Salesloft's AI and machine learning algorithm that tells us how much a deal is behaving like a won or lost opportunity from the past. It also provides activity score, aggregating signals from email, calendars, and marketing automation, as well as our revenue tech stack partners to show how engaged key players are within the account. 

So, it's best focus on deals that meet all of the following criteria:

• Have more revenue potential
• Currently in late forecast categories
• Have low activity

These are deals that both our sellers and Salesloft are expecting us to close, but for whatever reason account engagement has fallen off—putting the deal at risk.

How engaged are our opportunities?

We take the directional data insights from Salesloft, fold in the qualitative assessment from the field, and determine the best course of action to get the deal back on track. In this case, it may be as simple as enabling the seller around deal execution best practices, and ensuring that they’re armed with the right tools and tactics they need to manage their deal cycles.

Or the problem may be more complex, where the seller has key information about why they’re blocked and have temporarily pumped the brakes. In this case, we can run a play around executive introductions to ensure the prospect company understands how committed we are to the partnership.

My suggestion for these scenarios:

1. Build a menu of options for the cross-functional plays you can run for various scenarios.
2. Ensure buy-in from all stakeholders around the level of complexity to complete the deliverable and run the play.
3. Create a system for measuring whether or not your strategy is performing as expected.

A true revenue team works together to create a playbook that delivers results. Once you’ve taken care of in-quarter deals, you can repeat the exercise for out-quarter deals.

Which next quarter deals need some love?

Starting the machinery as soon as possible is always a good idea. This is especially true if the plays you run require time and resources from other teams.

I recommend starting this out-quarter cadence at or around week four of your current quarter. This gives you enough time to run QBRs, get feedback from sellers, and ensure you understand how the current quarter is trending. After that, you’ll have two paths to follow:

If the current quarter is light, you may want to run an acceleration play that may help pull a next quarter deal forward.

If you’re feeling good about CQ, you can bolster NQ proactively.

Analyzing pipeline creation, inspecting pipeline quality, evaluating next quarter pipeline, and having a cadence for deal acceleration—this is a top-of-funnel revenue process. Revenue teams who build this muscle are more connected, efficient, and predictable, and consistently hit their number quarter after quarter.