Top Performing Tactics for Overcoming a Stagnating Sales Pipeline

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February 2013
About the Pie Chart
The data presented in the pie chart
is derived from the Q3 2012 Intgrated
Customer Relationship Management
survey (n=198). The data serves as the
basis for this Gleansight Deep Dive,
which provides analyst commentary
related to a particular aspect of the
topic. The objective is to provide
additional perspective and illuminate
certain key considerations regarding
the implementation of the related
technology-enabled business initiative.
Additional survey data utilized in this
Deep Dive:
»» Q1 2013 Gleansight benchmark
report on Sales Performance
Management (n=97)
»» Q3 2012 CRM for Small
and Midsize Organizatoins
survey (n=318)
To learn more about Gleanster’s
research methodology, please click
here or email research@gleanster.com.
Deep Dive
Top Performing Tactics for Overcoming
a Stagnating Sales Pipeline
Are your sales efforts producing diminishing returns?
It’s inevitable that at some point sales processes and sales
technologies will fail to maximize revenue. Perhaps this is due to
a changing economy or changes in buyer behavior. Perhaps it
stems from a recent shift in the strategic direction of the business
or a competitive threat. Regardless of the reason, sales processes
require constant optimization and attention. But who has the time?
This Deep Dive will explore how Top Performing organizations
overcome and stay ahead of stagnating sales growth.
74%
ercentage of Top Performers that regard “Generate
mer Insights” as a top reason to monitor Social Media
68%
Percentage of Top Performing companies that reported year-over-year
revenue growth of 10% or more between 2011 and 2012.
Best Practice Answers to
Common Questions
How do you know if your customer
relationship management (CRM)
approach is producing diminishing
returns? Much like a doctor evaluates
a sick patient, diagnosing the problem
starts with identifying symptoms.
Symptoms that go hand in hand with a
stagnating pipeline include:
• Longer-than-average sales cycles
• High sales rep turnover
• Recent loss of market share
• Difficulty accurately forecasting
sales results
Research reveals that 9 out of 10 sales
leaders will readily admit there is “room
for improvement” with respect to internal
CRM processes or technologies. It’s
easy for a depressed global economy
to mask internal issues. While buyers
may be savvy, and purchase decisions
generally take longer, there’s also a
good chance internal initiatives such as
optimizing sales processes or improving

terms of use.
Top Performing Tactics for Overcoming a Stagnating Sales Pipeline 2
Top Performers Defined
Gleanster uses 2-3 key performance
indicators (KPIs) to distinguish “Top
Performers” from all other companies
(“Everyone Else”) within a given data
set, thereby establishing a basis
for benchmarking best practices.
By definition, Top Performers are
comprised of the top quartile of
qualified survey respondents (QSRs).
The KPIs used for distinguishing Top
Performers focus on performance
metrics that speak to year-over-
year improvement in relevant,
measurable areas. Not all KPIs
are weighted equally. The KPIs
used for this Gleansight are:
• 12-month change in revenue
• Current Lead-to-Sales Rate
• 12-month chagne in
Lead-to-Sales Rate
the availability of information could give
your sales reps the competitive edge
they desperately need.
A 2012 survey on Integrated CRM
indicated that the top challenges
with CRM continue to be the same
challenges organizations were facing
20 or 30 years ago: getting reps to use
the technology effectively. (See Figure
1.) The natural byproduct of an unused
system like CRM is data credibility, and
it’s a perpetually growing problem for
the organization. The less information
reps enter into the system, the less
accurate the pipeline and CRM metrics
are, leading senior management
to circumvent CRM and turn to
spreadsheets as a system of record.
Best Practice Answers to
Common Questions
Sometimes the signs of a stagnating
pipeline are less obvious. In fact, a
variety of factors may even be early
symptoms that can be addressed before
they become a serious problem. It’s
also important to apply a methodical
approach to evaluating pipeline success.
Since maximizing revenue is the desired
outcome, it’s important to explore all
three areas that impact sales success;
people, process, and technology. (See
Figure 2.)
Stagnating opportunities. Are
opportunities stuck in the pipeline for
abnormally longer periods of time? Eight
out of ten Top Performers measure
the average sales cycle time as an
“ongoing metric in sales dashboards.”
Regardless of whether the sales cycle
is measured in minutes, weeks, months,
or years, understanding deviations
that are outside of normal variances
is critical to staying on top of potential
issues. Stagnating opportunities could
be an indication that sales reps are
not properly trained, leads are not
sufficiently nurtured or qualified, or
sales processes are not being followed.
Reps leave opportunities as
‘inactive’ to protect them. For Top
Performers, CRM is about more than
a vehicle to capture customer data
and opportunity management. To the
extent data from other systems (such as
marketing, finance, or operations) can
be integrated within CRM to empower
sales reps and maximize the success
of customer communications, CRM
Figure 1: Top Challenges with CRM in 2012

terms of use.
becomes a competitive advantage in
sales.
CRM technology not used
effectively. Despite decades of
best practice research and mature
investments in CRM technology, driving
adoption continues to be a top three
challenge for Top Performers and all
organizations. Longer sale cycles or
an idle pipeline could be nothing more
than a salesforce that is not updating
CRM in a timely manner. When sales
reps fail to leverage CRM, more often
than not CRM is used as a management
tool that, to the average sales rep, does
nothing more than track and monitor
information that could be used against
them. For Top Performers, CRM is a
source of competitive advantage for
reps. CRM becomes a destination for
sales people to get a leg up on deals,
supplying background information on
accounts or contacts, lead qualification
through lead scoring, insight into
marketing communications and
engagements, products purchased
customer service interactions, etc.
Insufficient leads passed to inside
sales. For some organizations, inside
sales (remote/virtual sales) plays a
critical role in qualifying or even closing
opportunities. A number of factors
influence the effectiveness of inside
sales reps, including lead qualification,
the accuracy of contact information,
and training. But inside sales is largely
a numbers game requiring productivity,
discipline, and consistency. A stagnating
pipeline could be an indication that
the volume of leads entering the sales
pipeline is not sufficient to meet sales
targets.
Opportunities are slipping
through the pipeline. According to
Gleanster research, approximately 50%
of the leads that enter the sales pipeline
will not close in the near term but will
likely close in the future. If processes
or technology do not allow sales reps
to route opportunities that are not
Figure 2: Diagnosing a Stagnant Sales Pipeline

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ready to buy back to marketing, then
these opportunities are frequently lost
to competitors. These leads represent
an investment from the organization,
and therefore should be methodically
managed to maximize the chance of a
long-term sale.
Lack of process. If lack of process
plagues sales results in your
organization, there’s a good chance
sales is not reaching its full potential.
Top Performers rank streamlining and
establishing consistency in company
sales processes as a top three value
driver for maximizing CRM success.
Top Performing Strategies
for Boosting Sales Results
Empower sales for value-added
engagement . The balance of power
has shifted in the sales process, and
these days consumers are in control.
Sales must be sensitive to the fact
that buyers are often more informed
about competitive offers and product
benefits well before engaging with sales.
Growth in emerging channels like social
media provides 24x7 access to happy
and unhappy customers, colleagues,
friends, and competitive pricing. But
when Gleanster asked sales leaders if
social media had an impact on the sales
process, six out of ten sales resources
responded “somewhat” or “not at all.”
That’s because social media doesn’t
really have a direct impact on the close,
but it does have an indirect impact that
many organizations overlook. The web
is about empowerment, and information
is power. For Top Performing
organizations this means customer
acquisition is less about selling
and more about building a trusted
relationship. There are simply too many
marketing messages and too many
sales pitches to take in, so capturing
mindshare and earning a conversation
requires salespeople to deliver value
when interacting with a prospect. For
Top Performers, automation plays a
critical role in empowering sales reps.
Easy access to information about a
prospect or customer from within CRM
gives reps insight into how to shape
and mold a conversation in the context
of each buyer. Top Performers are 7x
more likely to automate value-added
engagement with nurturing and scoring
so educated and qualified opportunities
are passed to the sales team. By
giving sales visibility into past customer
behavior from within CRM, reps start to
rely on CRM for critical information that
gives them a leg up and increases the
likelihood of a closed sale.
Educate sales on the customer
lifecycle. On the surface this may
seem like a blatantly obvious best
practice. Sales people should know
and understand the sales process
because we live it day after day. But
the Gleanster survey on Integrated
Customer Relationship Management
revealed that Top Performing
organizations are 3x more likely than
Everyone Else to document and
standardize a formal understanding of
the customer journey from marketing,
to sales, to customer service. In fact,
just two out of ten of the average
What is value?
It’s important to keep in mind that value-
added engagement is not defined by a
good product or a great deal. It’s about
the perception of value in the mind of
the buyer. If the pipeline is stagnating,
it could be because reps are not
effectively contextualizing the solution
or problem for each individual prospect.
Value-Added Engagement:
• Earn conversations with prospects
• Sales needs to qualify and
share what makes a “good”
sales conversation so marketing
automation and nurturing can
enhance sales conversations
Figure 3: Understanding of
the Customer Lifecycle

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organizations actually document this
process. (See Figure 3.)
Keep in mind that the customer
experience spans every interaction
with your brand. When sales targets
are falling short, there’s a good chance
the process is breaking down in one or
more areas. A formal understanding of
the customer lifecycle – from lead, to
prospect, to customer – will provide a
systematic way to ensure each step in
the value chain is actually adding value
to the next. (See Figure 4.)
Understand the role of
technology in the sales process.
There are two fundamental best
practices Top Performers teach us
about sales technology. One, not
all CRM technologies are created
equal. Two, CRM alone only partially
addresses some of the best practice
demands of Top Performing sales
teams.
CRM, often referred to as sales force
automation (SFA), typically refers to
solutions with a distinct and standard
set of capabilities, including contact
management, account management,
territory management, opportunity
management, and forecasting and
analytics. These capabilities make
traditional CRM ideal for managing
a long sales cycle or a few quality
leads. While any CRM tool can be
customized to meet the unique needs
of the organization, Top Performers
are 8x more likely than Everyone Else
to rely on pre-configured modules
or integration with other systems to
augment sales success. Excessive
customization within CRM rarely
delivers the desired value, and it often
makes future upgrades or process
changes difficult. Furthermore,
traditional CRM technologies are
largely designed for one unique type
of selling: enterprise sales. But today,
more and more organizations are
relying on inside sales teams to qualify
or sell to prospects. The inside sales
process demands high volume and
rapid turnaround on leads – that makes
productivity, discipline, and consistency
critical to success. The average CRM
tool is not necessarily designed to
augment insides sales processes
with lead routing, prescriptive selling,
telephony integration, workflows, and
call scripts.
The second common problem with
defining the role of technology is a
general lack of knowledge about the
types of technologies that can augment
or optimize sales success. Eight out
of ten sales leaders desired “a better
understanding of sales technologies”
in 2012. (See Figure 5.) It seems that
knowledge about how technology can
play a role in optimizing sales and the
expected return on investment that can
be achieved is still a mystery for sales
leaders. Figure 5 highlights some of the
Figure 4: Elements of the Customer Lifecycle

terms of use.
common classifications of technologies
across three areas of sales optimization.
• Sales Effectiveness:
Technologies designed to enhance
or improve sales results. These
technologies typically give sales
reps a leg up in specific stages
of the customer lifecycle to
maximize the chance of winning an
engagement in “the right terms and
in the right timeline.”
• Sales Enablement: Technologies
and services designed to enhance
the individual success of sales
reps, in a systematic way. Most
organizations are guilty of
opportunistic or haphazard sales
enablement that gives sales
reps just enough information to
be marginally effective. Done
correctly, a sales enablement
infrastructure should make sharing
best practices across the sales
function a scalable and ongoing
process that is readily accessible
anytime and anywhere.
• Sales Performance Management
(SPM): Technologies designed to
systematically manage incentive
compensation management (to
minimize spreadsheets and manual
processes) and empower sales
reps to forecast and manage sales
success from within CRM. SPM
also includes technologies to find,
hire, and manage sales resources.
Research from Gleanster suggests Top
Performing organizations are as much
as 6x more likely than Everyone Else to
augment CRM investments with third-
party solutions designed to maximize
sales results. Today, the widespread
acceptance of Software-as-a-Service
(SaaS) makes these solutions both
affordable and accessible to even the
smallest organization. In fact, one of the
most common ways for Top Performers
mitigate adoption challenges with
CRM is by ensuring the CRM is also a
destination for reps to access critical
information on prospects or accounts,
locate best practice materials, or locate
new opportunities sorted by propensity
to purchase.
Figure 5: Categories of Sales Technologies

terms of use.
Automate measurement and
metrics. For Top Performers, the
top three metrics for measuring the
success of CRM initiatives tend to
be the most obvious; revenue growth
(85%), actual vs. forecasted revenue
(82%), and win/loss percentage by sales
rep (67%). At first glance, these metrics
seem to make sense because they
are outcome-based and directly tied to
the goal of any CRM investment – to
maximize sales. It’s interesting to note
that the fourth most common metric
for measuring sales success is system
usage. Looking back at some of the
top challenges with respect to CRM for
Top Performing organizations, sales
personnel adoption was at the top of the
list. Top Performers use system usage
to gauge the effectiveness of both the
sales processes and information that
is available to sales reps. If information
is difficult to find or processes are not
automated, reps stop finding value in
using the system.
One key finding was that eight out of
ten Top Performers rely exclusively
on CRM and analytics dashboards
for calculating critical metrics. These
organizations have done away with
spreadsheets and complicated
calculations in favor of standardized and
automated calculations from within a
core system of record. This allows Top
Performers to benchmark performance
over time using consistently calculated
metrics. Top Performers were also more
likely than Everyone Else to automate
“non-traditional” but critical metrics such
as:
• Speed-to-call
• Speed-to-contact
• Contact rate
• Qualification rate
• Conversion rate
• Call volume
• Average call time
• Lead status
• Average sales cycle
Many of these metrics are used
exclusively to gauge the effectiveness of
sales processes and sales enablement
training.
Link process to desired outcomes.
Results are a byproduct of process.
All too often organizations get caught
up the endless conundrum of CRM
configuration. Do you customize the
system to meet processes or customize
processes to meet the system? From a
best practice standpoint, it’s generally a
good idea not to excessively customize
CRM. In fact, every customization
should have a valid business case
for capturing custom data, and
ultimately this data should be used on
a regular basis to make decisions. Top
Performers rank process optimization
and revision as a top value driver for
success. To do this, organizations
should focus on processes that lead to
desired results. Start with the goal, and
find the most effective and efficient way
to accomplish that goal.
Key considerations when
evaluating process changes:
• Did your organization change
process to fit the CRM
tool? Is that working?
• Are there legacy processes that
no longer add value internally?
• Does lack of integration with
other systems impede results?
• Are there bottlenecks in the
flow of information that is
critical to sales success?

terms of use.
Deep Dive Talking Points
• Stagnating opportunities could be an indication that sales reps are not
properly trained, leads are not sufficiently nurtured or qualified, or sales
processes are not being followed.
• For Top Performers, CRM is a source of competitive advantage for reps. CRM
becomes a destination for sales people to get a leg up on deals, providing
background information on accounts or contacts, lead qualification through
lead scoring, insight into marketing communications and engagements,
products purchased customer service interactions, etc.
• A formal understanding of the customer lifecycle – from lead, to prospect,
to customer – will provide a systematic way to ensure marketing, sales, and
service are maximizing the lifetime value of prospects and customers.
• Every customization in CRM should have a valid business case for capturing
custom data, and ultimately this data should be used on a regular basis to
make decisions.

terms of use.
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Related Research
Recently published research that may be of interest to senior industry practitioners
include:
Gleansight: CRM for Small and Midsize Businesses
Gleansight: Integrated Customer Relationship Management
Deep Dive: 7 Imperatives for Embracing Social Media in Sales
Deep Dive: How Top Performers Synchronize for
Success in Cross-Channel Customer Service
Deep Dive: Measuring the Impact of Lead Nurturing on the Sales Pipeline
The Gleanster website also features carefully vetted white papers on these and
other topics as well as Success Stories that bring the research to life with real-
world case studies. To download Gleanster content, or to view the future research
agenda, please visit www.gleanster.com.
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Top Performing Tactics for Overcoming a Stagnating Sales Pipeline

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Top Performing Tactics for Overcoming a Stagnating Sales Pipeline