4/30/2024-April is done; time to clean those PIPES!

Ask direct and hard questions in your meetings and probe for the truth from your buyers about their intent to buy. Do it in every meeting.

With one month of Q2 in the bag, bury yourself in your CRM and dig for insights.

Specifically, review your opps to see how long they’ve been opened versus your average close term. Each opp has an "expiration date" on it, so let that data drive your urgency and plan for working the account.

To be a great revenue prognosticator, you must be courageous enough to ask hard, direct questions. And where you are in the sales cycle dictates which hard questions you must ask.

As you review your top opportunities today, use these three questions as your litmus test on deals you’re working on for Q2:

1. Is this opp gonna pop?
2. When is it coming in?
3. What’s your confidence factor for it closing in Q2? (How do you defend the probability?)

If you don’t have definite answers for the above, work on getting them today.

The clock is ticking – not just on getting the opps across the line in Q2 – but until your manager asks you the same questions.

Force yourself to throw out the rotten fruits and veggies today – mark your stale deals as "closed lost" and move on.

Nobody cares about the aggregate amount of your pipeline if none of it closes.

You can be the nicest gal/guy inside your org, and say all the right things in meetings, and volunteer to push all the chairs back in the conference room after meetings…but if you don’t deliver an accurate rev projection each quarter, your credibility is shot.

How do you get good at pipeline management and forecasting?

Aask direct and hard questions in all of your meetings and probe for the truth from your buyers about their intent to buy. Listening to the anwers of your smart questions is not enough, you’ll also need to qualify buyers and fight through objections.

The guy who cleared this clogged pipe in a huge shopping mall parking lot is not as smart as you, but he figured it out.

Perhaps watching him do his thing in this YouTube short will encourage you to clean up your pipeline.

Creating a meanigful pipeline means the deals in it are real. Your manager doesn’t want to see bloat…s/he wants to see a list of real and nurtured opportunities qualified by your savvy skills.