How to Run a Lightning-Fast Pipeline Review That Actually Works | Mark Nietzel

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1. 7:43

   you know is critical to the deal, don't just slack a talk track and say, good luck. Let me know how it went. Practice it. Hop on a zoom meeting for five minutes and say, hey, let's do this two or three times. And you'll be surprised at how often people have some friction with their talk track or what they think they're going to say. And they stumble over the words and they go, okay, shoot, I got to do this again. I got to do this again. “And it's a really good way to fine tune those important talk tracks.” I actually have a colleague who works here at my company who, and she's a manager as well. During her one-on-ones after doing a role play, she will put herself on mute, turn the camera off and instruct her rep to actually make that important phone call. So after they've done the role play, they'll take it a step further.

   In Roleplay and simulation

2. 8:09

   well. During her one-on-ones after doing a role play, she will put herself on mute, turn the camera off and instruct her rep to actually make that important phone call. So after they've done the role play, they'll take it a step further. And while they're on a zoom meeting together, the rep will actually make that important phone call. “So the manager can sit there, listen to the call and then provide feedback right after.” All right, Mark. You talked about a couple of different meetings and tools that you're using to help empower your reps and keep your team on track. You talked about the lightning pipe review, this weekly pipeline tracker that folks are filling out.

   In Call review coaching

3. 13:51

   the deals that are on the sheet and we look at the key ingredients they're missing. And then there's a column all the way on the right side of the Excel sheet. And it's just action items. We'll just say, all right, cool. Like you're missing an economic buyer on four out of these six deals. Your action item is to call the economic buyer. It's to ask your champion “for permission to call them. It's to look them up and zoom info. It's to look at their website” and find out who the economic buyer is. So we have an action item section of it at the end of the deal review or at the end of the pipeline review that basically says, here's what you're going to do to fill that gap and turn all of those binary yeses or nos into yeses. Robert Leonard My guess is there have been times where someone says, yeah, an economic buyer is involved or

   In Economic buyer identification

4. 15:18

   and Smartlead.io. I think that's one way that I test the truth and the veracity of those yes-no answers. And then additionally, we have really good definitions of what an A-rated champion is at my company. The way that we define a champion at my company is, A, do they have personal pain that my product solves for? “B, do they have political and technical clout in the organization?” And C, do they have the ability or at least the knowledge on how to get a deal done? And so those three things are pretty clear criteria that I can push the rep on. If they're like, yeah, I think I got a champion on this, I'm like, how do you know? Do they meet all three of these criteria? Have we tested them on it? So there's an ability for me to push them a little bit on it if I'm hearing a wishy-washy

   In Champion identification

5. 15:22

   And then additionally, we have really good definitions of what an A-rated champion is at my company. The way that we define a champion at my company is, A, do they have personal pain that my product solves for? B, do they have political and technical clout in the organization? “And C, do they have the ability or at least the knowledge on how to get a deal done?” And so those three things are pretty clear criteria that I can push the rep on. If they're like, yeah, I think I got a champion on this, I'm like, how do you know? Do they meet all three of these criteria? Have we tested them on it? So there's an ability for me to push them a little bit on it if I'm hearing a wishy-washy answer. You talked about the back-channeling with call reviews, and I'm wondering, do you have

   In Champion identification

6. 17:01

   and really focus on the execution piece. So there's dedicated time, four hours of my calendar a week to do that. And then I also do what you suggested and more ad hoc like, okay, I know my rep Joe Schmo had an important call on Monday afternoon. First thing I'm going to do on Monday morning while I'm having my coffee is watch that call because I know it was important. “So I try to do both.” And my leader, who's a second line manager, he does a really good job of holding us accountable to call coaching. I think it's awesome. It's the same way that I hold my reps accountable to items. My VP holds me accountable to call coaching. Gong has a coaching metrics section where it'll tell you like over a rolling 30 days

   In Call review coaching

7. 18:08

   reps. It is the least efficient way because it takes an hour of your time. If you spend one hour and you're really efficient at ripping through tape recordings, you can get through three, sometimes four tapes if you're targeting the right parts of the call “in a single hour.” The biggest thing is, Nick, to your point, people don't schedule it on their calendars in the same way they schedule a customer call. So one thing that was really, really helpful for me is just as a forcing function is once per rep, when I was a VP of sales, I had 30 reps on my team.

   In Call review coaching

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