Managing Pipelines
Michael Osborne Former CRO, Bazaarvoice
Michael is the CEO and President of SmarterHQ, a customer-centric behavioral marketing platform. He is the Co-Founder and former CRO of myDocket (Handshakez). Michael was formerly the Chief Revenue Officer at Bazaarvoice (NASDAQ: BV) and led the company from under $1 million in revenue to its IPO in February of 2012. During his time at Bazaarvoice, Michael held a number of other positions including Senior VP of Worldwide Sales and Chief Customer Advocate. Prior to Bazaarvoice, Michael was the Director of Client Services at Coremetrics, a provider of web analytics and marketing optimization solutions. He is currently on the Board of Advisors at ShopSocially and Nomi.
Summary Notes on Managing Pipelines
- How did you weight and flush pipelines?
- Had a lot of eyes on every deal
- Became successful because he paid attention to every deal he could
- What are key metrics to manage and monitor a pipeline quarterly?
- Ended up with a view in CRM that was very simple
- Matrix consisted of best case and commit and stages of a deal (4 stages)
- An early stage deal early in the quarter had a decent chance of closing
- A later stage deal later in the quarter was almost a lock
- Managed metrics based on deviance – if numbers said one thing and budgeting said something different, would figure out why
- How did forecast versus plan at the start of a quarter?
- Doesn’t look for 4x pipeline etc., look at a rep’s pipeline and realistic ability to hit target
- Looks at the dollar value of each deal
- Would ask a rep to pick which names he or she would expect close and why – if that list was covered he was OK with it
- Not a concrete ratio
- When do deals typically get done throughout a quarter
- The more transactional the business, the more you can engineer to a continual model
- For business with deals that get done in 5 days, easy to have a monthly target
- For business with deals that take 90-150 days, it’s really difficult to engineer to a monthly number
- As many as 40-60% of deals occur in the last month of a quarter
- This was sometimes weighted by large deals coming in later in the quarter
- What are some tips for land and expand strategy?
- Have to build the first relationship well – this trains an organization how you’re going to work with them
- If it goes poorly it becomes very difficult to upsell that organization
- Sacrificing on terms the first time around, and delivering on service, is an effective way of building a relationship for the long term
- Have to build the first relationship well – this trains an organization how you’re going to work with them
- How hands-on did you get during onboarding of new customers?
- Early days you hand-hold everyone, very high touch – was expensive
- Given that they were going for a 10-year relationship and an upsell path, this approach was key to customer growth
- Early days you hand-hold everyone, very high touch – was expensive