Best Practices for Managing Sales Pipeline Hygiene and Handling Sales Manager Challenges
Hi everyone, Looking for some advice navigating dealing with sales managers and pipeline hygiene. Some context: Company is really focused on generating pipeline and managers are "trigger-happy" when it comes to opening opportunities (Salesforce is our CRM) and loathe to close them out when they start to die. We are also quite small - we have 6 sellers and I am the only RevOps person. I have general buy-in from the "ICs" (for want of a better term), but the sales managers are very difficult to get to maintain hygiene. Some system flags:
Stale pipeline: deals are flagged if they have no activity in 14 days - i.e. there are no logged communications, meetings set, or status changes. I reach out to reps directly with this information at the end of each month. The expectation is that they take care of these by the end of the week from when I send the reminder.
Next Step Date: The date that the "Next Step' field is supposed to be executed by. I run a report and reach out to reps directly at the same time each month with overdue Next Step Dates.
Managers and I have equal status in the company hierarchy, but I own SFDC policies. However, I do want a balance between flexibility and regular updates in the pipeline. I recognize that being overly rigid could cause resentment, but being too loose will give us bad data. Today, a sales manager and I got into a dispute about the 14 day marker. He said that sometimes his main contact on a deal will tell him to check back months later. I contend that this is not even real pipeline as there is not a high buying interest and that if we cannot justify reaching out to a prospect on an opportunity via email in a month, we should close the opportunity. If it reopens later, we can just reopen it. Happy to welcome any input!
