Review Deal Health with Pipeline Inspection
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how Pipeline Inspection helps sales teams understand deal health.
- List features that enable sales managers to coach sales reps to close more deals.
- Know where to find recent changes in opportunities and overall pipeline.
The Pipeline Inspection Experience
You’re ready to get more insight into the Haven Enterprises opportunity. In Pipeline Inspection recent changes to opportunities are highlighted, such as changes to amounts, close dates, opportunity stages, forecast categories, and more.
What immediately pops up is that it has a high-opportunity score and the amount has increased recently.
You dig into the opportunity’s insights panel to learn more about the health of the deal. The insights panel shows deal insights, including AI-based insights, close date predictions, insights from call recordings, emails, service cases, and other sources.
Insights That Help Close Deals
While the deal seems to be making good progress, an insight from a recent call indicates that a competitor was mentioned.
You’re familiar with the competitor, and you have a few secret weapons that have helped you win against this competitor. So, things are looking up. You use the Send Email feature to contact the sales rep and let them know that you can help with a strategy to win against this competitor.
Pretty quickly, you get an email back from the rep saying they are excited to address the competitive situation. Since this was the main risk in their deal, with a good plan they feel confident enough to commit this deal for the quarter. Looking at the pipeline, you can see that your sales rep has updated Haven and moved it to commit. You’ll need to adjust the forecast later in Collaborative Forecasts to reflect this change.
Other Ways to Slice the Pipeline
Before you head over to Collaborative Forecasts to adjust the forecast, you quickly review your team’s pipeline for the quarter. Using the quick filters, you select This Quarter and My Team to adjust the metrics and filter the list.
The pipeline is good, but could be stronger. A custom field that your Salesforce admin recently added displays product quantities for each opportunity. Already, the data in this field shows an issue; quite a few opportunities have low product quantities. Your sales teams can work on this to get their numbers up.
You make a note to address this issue with reps in their upcoming pipeline review meetings. And then you move to the Flow Chart to see a visualization of pipeline movement up to the present.
Your team has closed $550K in the last quarter, and the flow chart shows that the pipeline has increased by $1.1M. So, you can adjust the forecast, and you’re ready for your forecast reviews with leadership, and pipeline reviews with your team. You might even be able to adjust their quotas next quarter.
