Build Your Pipeline Engine

Learning Objectives 

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Define business pipeline.
• Describe how pipeline and annual contract value are related.
• Identify ways to grow, measure, and maintain your pipeline.

What Is Business Pipeline?

Pipeline is the total dollar value of all the deals that your sales team is working on. Our pipeline is tracked within the Salesforce Opportunity record. This is where all the details are managed—like the name of the account, the names of the Account team, the size of the deal, when it's projected to close, what products the customer is interested in, who the contacts are, and more. When you add up all your opportunities, you get your total pipeline. 

Focusing on Pipeline Creates ACV 

Annual contract value (ACV) is the piece of the pipeline equation that our sales and marketing teams can really influence. And our sales reps get paid based on ACV. It's where we can shape the outcome. We know how many existing contracts we have. We know our attrition rate. It’s the ACV bookings each quarter that are the target we're driving toward.

And what’s the number one leading indicator of ACV? Pipeline. It’s what drives forecast accuracy and accountability. So that’s why the two are so intertwined. Pipeline is the focus. ACV is the outcome. And over the years we’ve become good at measuring, driving, and optimizing our pipeline. We like to think of it as a fine-tuned pipeline engine. 

How Salesforce Builds Our Pipeline Engine

Just like a combustion engine, your pipeline engine needs to have all cylinders firing. At Salesforce, the cylinders of pipeline generation are our people. Here are the roles they play to keep the engine running.

• Account executives (AE) create more than half of the pipeline at Salesforce. They are responsible for creating new opportunities, closing deals, and managing customer relationships.
• Business development representatives (BDR) create about a quarter of the pipeline. They focus on outbound prospecting and are responsible for making calls to leads and then passing them to AEs who drive them to closure.
• Sales development reps (SDR) focus on inbound lead qualification, following up on opportunities that come through the website, chat, and calls. SDRs also pass opportunities to AEs and are critical for our small business sales teams.
• Enterprise corporate specialists (ECS) manage smaller deals within large Enterprise accounts so that AEs can focus on larger ones. They focus on new business.
• Cloud sales are dedicated to a specific product (for example, Salesforce Service or Platform). They mostly work on existing deals but do represent a small percentage of the pipeline creation.

Fuel Your Pipeline Engine with Marketing 

Your pipeline engine needs fuel, and that fuel is marketing activities. At Salesforce, our robust marketing team has one goal in mind: Help the sales team drive high-quality pipeline. This goal guides all our marketing efforts.

• Brand awareness drives new audience growth by helping prospects and customers understand who we are and what we do.
• Demand generation includes tactics like lead buy and paid social to market products in specific industries or regions.
• Events drive massive pipeline at Salesforce and we measure the amount of pipeline registered, pipe in room, and incremental pipeline generated after the event to record that.
• Account-based marketing is a focused service with various programs to help increase relevance and engagement with our top accounts.
• Digital marketing is primarily done via our website. This is where we engage customers and then send that lead on to an SDR or BDR. We then drive more traffic to the website with paid media, email, social media, and awareness campaigns.
• Enablement means providing our sales teams with the right tools and resources to win deals. This could include emails, campaigns, ROI calculators, or competitive analysis.

Measure and Analyze Your Pipeline

Being able to measure your pipeline is key. To measure our pipeline at Salesforce, we use… well, Salesforce. And because everything is captured in Salesforce, our sales and marketing teams can always see pipeline data in real-time reports and dashboards. And our sales operations team can do deeper pipeline analysis using Tableau. 

We use a measurement framework called the accountability performance matrix (APM). It’s a series of tables where we can see pipeline data sliced by product, region, segment, and source. This allows us to drive pipeline accountability by cloud, by operating unit, and so on. 

Make It Actionable with a Pipeline Council

Every week, Salesforce brings together its sales, product, marketing, and operations leads to review the APM. It’s forward-looking, meaning that we know what percent we are into the quarter, and what percent of our target we have achieved. We even color code (red, yellow, or green) each area to easily see where we aren’t on target.

When something is yellow or red, we discuss it as a team. Then we assign actions (like increasing enablement, incentives, or budget) to move those areas back to green. When the team can easily zero in on focus areas and brainstorm solutions, we can maintain forward momentum. And, ultimately, keep our pipeline engine running smoothly.