Build credibility with tighter sales pipeline management

Pipeline coverage is an important leading indicator of whether a sales team will be able to hit revenue targets in future quarters.

With a competitive market and finite team resources, it’s important for sales teams to focus on quality opportunities, surface at-risk on opportunities from key accounts, and review next steps to win deals faster.

If data hygiene is lacking, your pipeline coverage metrics will be misleading. We need a systematic way of showing opportunities that need attention.

Developing a mechanism like an Opportunity Health Score uses signals from Opportunities and related objects, like Accounts and Contacts, to score your opportunities and highlight those that need attention. This model can use a numeric score (ex. 1-100) or be mapped to a letter grade (ex. A-F).

Why build this in-house when there are SaaS tools that do the same thing?

There are many tools out there that claim to do this type of scoring. If you have enough opportunity volume (30-50 per week), your data is / has been consistent historically, and you don’t mind that you cannot customize the scoring mechanism as needed, these types of tools are a great option. 

As with any new tool added, be skeptical and ask many questions before adding another layer to your tech stack.

How can implementing a simple Opportunity Health Score benefit my team?

• Identify the criteria that is most likely to lead an opportunity to close

• Align your team around the actions required to close an opportunity

• Revive or remove stale opportunities to improve pipeline coverage accuracy

• Move away from gut feelings around opportunity health to a quantifiable scoring mechanism

• Focus your team on the right opportunities so you can close more deals

Once you’ve assessed whether implementing an Opportunity Health Score is appropriate for your team, what scoring mechanisms should you include?

There are criteria that can be broadly applied to most sales organizations, while others will be specific to your business. The number of criteria and their respective values will depend on what characteristics are most impactful to closing deals within your sales cycle.

Recommended Opportunity Health Score Criteria:

• Deal Velocity

  • Stage Duration

  • Expected Close Date

• Last Outbound Activity

  • Next Step Notes

  • Email or Call Activity

• Key Contacts Identified

  • Sales Champion

  • Decision Maker

• Confidential Information

  • Confidential information that is uniquely important to your business and shared by a Contact to show intent to move the partnership forward. This type of information can sometimes require an NDA to be signed

  • Ex. Number of active users, Number of page visits, etc

Once you’ve set up your Opportunity Health Score, it’s important to incorporate the system into your day-to-day sales process. If you set the expectation that you will be reviewing opportunities based on the Opportunity Health Score, sellers will find a way to get you that information.

How can I integrate Opportunity Health Score into my day-to-day process?

Two recommendations to integrate Opportunity Health Score in your day-to-day process

• Use this report to drive your weekly pipeline reviews

• Have your reps update their opportunity fields from this view

When it comes to using the Opportunity Health Score with your team, there are ways to approach these alerts

• For high scores

  • These are healthy deals that have momentum and do not need additional support unless requested

• For mid-level scores

  • Analyze which criteria is scoring poorly and talk with your rep to understand where the blockers are and what areas you can provide support in

• For low scores

  • With low scores, it can be a matter of data hygiene. Is your rep updating the fields in this opportunity so that the score accurately reflects the actual health of the opportunity?

  • If the score is accurate, this opportunity may be stale and should be removed from the pipeline to re-focus your rep on healthy deals and improve pipeline coverage accuracy

The success of an Opportunity Health Score is similar to any other sales process – It starts with sales leaders integrating the Opportunity Health Score in their day-to-day activities and asking the same questions to their team weekly. This consistent process will build a rhythm for the sales team to improve their pipeline coverage accuracy and increase the number of opportunities closed by clearing blockers and setting next steps.