On Managing Pipelines

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

• 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