In order for senior leadership to be able to make intelligent business decisions they needed to know what revenue was forecasted to be brought in by the sales team each month. To achieve this goal, sales management would need their team to:

• Accurately report the current deal stages and percentage likely to close for each deal.

• Align team members to have a consistent and repeatable method for forecasting their pipeline.

During my needs analysis I interviewed sales management and participated in sales team meetings. From this I identified a number of areas that were lacking among the sales team that training could address:

• Team members had different criteria for defining lead stages and chance to close rates.

• Some team members lacked training on how to advance deals through a pipeline.

• The team did not have consistent questions that needed to be identified in order to advance a lead through the pipeline.

To address the issues preventing the team from accurately forecasting, I created a new Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) to define the different stages of the sales pipeline and identify what information was needed in order to advance a lead into each stage. The goals of this SOP included:

• Requirements in order move a lead from "New" to "Warm" and from "Warm" to "Hot".
• Details of what information should be extracted in order to accurately determine the likelihood of a deal closing.
• The steps needed to help a sales rep advance their lead through its current stage.

After my research, I created processes, resources, and training that focused on identifying criteria that would allow the sales team to accurately predict how likely a deal was to close. These criteria were largely based around key indicators such as budget, timeline for a project, triggering events that created a need for the customer to make a decision, engagement of decision makers, etc.

Delivery of this training was a blended experience and included:

• Created process documentation that outlines the requirements for a lead to be moved into each stage of the pipeline.

• Led an Instructor Led Training workshop where I presented this new model to the team.

• Began an ongoing phase of microlearning where I partnered with sales management to deliver smaller resources and lessons around good scoping questions, how to get to the root of a prospect's issue, and more.

Following this training, the sales team was able to leverage concrete lead data to more accurately forecast which deals would be likely to close within a monthly timeframe. This led not only to solving leadership’s need for better data to make business decisions but also helped the team improve their close rates by better qualifying leads through their pipeline.

• The team was able to leverage concrete lead data to more accurately forecast which deals would be likely to close.

• Senior leadership was able to make more informed business decisions based on a more predictable revenue forecast.

• The sales team saw a general rise in close rates due to an improvement in the team’s scoping and qualifying questions.