Building Visibility to Your Pipeline

Helping your sales team build during a challenging market can come down to focusing on the basics of good foundational processes.

For those of us who have seen several freight cycles, we can understand and even appreciate the cycles we experience. The ability to navigate each cycle, and the effective use of your time during each, allows those who are prepared to grow, and others who may not to experience a lot of heartache.

In April I was able to join in on a panel about organically growing a book of business with a few great leaders in our industry at the Capital Ideas Conference. This was a well-attended session, that often brings a lot of discussion as you have a group of competing businesses, talking about their own efforts to expand their own book of business, without perhaps sharing TOO much information.

What we heard being reinforced is the idea of going back to the basics, ensuring you have a good process, and helping team members see and understand that. I’ve been a firm believer in the idea of being able to understand your pipeline, manage that pipeline and effectively communicate across the business where you’re headed. You should have the same level of visibility to your pipeline, as you do to the carriers helping you serve your customers. Most organizations struggle with this level of visibility, which leads to a constant questioning of what’s on the horizon, with no real grasp of where they’re headed. To help manage that process, I urged attendees to build a sales process that is easily communicated, and visible across the entire organization.

At Qued, we’ve built this into the DNA of our organization early on. As we build the future of appointment scheduling for 3PLs and carriers, we wanted our entire team to have visibility to where our pipeline was, and where we needed to staff as we continued to grow. For us, we broke our sales process into four simple steps:

• Question
• Understand
• Execute
• Deliver

Each of these phases of our sales process gives the team visibility to where we are with a potential customer, and how as a team we can help support each other to serve them. Because each customer falls into one of these phases, it’s quickly identifiable for team members where they are, and when they may get engaged.

Question: Every potential customer starts in the question phase for our team. We are seeking to understand how their business currently handles appointments, who holds these responsibilities and how they’ve attempted to resolve this challenge in the past. You could often equate this to a discovery phase of any standard sales process. Team members have visibility to this as they may have specific experiences with a unique type of freight, or a specific TMS application, and they will share that knowledge in our weekly pipeline review. This allows every team member to be pulled off the sidelines and contribute to the efforts of bringing new customers into the platform.

Understand: Potential customers who have seen the value of our service, will typically meet a few benchmarks for our team to be identified as a strong potential for our service. Once that’s been identified, and they have generated interest, we move into the understand phase. At this point, we engage with end users, evaluate historical scheduling processes, systems, etc., and begin building the process for how we could work together. More team members get involved in this phase, giving our customers greater access to our team, and how we support them.

Execute: Once we move beyond the understanding of the value, we launch into the execution phase where our Customer Success team begins working to onboard customers. At this phase we know the use case, the specific system connection we’ve built and how this is going to impact users. Additional team members are involved, immersing our customers in an onboarding process that is designed to quickly get them into the platform.

Deliver: At the deliver phase, customers have begun scheduling their initial appointments, and then our Customer Success team assists them with training and scaling the product across their entire organization. This is also where we continue to cultivate the relationship, identify the next wave of scheduling needs, and support these customers.

The key here is that at any moment, our entire organization knows where our entire pipeline is. We know who is at Question, Understand, Execute and Deliver, and all our efforts are driven to support customers in each phase. This level of visibility pulls the sales process out of a siloed experience, into a team effort. In doing so, we see greater support for customers, and greater accountability across the entire organization.

Gaining this level of visibility to your own pipeline can significantly improve your ability to grow even in a challenging market. You can identify where your team may be spinning their wheels, where an extra hand, or different perspective can move potential customers forward, and how to provide greater support to the company goals. Building these good foundational processes will not only better serve your team members, but also the customers that you’re looking to support for this freight cycle, and the next one to come.