5 Tips on How to Run Your Pipeline Engine to Drive Growth | Salesforce on Salesforce

Hey there. I'm Eric and today we're talking about how to run your pipeline engine to drive company growth with examples of how we do it at Salesforce. Welcome to Salesforce on Salesforce an inside look at our marketing, sales and service businesses with helpful tips on topics like how to create a personalized marketing journey, how to case swarm with slack, and way more. While you're here, check out the blog and our trailhead quick look and be sure to check out other episodes in the series. People always ask me how Salesforce drives revenue growth the way we do. Well, I'll let you in on a little secret. The magic is our maniacal focus on pipeline. Pipeline is the common goal that unites our sales and marketing teams here at Salesforce. Pipeline is king. And why focus on pipeline? Well, to better understand that, let me break down our business model. Salesforce revenue for a given quarter can be calculated as existing contracts plus acv, which is what we call our net new reoccurring revenue minus attrition, which are the contracts that aren't being renewed. When you net all that out, you get our quarterly revenue. Now, the ACV piece of the equation is where we're hyper focused as a sales and marketing team. It's the variable that we can influence most. So what's the greatest leading indicator of acv? Well, you guessed it. It's pipeline. Pipeline is something earlier in the funnel that your entire org can rally around. Pipeline is the glue that holds together sales and marketing. It's what drives forecast accuracy. It's what drives accountability. It's really the number one thing we can measure and optimize across both organizations. So I'm going to break down five tips on how you can run your pipeline engine to drive growth. Pipeline is defined as the total value of all the deals that your sales team is working on. Every deal exists as an opportunity record inside of Salesforce. It takes a lot of rigor to have accurate pipeline data. Our sales teams are responsible for keeping the details of the opportunity updated. Like the solutions involved, the size of the deal, the next steps, the status, and when it's projected to close. Managers need to keep a close eye on it. It's really important to have rigor at every level of the sales organization to strengthen your pipeline accuracy. Tip number one, ensure your sales teams have the right level of discipline and rigor when it comes to keeping the opportunity data up to date. This is foundational to everything else we're gonna talk about. Okay. Just like a combustion engine, the pipeline engine needs to have all cylinders Firing at Salesforce. The cylinders of pipeline generation include multiple sales roles. First, we have account executives. AES quarterback every deal and they create over half of our pipeline. They're responsible for creating new opportunities, driving deals to close and managing the relationship with the customer. But they're not alone. They're supported by business development reps. BDRs bring in about a quarter of our pipeline. They're out there dialing for dollars, calling into accounts and passing potential opportunities to AES. And then there's sales development reps. SDRs focus primarily on inbound lead qualification. They follow up on all the leads that come in from the website and inbound calls, things like contact me forms, trials and demo videos. They flip these leads into opportunities and then those get routed to the right AE. SDRs account for a smaller percent of the overall pipeline, but they're really critical for our small business sales teams. And for large enterprise accounts, we have the enterprise corporate specialists leading transactional deals that are under a certain dollar amount. They manage these smaller deals end to end so that the AES can focus on the big ones. Finally, we have our cloud sales team. These are specialists who are dedicated to a specific product like service, cloud or platform. Now they're usually focused on maturing existing deals, but once in a while they create a new opportunity and do account for some of our pipeline creation. So those are the cylinders of pipeline generation. So onto my second tip. Understand each of these functions that make up your pipeline engine. What is their capacity? How do they operate day to day? What do they care about? Is each getting the support and optimization it needs? This will allow you to equip them with the best tools, enablement campaigns and resources. And they need to generate more pipeline. So if sales is the engine, then marketing is the fuel that helps drive high performance. At Salesforce. Marketing directly influences pipeline creation in a number of ways. Let's do a deeper dive and look at some examples. First, brand awareness. This is where we drive new audience growth by helping prospects and customers know and understand who we are and what we do. It's a key step in building a credible and trusted relationship with this audience. So when they're in the buying cycle, they consider Salesforce. This is where we're constantly working to build top of the funnel awareness. For example, you may have seen our latest brand awareness campaign during the Olympics or the super bowl. The one featuring Matthew McConaughey and Team Earth. All right, next up, demand generation. This includes tactics like lead buy, paid social and display content, syndication, and third party email and webinars. We run demand gen campaigns and market these products into very specific industries and into the regions. Next up is Events. Events drive massive pipeline At Salesforce we have an incredible lineup of events like World Tours, Connections, Trailblazer, DX and Dreamforce. These experiences are in person, live streamed and on demand. We measure the pipeline registered, the pipe in the room and the incremental pipeline generated after every event. Next up Account Based Marketing Our account based marketing team is the White Glove Service. These teams deliver account specific content, campaigns, experiences and programs to help increase the relevance and drive engagement with our top accounts which in turn helps drum up more Pipeline and acv. Alright. Next up is Digital which is near and dear for me. Our main digital channel is our website which includes Trailhead, Community, AppExchange and more. This is where we engage customers and give them offers like free trials, demos, chat and inbound phone numbers. Each of these turns into a lead that is routed to an SDR or a bdr. We then drive more traffic to the website with paid media, email, social media and awareness campaigns. And finally is our enablement team arming our sales teams with the right tools, information and resources to sell and win more deals. For example, for BDRs we give them emails and reasons to call and new use cases. For AES, we provide deal acceleration tools like ROI calculators, competitive analysis and create and close playbooks. So tip number three, everything your marketing team does, including every headcount and every dollar, needs to draw a direct line to how it's creating more pipeline and acv. Now let's talk about measuring pipeline. What's great is that because everything is run in Salesforce, our sales and marketing teams can always see pipeline data in real reports and dashboards. And our sales operations teams can go even deeper with pipeline analysis and tableau. At Salesforce we have a measurement framework called the Accountability Performance Matrix. It's a series of tables where we can see pipeline data cut by product, by region, by segment and by source. This allows us to drive pipeline accountability by cloud, by operating unit and so on. For example, on the APM we can see a row for each product. Then we can track columns for things like the Forecast, Closed Business, pipegen, openpipe, Pipeline Coverage Ratio. And for each we can look at the dollar amount and the year over year comparison. So tip number four measure your pipeline by product, by region and by source. If you don't set up the measurement framework properly, you can't effectively identify and fix hotspots. Now let's talk about how you can make all of this actionable you do this by conducting weekly Pipeline Councils. This is where the teams review the numbers together and assign actions. Every week Salesforce brings together sales, product, marketing and operations leads to review the apm. It's forward looking meaning we know what percent we are into the quarter and we know what percentage of our targets we've attained. That allows us to color code every cell in those tables either red, yellow or green and where things are red or yellow context is shared then actions are assigned. You can run a create and close campaign, you can deliver more enablement, you can do a dinner series, you can fund more paid media. Do whatever it takes to get that cell back to green. Pipeline Councils drive transparency and and accountability and actionability of the data. Tip number five Commit to weekly Pipeline Councils and make sure you have cross functional representation in the room so you can make decisions together and action them quickly. As you can see, it takes a village, cross functional teams, data reporting, analytics and real time adjustments to the strategy and execution. But you can do it. We hope you enjoyed this episode on how Salesforce aligns our sales and marketing teams behind Pipeline to drive growth. Be sure to check out the other episodes in this series and to continue learning about this topic, join us on our blog or on trailhead linked in the description below.