Short Salesforce-branded talk about driving more sales pipeline by treating pipeline creation as a year-round activity. Speaker contrasts "pipeline generation" (uncovering existing projects) with "demand creation" (creating demand where none exists), and recommends focusing intensely on a small number of strategic accounts and executives, empowering account executives with business acumen and relationship skills, and researching customers deeply (investor calls, annual reports) so meetings focus on customer initiatives rather than vendor pitch.
Chapters
If you are interested in getting physically fit and you decide to go to the gym, you know, one day a week, you're probably not going to be happy with the results. But if you find a way to go to the gym four days a week for 52 weeks out of the year, you will have a very different outcome. Pipeline's the same way. Pipeline needs to be created 52 weeks out of the year by every rep, by every manager, by every team and every market. I really like to separate between what I refer to as pipe generation and demand creation. So when you think about pipeline generation, it's generally going to uncover projects that are currently underway. But in environments where budgets are constrained, that motion does not work quite as well. Because there's not as many projects. Budgets may be frozen in some environments. So in a time like now, you really need your sellers to do what I refer to as demand creation, which is going to create demand where it does not currently exist. And in order to do so, you can't just say, hey, here's my product, Are you interested in it? You really have to get to know what is important to them. What I have my sales team do is have our reps identify who are their top strategic customers or prospects that we want to try to expand a relationship with. There's usually a handful of key executive roles or positions that are our target sort of roles or buyers, and then we want to measure on a small number of accounts against a small number of executives. How are we doing in building that relationship? Are we getting access to these executives? Do we understand what their top initiatives are? And if you do a sustained job of staying focused on a small number of customers and a small number of executives, and you get to know what is important to them, not what is important to us, but what is important to them, then generally you can create demand where it doesn't currently exist. In our go to market organization, which is a combination of sales and marketing and customer success, the largest investment we make here at Box is in our account executives. That's where the highest quality pipeline comes from. So in order for us to do more with less, in order for us to create more pipeline, when maybe marketing budgets are flat or just slightly up, but certainly the sales targets are still there, we need to empower our account executives to be market makers. They have to be deeply knowledgeable of your solution set, but they have to be loaded with business acumen, they have to be loaded with integrity and curiosity and relationship building capabilities so they can go find out what is it that's important to the customer and then they have to have that ability to effectively communicate how your solution set can help that customer solve a problem that they know or maybe don't know they have in a differentiated way to be focused, to be well prepared and to be trustworthy. And so let's break those down. Pick a very small number of customers that have the highest propensity to buy customers and or prospects and put all of your effort into that small number. Take that extra effort to research those companies if they're public companies, listen to their investor calls, read their annual reports really deeply, research the company and the executives that you are interested in connecting with. Make sure that you meet your expectations, that you follow through and that if you meet with that customer five times, really four of those times minimally should be about them and about their initiatives and not about you and your products and your solutions and how far away you are from your quota.
