A talk by Jason M. Lemkin on converting demand into revenue, focusing on how companies use pipeline reviews to turn opportunities into closed deals. The speaker contrasts informal ad-hoc checks with highly formalized RevOps processes (30-minute per-rep meetings, CRM spreadsheets) and argues that overly structured forecasting setups often produce inaccurate results.
I think that's smart. And then the second thing that comes to mind as companies mature a little bit, it's in the category of converting demand or opportunities to revenue, so closing revenue. And you know, you might be a founder that manages some salespeople, you might be a sales leader that manages a team of salespeople. And you know, this typically manifests in what I would describe as pipeline reviews, where this can either be ad hoc or casual, where it's sort of like, you know, how's the opportunity with perplexity going? And you get an update from the sales rep. Over time it becomes a little bit more formalized where, you know, my experience, and this was true even up to something like 12 months ago, you have like this incredibly sophisticated rev ops influence process around. You have a 30 minute meeting with each of your sales reps and in that meeting there is within your CRM all of the deals that have the sales rep notes that are like ready in different categories for you to talk about, you know, each of the sort of risks and, you know, highest probabilities with the different deals. And then through that you kind of get to a forecast and, you know, everything is like so perfect about this process. And RevOps has set up this like beautiful spreadsheet in CRM. The only problem is it's entirely wrong.
