The RevDynamiks™ Methodology for Outside the Box Analytics
In this episode, Craig draws parallels between GTM strategy and fluid dynamics, and shares three unique metrics for an effective GTM strategy.
After years of honing his revenue operations chops at Assent Compliance and Shopify, Craig co-founded Jameson Strategies to bring winning go-to-market strategies to smaller companies in an affordable way. Now he is doing the same as part of York IE, which acquired them in 2022.
In this Revenue Mavericks session, Craig goes beyond the critical foundational metrics to talk about some out of the box analytics techniques that can give companies a competitive advantage. These techniques arise from the RevDynamiks™ methodology, developed by Craig and his business partner, where they draw parallels between Go-to-Market and fluid dynamics, to better understand relationships between different aspects of the revenue engine and thus make Go-to-Market strategies more effective.
The metrics discussed:
- Win/Loss Time Gap: Difference between time to win and time to lose. Indicative of qualification process maturity, sales maturity and adds for forecast maturity.
- ACV Standard Deviation: the deviation across the ACV of companies in each market segment.
- Pipe Health (as a tension metric): Measuring pipe growth over time through a snapshot at the 1st of each month.
Understand your revenue in depth with RevDynamiks™
By drawing a direct parallel between Go-to-Market and fluid dynamics, one can look at pressure, gauge and velocity to ultimately determine how much of fluid (revenue) is flowing through the pipe at what speed.
Optimize deal management with intentional time gaps
By strategically extending the time to lose slightly longer than winning, organizations can proactively salvage struggling deals and gain a nuanced understanding of the sales cycle dynamics.
Proactively assess pipeline
health with metrics
Identify deviations, correlate strategies, and maintain a robust and healthy pipeline by analyzing the net change in the pipeline on the first day of each month and overlaying other trend-able metrics.
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This metric is a pivotal element in analyzing the efficiency and effectiveness of the sales process. Unlike the conventional "time to close" metric, this approach recognizes that the time it takes to win a deal and the time it takes to lose a deal can vary significantly. The metric aims to establish a balanced ratio, ideally set at 1.10, signifying that it takes slightly longer to lose a deal than to win. This intentional time gap underscores the commitment to salvaging deals that may be faltering and ensures a more nuanced understanding of the sales cycle.
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The Average Contract Value (ACV) standard deviation metric is a multifaceted tool essential for revenue forecasting and pricing strategy evaluation. Beyond a simple calculation, this metric considers the variability in ACV, shedding light on the predictability and stability of revenue streams. It becomes a crucial indicator when organizations are navigating pricing and packaging decisions, especially in the context of emerging trends like Product-Led Growth (PLG) and buyer-centric approaches. This metric acts as a barometer for strategic alignment with market trends, providing a nuanced understanding of revenue dynamics beyond traditional forecasting methods.
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Pipeline Health is developed as a snapshot analysis on the first day of each month which scrutinizes the net change in the pipeline. Overlaying other trend-able metrics onto this report makes it a canary in the coal mine, alerting organizations to deviations and unexpected shifts in pipeline dynamics. This metric goes beyond a superficial assessment of pipeline growth, revealing critical insights into the relationship between pipeline changes, win rates, and overall revcenue strategies.
Neel Kamal: Hello Everyone! My name is Neel Kamal, I am your host for Revenue Maverick, and today we have an esteemed guest, a friend of mine, and a director of Revenue Operations, Craig Handy. Craig, welcome to the Revenue Maverick program.
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Craig Handy: Thank you for having me, definitely, very very excited to be here. And I know you and I have been talking about this for a little while, and I think it's great to finally see it come together, and I can, I can live my Tom Cruise days as a, of a maverick. It's Rev Ops, of course, not jets, but you know the Maverick title works. I like it!
Neel Kamal: Exactly! And you know, Rev Ops community needs many many Tom Cruises of the world, because ultimately, you know the magic that happens in a revenue engine. A big part of that is kudos to the revenue operations folks. Often they go unnoticed and uncelebrated in the world of sales, as we know, but we know that the heroes of revenue engine are revenue operators and that's why we're calling them Revenue Mavericks. Today in our session, Craig is going to talk about 4 specific metrics, and these metrics are, they come from his experience of working at large and small organizations, and he has seen how these leading indicators have been very, very powerful in guaranteeing, you know, revenue results as well as revenue challenges and problems.
Neel Kamal: So with that, without further ado correct, let's take take us through this.
Craig Handy: Perfect, awesome!
So I'll. I'll start with saying one thing to,
Craig Handy: there's a lot of things that you could look at from a from a metric standpoint from a data standpoint, and I think that there's some critical, I I don't want to say basic, but some critical foundational reporting and analytics you should be looking at,
Craig Handy: I'm not covering those today, and I want to be really clear about that. I'm going to do a little bit of outside of the box analytics to look at, that I think we'll give you the competitive advantage, but also we'll give you a different perspective or a different way to analyze certain things. so so let's dive into it.
Craig Handy: The first thing I want to start with is just to tell you briefly about the RevDynamiks methodology. And so it's a methodology that my business partner and I worked at, and the main thing that we employ where we are at currently, York.ie. But the concept of RevDynamiks is essentially the fact that there's a lot of similarities in Go To Market
Craig Handy: as there is with the concept of fluid dynamics. So like a physics concept. And so the way we look at that is, we look at pressure, gauge, and velocity. And pressure for us is what are the things that kind of increase conversion? What are the things that decrease conversion? Things that hold you back or drive you forward.
Craig Handy: We look at gauge it's like, well, what's the overall size? Like how do we increase the amount of volume that's going through our pipe? Whether that's more deals, you know, or more areas, that the things that that may even be ACV, how are we increasing the the total value in the pipe?
Craig Handy: The last one is velocity, and these are things that increase the speed, or forward momentum, or things that pull them back.
Craig Handy: And we find by looking at it in this particular way, is it allows us to fine tune things that we do in our go to market process to best suit you know, best suit our objectives, to best actually do experiments, to actually best identify metrics and things that have the impact.
Craig Handy: So the reason I'm telling you all this is part of the analytics and reports that i'm going to show you now takes inspiration from these 3 main categories in the way that we think about that.
Craig Handy: So the first one I'm going to go into is the Win Loss Time Gap, and you probably heard this one before. But realistically you you probably more commonly hear the term "time to close".
Craig Handy: And the thing is, is that time to close is not created equal.
Craig Handy: The time to win and the time to lose is often different. It often is a separate thing. And there's different philosophies to have for that. So I will just spend time to actually look at that one specifically, and look for the average variance between that. And so our number here is looking a 1.0, is the time to win and the time to lose is exactly the same!
Craig Handy: Same exact time! The odds of that happening, incredibly low! Buy a lottery ticket if that's occurring. That's, that's very strange. But
Craig Handy: what we like to look at is have a target of like 1.10, which basically means that it takes us a little bit longer to lose than it does to win. And that intention is is that we're going forward with the best of intentions, we're trying to get this deal exposed. And you know, when we, things are maybe going off the rails, we give the benefit of doubt and we try and bring it back in.
Neel Kamal: Yeah, I see. Let me ask one question around that. So if you.
Neel Kamal: If you have a deal, and there are 5 stages of the deal. If you lose a deal at stage 2, obviously that time will be shorter.
Neel Kamal: And if you win a deal, you have to go through all 5 stages, so that time it will be longer.
Neel Kamal: So in this case, by expecting the time to loss to be greater, you are saying on an average, a loss only happens at the final stages of the deal, and not in the mid cycle.
Craig Handy: No, no! And that's a good point to to bring up actually. And so what what we find and what I found in in
Craig Handy: engagements and in previous companies is that one ends up happening is, let's say, a traditional deal, let's say most moves through 5 stages, and let's say it takes 10 days for each stage gets it to being one, it was 50 days altogether. What is it happening is, let's say we're on stage 3.
Craig Handy: We may spend 40 days in stage 3.
Craig Handy: That deal should have been closed lost.
Craig Handy: But it's sitting there.
Craig Handy: And so what ends up happening is that that starts to extend. So if everything was created equal, 100% yeah the win would take longer, because we have things that would drop off. But this definition is, and and so this is, this is when we get into this very interesting piece, where, when we're looking at our forecasting.
Craig Handy: We may say, all right we have X number of deals forecasted to close - close win, we look at our win loss time gap, and we realize that the average time to win is, let's say it's 30 days.
Craig Handy: and we have a bunch of deals that are forecasted to close, and they're at 38 days.
Craig Handy: Me, I'm not counting them. I'm getting they're gone! They're still alive! Fair. Sales rep working them. That's fine, but they're not part of my forecast, because they've exceeded the timeframe when they actually realistically should probably close.
Craig Handy: If that time starts to increase. Then I know that those things are
Craig Handy: comparable. If the time starts to decrease, maybe our process is cleaner, maybe we're getting better at qualification. But the real factor here for me, is understanding is it still in a realm of possibility? And is the ability to understand how we win versus the ability to understand how we lose, is that
Craig Handy: in competition with one another, or those actually kind of aligned? Or do they make sense? They have an explanation for it? So that's one of the ones that I look at in in that sample.
Neel Kamal: So if it is, if a deal is taking
Neel Kamal: more than that 1.1 times your ideal. Then what action, what decisions do you make?If it is not ideal? What do you do with this?
Craig:
So one of the main ones that we'd look at is is there a factor in the market? Is there a factor in the particular product? Is the market segment itself
Craig Handy: playing into that, right? And so you may look at all right well certain deals with companies in particular. Industries are taking longer, because maybe traditionally they have deeper procurement processes. Or maybe there's a a a key thing that we're losing late in the stage or late in the opportunity that we should actually address early on, right. And so those are those types of things that you would double down on to understand why that's actually happening.
Craig Handy: Another factor may be the fact that do we understand when a deal has momentum, or when it does not? And that comes to a sales coaching based behavior to say if we have, you know, reps that don't know
Craig Handy: what a good deal looks like, or not doing good qualification to start, or kind of getting the run around by the prospect. Then there's some time to spend to say, all right what can we improve that? Can we, can we coach them on on again, creating that momentum, creating that understanding earlier on, so they can differentiate this deal, actually does that have legs? Or or does it, does it not? The time to win is generally going to be the time to win, and you can optimize that. The time to lose
Craig Handy: is usually subjective. Unless you're getting an actual message from the prospect saying hey, I do not want to move forward with this, please
Craig Handy: close last your, opportunity. I don't think we hear those very often. They kind of trickle out. And so, because of that subjectivity, there's a lot on the rep, or those involved to be able to identify those signs and realize when it's time to pop it back in nurture, or when it's time to double down, or realistically, when it is or isn't time to forecast it.
Neel Kamal: This is actually very smart. It solves another problem.
Neel Kamal: A lot of people just look at average time to win.
Neel Kamal: and they look for all deals which are being an anomaly, which are taking more than that.
Neel Kamal: But the problem is average time to win across. The company has no meaning to the deal execution, and by making it a ratio you are applying a cohortness to it.
Neel Kamal: So for a particular rep,
Neel Kamal: if your time to lose is longer, then maybe your time to win is longer, too. Because you are dealing with a particular type of market segment, which is not, so by making it a ratio
Neel Kamal: and a time gap you saw the problem of
Neel Kamal: broad stroke comparison across the company. You made it to the cohort of that rep or maybe that business unit. Really smart! I like it!
Craig Handy: I'm gonna talk about the concept, and then I'm going to talk about the particular graph that I've shown, and I want to be clear that this is not
Craig Handy: the only graph to look at this particular topic. It's a it's the one I spun up, and I think you can do probably something way better using BoostUp, but nonetheless, the the intention here really is looking at the ACV Standard Deviation.
Craig Handy: So standard deviation for for all those listening is going to be the variance between all of the different instances of an annual contract value compared to its average. So what is the average contract value? How much does that differ?
Craig Handy: So in this particular view, and what I'm showing here is, I'm looking at based on 3 different market segments, our SMB, our Mid-Market, and our Enterprise. And the plots on the graph are looking at the %age of standard deviation. So this is normally not shown in %age but i 'm doing this for for simplification of this. And
Craig Handy: we're then looking at it over quarters. And so the main reason for this, and why I initially started going towards looking at the ACV standard deviation is because when you are forecasting your deals
Craig Handy: and you are forecasting into the future based on we think we're going to hit X revenue, we need to produce this many leads, you almost always use the ACV as the calculation in that. But the deals are not the ACV. An example of this, let's say you have 1 million dollars in your pipeline.
Craig Handy: And you have 3 deals that represent what that is. You could say hey, all 3 of those deals have a you know, an equal ACV. But that's probably maybe not the case. Maybe one of the deals is $850,000, and another $100,000, and you know another another one's $50,000 right. Like they
Craig Handy: are not all equal. So if you say, well, if I win 50% of them, I'm going to win! I'm going to get $500,000 in revenue, No!
Craig Handy: Depends on which one of those deals you're gonna get. And so when you're running your forecast, what I'm looking for is, I'm taking into consideration what the actual average is, and then looking at the deviation to then say, what is the possible upside of that? Versus where is it possibly going to come in low? And then how can I then separately chunk out these individual deals within that pipe.
Craig Handy: So it's not always a clean process,
Craig Handy: but it's a process that allows you to get really really tight when it comes to ensuring that when you're forecasting, you are capturing that variance, and you're not surprised by these things of you know where it could swing. So that's the main focus of it. But there's another factor for this, I think, is really great.
Craig Handy: You're gonna hear a lot, probably toward, like, you know, in 2022 you definitely heard it. You're gonna hear a lot more of it in 2023, is the concept of PLG : the Product Led Growth. You're gonna hear again the buyer centricity, all those topics.
Craig Handy: And when we look at pricing and how we package our contracts, play a lot into that. And so an example of that being is in an Smb market.
Craig Handy: The likelihood that you have a set price. You, don't, negotiate that price, or the price is really like straightforward makes sense for the market.
Craig Handy: The sense is that that SMB should very have very low deviation, if any.
Craig Handy: When you're looking at an enterprise contract that is like, hey we don't even list our price, we negotiate, we have different pieces. You are going to expect wider deviation from that. That's, that's fine.
Craig Handy: So what we look at this is to say, what is the deviation trend? And ideally, we want that deviation actually to be going down. We want it to be more predictable, more close. But we also ideally want the average contract value to go up. And so, if we're seeing deals that are above the expectation or below expectation, then we want to double down on those. And we want to look at that to say, are we
Craig Handy: adding value by adding add ons? And that's why we're increasing the price. Or we actually selling through discounts? which is a horrible practice to partake in. But it's do we feel like we're not providing value where we can't actually sell this or just,
Craig Handy: you know, tossing discounts out of the window, in which case our deviation starts to get really all over the place.
Craig Handy: and we don't lead by value. So again
Craig Handy: this is like a multi layered sense of a of a metric in a stat, but it is one that's very useful when you're looking at how your your Go To Market from a pricing, packaging and pitching standpoint looks over time, as you're going along.
Neel Kamal: Very well said. and and also very timely, because in 2023, this is gonna play out hugely.
Neel Kamal: If you miss the $800,000 deal, and even if you are more than 50%, you will not make that half a million dollars. As well as the sentiment of the industry on trying to get to uniformity on pricing on SMB, which is where
Neel Kamal: you know the cost is higher. The cost of sale is higher, the predictability needs to come in. I think it also gives me an opportunity to plug in BoostUp a little bit here. Because
Neel Kamal: what happens in charts like this, a chart like this can be drawn in multitude of ways, including spreadsheet.
Neel Kamal: However, If you have BoostUp RevBI,
Neel Kamal: you will be able to click on those dots and see the list of opportunities which are in the deviant part of the standard deviation which are not conforming to the standard, and they are the deviation. So the double-click-ability of the chart, and going from a point all the way directly into deals and from deals into
Neel Kamal: the specificity of data, that we call "the connected tissue" or the "connected layer" of revenue intelligence. And BoostUp is very good with that. But coming back to this chart now.
Neel Kamal: In your practice, Craig, when you were seeing lumpiness or deviations,
Neel Kamal: unexpected deviations,
Neel Kamal: What were you able to do using this chart? What was this able to just bring attention for executives? Or it was actually execution too, at the rep and manager level?
Craig Handy: Yeah, so. And and that's a great question, is, I I think.
Craig Handy: both the chart you saw before this chart, and even the next chart. I like to call them canaries. and you know the canary and the coal mine type of perspective, is that they are there to give you a baseline tension metric, a point to say, hey, something's up here. Something's interesting. I want to double down, I want to look into it, and that's the main focal point of this. That being said.
Craig Handy: can I leverage this? Yes, there's I would say, 2 main ways that I would, I would leverage this. The first one is
Craig Handy: if i'm seeing particular trend lines going up, I'm going to go back to and remember we thought about this before the RevDynamiks for looking at those 3 categories. I'm going to go back, and i'm going to do an experiment, probably with gauge on the ACV side of thing is, I'm going to maybe bump my ACVs or I'm going to decrease my ACV and I'm going to see
Craig Handy: or my price point on my products. And i'm going to see does that net in the standard deviation? Or can I make these different like, you can only discount this much, or here's this unique package that we're going to do. Can we simplify some of that? And then do we see that these are not things you're going to see overnight. It it needs to be trended. It needs to be captured. If you look at this from a monthly standpoint as opposed to quarterly standpoint, You're going to need to hope that you have volume, to be able to make something representative, because again, that that's a really key thing.
Craig Handy: The other thing I would say is when you're, when you're able to actually, and to your point - "the connective tissue", when you're able to actually go in there and look at that.
Craig Handy: If this is, and and the way I'm I've done this report is these are deals that have been closed. If i'm looking at it live from a manager standpoint going in there and seeing like, hey, you know this, this team or this rep has this huge deviation. What are these deals? And then diving into that further to say - all right. well this deal's like this because of X, or this deal's like this because of Y, and then I can actually coach that, or you know, influence that ahead of time to try and nip that in the bud before it becomes
Craig Handy: before it actually becomes a trend. You know what I mean. It's a point.
Craig Handy: not a big deal. If it's a if it's a line changing direction. Well, that becomes a big deal maybe a good big deal, but often not.
Neel Kamal: That's right.
Neel Kamal: Very good. I like this.
Craig Handy: Perfect. Alright, so we'll jump in the last one here. so this this one is
Craig Handy: personally my favorite. It's very simple, but I will not go anywhere without it. Doesn't matter who i'm working with what i'm doing. I'm always looking at this particular piece. And so what this is this is the ultimate canary in the coal mine
Craig Handy: Pipe Health for us is defined as we look at a snapshot of the first day of the month.
Craig Handy: and we look at exactly the deals that are in the pipe. And the way that we do that is, we take deals that were created, subtract deals that were closed. That includes deals that are won.
Craig Handy: That includes deals that are lost. We include deals that are won is because you can't win a deal twice. It's not in the pipe anymore. It's over. You can upsell it, great. That's fine. But if you've won the deal, yeah, that's great. That's exciting. Celebrate You've got revenue. But now you have one less deal in the pipe.
Craig Handy: Do you need to do something about that.
Craig Handy: So this report on its own tells you very little in the sense of why.
Craig Handy: But it is used as a double click, kind of point to then benchmark everything. And and whenever you're measuring something else, come back to this as tension metric.
Craig Handy: And again, for the audience, tension metric is a metric that is used in conjunction with another metric to you know, if you change this, what does it happen over here? If you do this, what happens over here. So we use to see things in balance, to try and find net positive as opposed to positive here, negative down there.
Craig Handy: So
Craig Handy: what we generally see here is, you're looking at the the main, the blue bars, which is the overall size of deals in the pipe. You can do this by ACV. If your CRM or your analytics platform, BoostUp, indexes and snapshots. If you're using something, you know, like salesforce or Hubspot, you you're controlled into a particular way to do it, but it's still leverage. Oftentimes I found, if we do in an excel sheet, so that's not the that's not the way forward. But it is a way. but you're basically looking at deals created,
Craig Handy: total deals in the pipe, and then the net change is looking at obviously just the change from the previous period, the previous measurement. So are we growing the pipe, or is the pipe shrinking. Doesn't, tell you oh, yeah, pipe shrunk because we won a million deals! Great! Pipe shrinking! that's what you need to focus on.
Craig Handy: We then look at what is the average time to close. In this case I don't care about win or loss, I'm just looking at when the deals on average go from creation to done, and then I'm looking at the win rate. So that does play into effect of is it a positive close out?
Craig Handy: So these are the questions that I'm going to ask when I'm going through here is I'm going to say if I'm adding sales people to the business
Craig Handy: Is my overall pipe size growing?
Craig Handy: If it isn't do I need those particular sales people? If I'm adding those salespeople, my pipe is saying the same, my win rate is growing up, then I can assume I've probably reduced the number of deals an individual rep is working with, and therefore the individual rep can spend better time and sell better. That's great.
Craig Handy: Maybe my pipe stays exactly the same. But my win rate plummets.
Craig Handy: Okay, I'm creating a bad pipe. I'm adding bad deals in, and I'm closing them up just as quickly as I'm bringing them in.
Craig Handy: That's not positive with the business, because I'm not generating revenue. I'm just making it look like I have a big pipe. Or maybe the pipe is growing, but the win rate is shrinking, and that's actually showing I'm even doubling down on that further. Another one being maybe the pipe is staying stagnant, but the average time to close is skyrocketing.
Craig Handy: So actually, not generating new business. I'm just not closing anything out. So it's realistically this kind of thing we go back to you to say this is like this is the pulse. This is the main lifeline of what that that pipe is looking, and then we turn those levers, pick those knobs and everything we're doing and seeing what is that actually do to the overall health of that particular pipe.
Craig Handy: So it's simple, but I love it as that as that canary.
Neel Kamal: Are you also trending the average time to close and win rate on a month to month basis, because here, right now, it is just stationary.
Craig Handy: Yeah. So so generally and again, we we'll do this in different ways, depending on. You know what kind of business you have, which type of businesses you working with. My preference is rolling 120, I think rolling 120 is a very useful tool to not to show history, but also not
Craig Handy: like a lot can change a year. But some clients that we do this with it's 365, some of them they want to do a quarterly. I I will do it monthly, but I won't recommend it, because the senses is that again,
Craig Handy: win rate in a month period is is volatile. That doesn't actually make sense. But that's the intention is, you want to set a timeframe, and then run with that that particular conversion to see like how that is changing, how that is influencing.
Neel Kamal: And just a small point of clarification. it's kind of obvious, but let me state it out. The black lines and red lines are basically the reverse of each other right? So if you
Neel Kamal: have won deals, then that's in black, and if you have lost deals, then of the 5, then it is negative?
Craig Handy: No, that's so those are. Those are representative of the bar directly behind it. So if you see let's let's look at April, 2022, which is right here. What that's basically saying that that black bar there is the amount of pipe growth compared to the previous month, which was March. So if you basically kind of took that chunk there, that would sit up here and make that equal. But you look at June, it's red because it's actually a pipe size decrease.
Craig Handy: And so when we look at that, it's yeah, that overall in may 2022, we were I don't know it's like 75, maybe we're down to you know 70 right? And so it's it's basically it's just in the black or in the red.
Neel Kamal : And the red can happen
Neel Kamal: even if you have added more to the pipe because you have close won or close lost many.
Craig Handy: Yeah, like, for for example, like, if this, if we broke this data down, you know this July here we had a big drop, but we could have had our best month ever, but we blew the revenue of the water. And that's fine, like you'd look at that and be like oh, this is that bad? And you should, you should look at that. Is that bad? Then you go and you validate. Okay,
Craig Handy: we won a lot of deals. This was a great month. If we keep at this pace, though we keep winning. Are we gonna, you know? I I mean, we're asking the VP of Sales or CRO, hey, this is a great month. Are we gonna keep doing this?
Craig Handy: Because if we are, we don't have the pipeline for it. So that's that's an area where all right. So we need to actually
Craig Handy: get more deals. We need to actually pump that back up again. If this was a loop we had a promo, and there was a market shift that people wanted to buy this. All right, let's not panic about that. Maybe we're good. Maybe we don't need to hire a bunch of new sales. People we don't need to, you know. Drop a bunch of money out of marketing campaign, you know. Maybe we do right? So that's that's really. It's meant to create questions.
Neel Kamal: Yes, it's a connector, the canary point. I got that. What about plotting the number of reps because one of the key decisions you're making through this chart is is the business or the pipeline continue to grow, and therefore we need to fund growth of the sales team.
Neel Kamal: Do you ever consider plotting the number of reps as an overlay on this start.
Craig Handy: Yeah, you, you know you can. You can plot that you can plot, I guess. Say, we, you do it an ACV standpoint instead of a you know, deals number. You can actually try and trend the win rate. I mean it's a little messy, but you can do that. I've seen this one done by you know, doing the bar chart with like the the stack bar chart, and showing different market segments in it as well to see like are we, cause another example for that maybe
Craig Handy: we are filling the pipe with a ton of SMB, and our enterprise is decreasing, and then our ACV is dropping, and everything looks good. But but actually no, it's not, because that's not
Craig Handy: strategically what we're doing right? So basically any other metric that you look at, as long as it's trendable, you can overlay it on here and see if that has having any sort of correlation or or what not. And usually it does, and it's it's actually this wonderful thing where we at a client,
Craig Handy: and probably about 6 months ago, that we were having review of this and and their their controller was on the call, and we layered the ACV with the number of deals and
Craig Handy: the obviously the bars and everything. numbers were different, but the shape was exactly the same, and he's like hang on a second! like that that really like makes sense like that. And I like, yeah, like it does. And and that's that's important because you're starting to see like
Craig Handy: what are these, what what what is creating these changes, or what is creating this trend?
Neel Kamal: Yeah.
Neel Kamal: In fact, this is a significant leading indicator for the early part of the go-to-market function. Because if this is not happening,
Neel Kamal: then all the other decisions, investment into the sales team,
Neel Kamal: or increasing or decreasing investment into marketing team.
Neel Kamal: more investment to your R&D.
Neel Kamal: Basically this is an early indicator of a lot of other decisions that you make. So
Neel Kamal: I agree with your sentiment that
Neel Kamal: you know pipeline health is one such thing that everybody looks at, and everybody looks differently. But you've given me a very interesting way of looking at it.
Neel Kamal: So this is very useful.
Neel Kamal : Do you have more, Craig. I'd love to keep on going?
Craig Handy : I have this lovely Thank you slide. That's that's the last one.
Craig Handy: No, I will. I will say one thing, though, and I'll i'll go back, and I'll mention this here because I I think it's relevant, and it's relevant to this and and as we see things.
Craig Handy: There's there's a concept in I'll talk a little bit more about it on the side and whatnot. But especially around all these things, the the concept of the Bernoulli's principle
Craig Handy: and we talk about this from from fluid dynamics. We take it from our dynamics but it's mainly the concept that when when a fluid moves through a pipe, the faster it moves through the pipe, the less outward pressure it creates.
Craig Handy: So if we translate that into our go to market, pipe our our metaphorical pipe.
Craig Handy: The faster a deal, the more straightforward, consistent, predictable flow motion ideal moves from start to finish, the less outward pressure is going to create. So it's going to be more, it's more efficient. It's a more affordable deal. It's a more predictable deal. Everything's great about that. When the velocity slows down, when the 4 momentum slows down, it starts to create outward pressure which puts pressure on your sales team, on your solution engineers, on your legal team, on your pricing specialists, on your marketers sometimes. All of that adds to the cost of actually getting a successful
Craig Handy: customer, it decreases the predictability. It decreases your your overall success of the business. And then it means you actually need more people to even get that done. And so, when when we look at these, you know, these canary type reports one of the ways that we're looking for, that is saying, are we contributing to positive healthy behaviors in that go-to-market process? And if we are great. If we're not, let's use these tools to like double down and identify where is it that we're we're missing the mark? Where can we
Craig Handy: you know spend more or focus more or whatnot to improve that. And and there's a there's a multitude of different factors like Bernoulli's principle that that really relate to that story, and it's just about uncovering you know what is actually going on and ultimately asking better questions of yourself and of your go-to-market team as a whole.
Neel Kamal: Yeah, actually, you know, you're making me think about how did the concept of the terminology of pipe come to the world of modern selling.
Neel Kamal: I know, because fluid dynamics or the concept is very powerful actually, and Bernoulli's principle is applicable for anything that is floating, and business need to be floating and growing. So you look at it from a pressure to the type perspective, or you look at it from a health of the business which wants to just cruise through and flow,
Neel Kamal: It all makes sense for for fluid dynamics to be the inspiration behind
Neel Kamal: How revenue team should be operating. However, come to think of it, I think the pipe term was borrowed from
Neel Kamal: car and assembly line.
Neel Kamal: is what I recall.
Neel Kamal: Craig, I wanna thank you for your contribution to the Revenue Operations Group. You continue to be a talk leader and welcome and congratulations to be a Revenue Maverick.
Neel Kamal: We will post this video. People will watch it. I'm sure they will have questions, and they will reach out to the community over LinkedIn, or whichever form they can. So for the watchers, thank you so much for listening, and feel free to tag us for where if we can be of value to you.
Craig Handy: Wonderful! Thank you for having me
Neel Kamal: Hello Everyone! My name is Neel Kamal, I am your host for Revenue Maverick, and today we have an esteemed guest, a friend of mine, and a director of Revenue Operations, Craig Handy. Craig, welcome to the Revenue Maverick program.
Craig Handy: Thank you for having me, definitely, very very excited to be here. And I know you and I have been talking about this for a little while, and I think it's great to finally see it come together, and I can, I can live my Tom Cruise days as a, of a maverick. It's Rev Ops, of course, not jets, but you know the Maverick title works. I like it!
Neel Kamal: Exactly! And you know, Rev Ops community needs many many Tom Cruises of the world, because ultimately, you know the magic that happens in a revenue engine. A big part of that is kudos to the revenue operations folks. Often they go unnoticed and uncelebrated in the world of sales, as we know, but we know that the heroes of revenue engine are revenue operators and that's why we're calling them Revenue Mavericks. Today in our session, Craig is going to talk about 4 specific metrics, and these metrics are, they come from his experience of working at large and small organizations, and he has seen how these leading indicators have been very, very powerful in guaranteeing, you know, revenue results as well as revenue challenges and problems.
Neel Kamal: So with that, without further ado correct, let's take take us through this.
Craig Handy: Perfect, awesome!
So I'll. I'll start with saying one thing to,
Craig Handy: there's a lot of things that you could look at from a from a metric standpoint from a data standpoint, and I think that there's some critical, I I don't want to say basic, but some critical foundational reporting and analytics you should be looking at,
Craig Handy: I'm not covering those today, and I want to be really clear about that. I'm going to do a little bit of outside of the box analytics to look at, that I think we'll give you the competitive advantage, but also we'll give you a different perspective or a different way to analyze certain things. so so let's dive into it.
Craig Handy: The first thing I want to start with is just to tell you briefly about the RevDynamiks methodology. And so it's a methodology that my business partner and I worked at, and the main thing that we employ where we are at currently, York.ie. But the concept of RevDynamiks is essentially the fact that there's a lot of similarities in Go To Market
Craig Handy: as there is with the concept of fluid dynamics. So like a physics concept. And so the way we look at that is, we look at pressure, gauge, and velocity. And pressure for us is what are the things that kind of increase conversion? What are the things that decrease conversion? Things that hold you back or drive you forward.
Craig Handy: We look at gauge it's like, well, what's the overall size? Like how do we increase the amount of volume that's going through our pipe? Whether that's more deals, you know, or more areas, that the things that that may even be ACV, how are we increasing the the total value in the pipe?
Craig Handy: The last one is velocity, and these are things that increase the speed, or forward momentum, or things that pull them back.
Craig Handy: And we find by looking at it in this particular way, is it allows us to fine tune things that we do in our go to market process to best suit you know, best suit our objectives, to best actually do experiments, to actually best identify metrics and things that have the impact.
Craig Handy: So the reason I'm telling you all this is part of the analytics and reports that i'm going to show you now takes inspiration from these 3 main categories in the way that we think about that.
Craig Handy: So the first one I'm going to go into is the Win Loss Time Gap, and you probably heard this one before. But realistically you you probably more commonly hear the term "time to close".
Craig Handy: And the thing is, is that time to close is not created equal.
Craig Handy: The time to win and the time to lose is often different. It often is a separate thing. And there's different philosophies to have for that. So I will just spend time to actually look at that one specifically, and look for the average variance between that. And so our number here is looking a 1.0, is the time to win and the time to lose is exactly the same!
Craig Handy: Same exact time! The odds of that happening, incredibly low! Buy a lottery ticket if that's occurring. That's, that's very strange. But
Craig Handy: what we like to look at is have a target of like 1.10, which basically means that it takes us a little bit longer to lose than it does to win. And that intention is is that we're going forward with the best of intentions, we're trying to get this deal exposed. And you know, when we, things are maybe going off the rails, we give the benefit of doubt and we try and bring it back in.
Neel Kamal: Yeah, I see. Let me ask one question around that. So if you.
Neel Kamal: If you have a deal, and there are 5 stages of the deal. If you lose a deal at stage 2, obviously that time will be shorter.
Neel Kamal: And if you win a deal, you have to go through all 5 stages, so that time it will be longer.
Neel Kamal: So in this case, by expecting the time to loss to be greater, you are saying on an average, a loss only happens at the final stages of the deal, and not in the mid cycle.
Craig Handy: No, no! And that's a good point to to bring up actually. And so what what we find and what I found in in
Craig Handy: engagements and in previous companies is that one ends up happening is, let's say, a traditional deal, let's say most moves through 5 stages, and let's say it takes 10 days for each stage gets it to being one, it was 50 days altogether. What is it happening is, let's say we're on stage 3.
Craig Handy: We may spend 40 days in stage 3.
Craig Handy: That deal should have been closed lost.
Craig Handy: But it's sitting there.
Craig Handy: And so what ends up happening is that that starts to extend. So if everything was created equal, 100% yeah the win would take longer, because we have things that would drop off. But this definition is, and and so this is, this is when we get into this very interesting piece, where, when we're looking at our forecasting.
Craig Handy: We may say, all right we have X number of deals forecasted to close - close win, we look at our win loss time gap, and we realize that the average time to win is, let's say it's 30 days.
Craig Handy: and we have a bunch of deals that are forecasted to close, and they're at 38 days.
Craig Handy: Me, I'm not counting them. I'm getting they're gone! They're still alive! Fair. Sales rep working them. That's fine, but they're not part of my forecast, because they've exceeded the timeframe when they actually realistically should probably close.
Craig Handy: If that time starts to increase. Then I know that those things are
Craig Handy: comparable. If the time starts to decrease, maybe our process is cleaner, maybe we're getting better at qualification. But the real factor here for me, is understanding is it still in a realm of possibility? And is the ability to understand how we win versus the ability to understand how we lose, is that
Craig Handy: in competition with one another, or those actually kind of aligned? Or do they make sense? They have an explanation for it? So that's one of the ones that I look at in in that sample.
Neel Kamal: So if it is, if a deal is taking
Neel Kamal: more than that 1.1 times your ideal. Then what action, what decisions do you make?If it is not ideal? What do you do with this?
Craig:
So one of the main ones that we'd look at is is there a factor in the market? Is there a factor in the particular product? Is the market segment itself
Craig Handy: playing into that, right? And so you may look at all right well certain deals with companies in particular. Industries are taking longer, because maybe traditionally they have deeper procurement processes. Or maybe there's a a a key thing that we're losing late in the stage or late in the opportunity that we should actually address early on, right. And so those are those types of things that you would double down on to understand why that's actually happening.
Craig Handy: Another factor may be the fact that do we understand when a deal has momentum, or when it does not? And that comes to a sales coaching based behavior to say if we have, you know, reps that don't know
Craig Handy: what a good deal looks like, or not doing good qualification to start, or kind of getting the run around by the prospect. Then there's some time to spend to say, all right what can we improve that? Can we, can we coach them on on again, creating that momentum, creating that understanding earlier on, so they can differentiate this deal, actually does that have legs? Or or does it, does it not? The time to win is generally going to be the time to win, and you can optimize that. The time to lose
Craig Handy: is usually subjective. Unless you're getting an actual message from the prospect saying hey, I do not want to move forward with this, please
Craig Handy: close last your, opportunity. I don't think we hear those very often. They kind of trickle out. And so, because of that subjectivity, there's a lot on the rep, or those involved to be able to identify those signs and realize when it's time to pop it back in nurture, or when it's time to double down, or realistically, when it is or isn't time to forecast it.
Neel Kamal: This is actually very smart. It solves another problem.
Neel Kamal: A lot of people just look at average time to win.
Neel Kamal: and they look for all deals which are being an anomaly, which are taking more than that.
Neel Kamal: But the problem is average time to win across. The company has no meaning to the deal execution, and by making it a ratio you are applying a cohortness to it.
Neel Kamal: So for a particular rep,
Neel Kamal: if your time to lose is longer, then maybe your time to win is longer, too. Because you are dealing with a particular type of market segment, which is not, so by making it a ratio
Neel Kamal: and a time gap you saw the problem of
Neel Kamal: broad stroke comparison across the company. You made it to the cohort of that rep or maybe that business unit. Really smart! I like it!
Craig Handy: I'm gonna talk about the concept, and then I'm going to talk about the particular graph that I've shown, and I want to be clear that this is not
Craig Handy: the only graph to look at this particular topic. It's a it's the one I spun up, and I think you can do probably something way better using BoostUp, but nonetheless, the the intention here really is looking at the ACV Standard Deviation.
Craig Handy: So standard deviation for for all those listening is going to be the variance between all of the different instances of an annual contract value compared to its average. So what is the average contract value? How much does that differ?
Craig Handy: So in this particular view, and what I'm showing here is, I'm looking at based on 3 different market segments, our SMB, our Mid-Market, and our Enterprise. And the plots on the graph are looking at the %age of standard deviation. So this is normally not shown in %age but i 'm doing this for for simplification of this. And
Craig Handy: we're then looking at it over quarters. And so the main reason for this, and why I initially started going towards looking at the ACV standard deviation is because when you are forecasting your deals
Craig Handy: and you are forecasting into the future based on we think we're going to hit X revenue, we need to produce this many leads, you almost always use the ACV as the calculation in that. But the deals are not the ACV. An example of this, let's say you have 1 million dollars in your pipeline.
Craig Handy: And you have 3 deals that represent what that is. You could say hey, all 3 of those deals have a you know, an equal ACV. But that's probably maybe not the case. Maybe one of the deals is $850,000, and another $100,000, and you know another another one's $50,000 right. Like they
Craig Handy: are not all equal. So if you say, well, if I win 50% of them, I'm going to win! I'm going to get $500,000 in revenue, No!
Craig Handy: Depends on which one of those deals you're gonna get. And so when you're running your forecast, what I'm looking for is, I'm taking into consideration what the actual average is, and then looking at the deviation to then say, what is the possible upside of that? Versus where is it possibly going to come in low? And then how can I then separately chunk out these individual deals within that pipe.
Craig Handy: So it's not always a clean process,
Craig Handy: but it's a process that allows you to get really really tight when it comes to ensuring that when you're forecasting, you are capturing that variance, and you're not surprised by these things of you know where it could swing. So that's the main focus of it. But there's another factor for this, I think, is really great.
Craig Handy: You're gonna hear a lot, probably toward, like, you know, in 2022 you definitely heard it. You're gonna hear a lot more of it in 2023, is the concept of PLG : the Product Led Growth. You're gonna hear again the buyer centricity, all those topics.
Craig Handy: And when we look at pricing and how we package our contracts, play a lot into that. And so an example of that being is in an Smb market.
Craig Handy: The likelihood that you have a set price. You, don't, negotiate that price, or the price is really like straightforward makes sense for the market.
Craig Handy: The sense is that that SMB should very have very low deviation, if any.
Craig Handy: When you're looking at an enterprise contract that is like, hey we don't even list our price, we negotiate, we have different pieces. You are going to expect wider deviation from that. That's, that's fine.
Craig Handy: So what we look at this is to say, what is the deviation trend? And ideally, we want that deviation actually to be going down. We want it to be more predictable, more close. But we also ideally want the average contract value to go up. And so, if we're seeing deals that are above the expectation or below expectation, then we want to double down on those. And we want to look at that to say, are we
Craig Handy: adding value by adding add ons? And that's why we're increasing the price. Or we actually selling through discounts? which is a horrible practice to partake in. But it's do we feel like we're not providing value where we can't actually sell this or just,
Craig Handy: you know, tossing discounts out of the window, in which case our deviation starts to get really all over the place.
Craig Handy: and we don't lead by value. So again
Craig Handy: this is like a multi layered sense of a of a metric in a stat, but it is one that's very useful when you're looking at how your your Go To Market from a pricing, packaging and pitching standpoint looks over time, as you're going along.
Neel Kamal: Very well said. and and also very timely, because in 2023, this is gonna play out hugely.
Neel Kamal: If you miss the $800,000 deal, and even if you are more than 50%, you will not make that half a million dollars. As well as the sentiment of the industry on trying to get to uniformity on pricing on SMB, which is where
Neel Kamal: you know the cost is higher. The cost of sale is higher, the predictability needs to come in. I think it also gives me an opportunity to plug in BoostUp a little bit here. Because
Neel Kamal: what happens in charts like this, a chart like this can be drawn in multitude of ways, including spreadsheet.
Neel Kamal: However, If you have BoostUp RevBI,
Neel Kamal: you will be able to click on those dots and see the list of opportunities which are in the deviant part of the standard deviation which are not conforming to the standard, and they are the deviation. So the double-click-ability of the chart, and going from a point all the way directly into deals and from deals into
Neel Kamal: the specificity of data, that we call "the connected tissue" or the "connected layer" of revenue intelligence. And BoostUp is very good with that. But coming back to this chart now.
Neel Kamal: In your practice, Craig, when you were seeing lumpiness or deviations,
Neel Kamal: unexpected deviations,
Neel Kamal: What were you able to do using this chart? What was this able to just bring attention for executives? Or it was actually execution too, at the rep and manager level?
Craig Handy: Yeah, so. And and that's a great question, is, I I think.
Craig Handy: both the chart you saw before this chart, and even the next chart. I like to call them canaries. and you know the canary and the coal mine type of perspective, is that they are there to give you a baseline tension metric, a point to say, hey, something's up here. Something's interesting. I want to double down, I want to look into it, and that's the main focal point of this. That being said.
Craig Handy: can I leverage this? Yes, there's I would say, 2 main ways that I would, I would leverage this. The first one is
Craig Handy: if i'm seeing particular trend lines going up, I'm going to go back to and remember we thought about this before the RevDynamiks for looking at those 3 categories. I'm going to go back, and i'm going to do an experiment, probably with gauge on the ACV side of thing is, I'm going to maybe bump my ACVs or I'm going to decrease my ACV and I'm going to see
Craig Handy: or my price point on my products. And i'm going to see does that net in the standard deviation? Or can I make these different like, you can only discount this much, or here's this unique package that we're going to do. Can we simplify some of that? And then do we see that these are not things you're going to see overnight. It it needs to be trended. It needs to be captured. If you look at this from a monthly standpoint as opposed to quarterly standpoint, You're going to need to hope that you have volume, to be able to make something representative, because again, that that's a really key thing.
Craig Handy: The other thing I would say is when you're, when you're able to actually, and to your point - "the connective tissue", when you're able to actually go in there and look at that.
Craig Handy: If this is, and and the way I'm I've done this report is these are deals that have been closed. If i'm looking at it live from a manager standpoint going in there and seeing like, hey, you know this, this team or this rep has this huge deviation. What are these deals? And then diving into that further to say - all right. well this deal's like this because of X, or this deal's like this because of Y, and then I can actually coach that, or you know, influence that ahead of time to try and nip that in the bud before it becomes
Craig Handy: before it actually becomes a trend. You know what I mean. It's a point.
Craig Handy: not a big deal. If it's a if it's a line changing direction. Well, that becomes a big deal maybe a good big deal, but often not.
Neel Kamal: That's right.
Neel Kamal: Very good. I like this.
Craig Handy: Perfect. Alright, so we'll jump in the last one here. so this this one is
Craig Handy: personally my favorite. It's very simple, but I will not go anywhere without it. Doesn't matter who i'm working with what i'm doing. I'm always looking at this particular piece. And so what this is this is the ultimate canary in the coal mine
Craig Handy: Pipe Health for us is defined as we look at a snapshot of the first day of the month.
Craig Handy: and we look at exactly the deals that are in the pipe. And the way that we do that is, we take deals that were created, subtract deals that were closed. That includes deals that are won.
Craig Handy: That includes deals that are lost. We include deals that are won is because you can't win a deal twice. It's not in the pipe anymore. It's over. You can upsell it, great. That's fine. But if you've won the deal, yeah, that's great. That's exciting. Celebrate You've got revenue. But now you have one less deal in the pipe.
Craig Handy: Do you need to do something about that.
Craig Handy: So this report on its own tells you very little in the sense of why.
Craig Handy: But it is used as a double click, kind of point to then benchmark everything. And and whenever you're measuring something else, come back to this as tension metric.
Craig Handy: And again, for the audience, tension metric is a metric that is used in conjunction with another metric to you know, if you change this, what does it happen over here? If you do this, what happens over here. So we use to see things in balance, to try and find net positive as opposed to positive here, negative down there.
Craig Handy: So
Craig Handy: what we generally see here is, you're looking at the the main, the blue bars, which is the overall size of deals in the pipe. You can do this by ACV. If your CRM or your analytics platform, BoostUp, indexes and snapshots. If you're using something, you know, like salesforce or Hubspot, you you're controlled into a particular way to do it, but it's still leverage. Oftentimes I found, if we do in an excel sheet, so that's not the that's not the way forward. But it is a way. but you're basically looking at deals created,
Craig Handy: total deals in the pipe, and then the net change is looking at obviously just the change from the previous period, the previous measurement. So are we growing the pipe, or is the pipe shrinking. Doesn't, tell you oh, yeah, pipe shrunk because we won a million deals! Great! Pipe shrinking! that's what you need to focus on.
Craig Handy: We then look at what is the average time to close. In this case I don't care about win or loss, I'm just looking at when the deals on average go from creation to done, and then I'm looking at the win rate. So that does play into effect of is it a positive close out?
Craig Handy: So these are the questions that I'm going to ask when I'm going through here is I'm going to say if I'm adding sales people to the business
Craig Handy: Is my overall pipe size growing?
Craig Handy: If it isn't do I need those particular sales people? If I'm adding those salespeople, my pipe is saying the same, my win rate is growing up, then I can assume I've probably reduced the number of deals an individual rep is working with, and therefore the individual rep can spend better time and sell better. That's great.
Craig Handy: Maybe my pipe stays exactly the same. But my win rate plummets.
Craig Handy: Okay, I'm creating a bad pipe. I'm adding bad deals in, and I'm closing them up just as quickly as I'm bringing them in.
Craig Handy: That's not positive with the business, because I'm not generating revenue. I'm just making it look like I have a big pipe. Or maybe the pipe is growing, but the win rate is shrinking, and that's actually showing I'm even doubling down on that further. Another one being maybe the pipe is staying stagnant, but the average time to close is skyrocketing.
Craig Handy: So actually, not generating new business. I'm just not closing anything out. So it's realistically this kind of thing we go back to you to say this is like this is the pulse. This is the main lifeline of what that that pipe is looking, and then we turn those levers, pick those knobs and everything we're doing and seeing what is that actually do to the overall health of that particular pipe.
Craig Handy: So it's simple, but I love it as that as that canary.
Neel Kamal: Are you also trending the average time to close and win rate on a month to month basis, because here, right now, it is just stationary.
Craig Handy: Yeah. So so generally and again, we we'll do this in different ways, depending on. You know what kind of business you have, which type of businesses you working with. My preference is rolling 120, I think rolling 120 is a very useful tool to not to show history, but also not
Craig Handy: like a lot can change a year. But some clients that we do this with it's 365, some of them they want to do a quarterly. I I will do it monthly, but I won't recommend it, because the senses is that again,
Craig Handy: win rate in a month period is is volatile. That doesn't actually make sense. But that's the intention is, you want to set a timeframe, and then run with that that particular conversion to see like how that is changing, how that is influencing.
Neel Kamal: And just a small point of clarification. it's kind of obvious, but let me state it out. The black lines and red lines are basically the reverse of each other right? So if you
Neel Kamal: have won deals, then that's in black, and if you have lost deals, then of the 5, then it is negative?
Craig Handy: No, that's so those are. Those are representative of the bar directly behind it. So if you see let's let's look at April, 2022, which is right here. What that's basically saying that that black bar there is the amount of pipe growth compared to the previous month, which was March. So if you basically kind of took that chunk there, that would sit up here and make that equal. But you look at June, it's red because it's actually a pipe size decrease.
Craig Handy: And so when we look at that, it's yeah, that overall in may 2022, we were I don't know it's like 75, maybe we're down to you know 70 right? And so it's it's basically it's just in the black or in the red.
Neel Kamal : And the red can happen
Neel Kamal: even if you have added more to the pipe because you have close won or close lost many.
Craig Handy: Yeah, like, for for example, like, if this, if we broke this data down, you know this July here we had a big drop, but we could have had our best month ever, but we blew the revenue of the water. And that's fine, like you'd look at that and be like oh, this is that bad? And you should, you should look at that. Is that bad? Then you go and you validate. Okay,
Craig Handy: we won a lot of deals. This was a great month. If we keep at this pace, though we keep winning. Are we gonna, you know? I I mean, we're asking the VP of Sales or CRO, hey, this is a great month. Are we gonna keep doing this?
Craig Handy: Because if we are, we don't have the pipeline for it. So that's that's an area where all right. So we need to actually
Craig Handy: get more deals. We need to actually pump that back up again. If this was a loop we had a promo, and there was a market shift that people wanted to buy this. All right, let's not panic about that. Maybe we're good. Maybe we don't need to hire a bunch of new sales. People we don't need to, you know. Drop a bunch of money out of marketing campaign, you know. Maybe we do right? So that's that's really. It's meant to create questions.
Neel Kamal: Yes, it's a connector, the canary point. I got that. What about plotting the number of reps because one of the key decisions you're making through this chart is is the business or the pipeline continue to grow, and therefore we need to fund growth of the sales team.
Neel Kamal: Do you ever consider plotting the number of reps as an overlay on this start.
Craig Handy: Yeah, you, you know you can. You can plot that you can plot, I guess. Say, we, you do it an ACV standpoint instead of a you know, deals number. You can actually try and trend the win rate. I mean it's a little messy, but you can do that. I've seen this one done by you know, doing the bar chart with like the the stack bar chart, and showing different market segments in it as well to see like are we, cause another example for that maybe
Craig Handy: we are filling the pipe with a ton of SMB, and our enterprise is decreasing, and then our ACV is dropping, and everything looks good. But but actually no, it's not, because that's not
Craig Handy: strategically what we're doing right? So basically any other metric that you look at, as long as it's trendable, you can overlay it on here and see if that has having any sort of correlation or or what not. And usually it does, and it's it's actually this wonderful thing where we at a client,
Craig Handy: and probably about 6 months ago, that we were having review of this and and their their controller was on the call, and we layered the ACV with the number of deals and
Craig Handy: the obviously the bars and everything. numbers were different, but the shape was exactly the same, and he's like hang on a second! like that that really like makes sense like that. And I like, yeah, like it does. And and that's that's important because you're starting to see like
Craig Handy: what are these, what what what is creating these changes, or what is creating this trend?
Neel Kamal: Yeah.
Neel Kamal: In fact, this is a significant leading indicator for the early part of the go-to-market function. Because if this is not happening,
Neel Kamal: then all the other decisions, investment into the sales team,
Neel Kamal: or increasing or decreasing investment into marketing team.
Neel Kamal: more investment to your R&D.
Neel Kamal: Basically this is an early indicator of a lot of other decisions that you make. So
Neel Kamal: I agree with your sentiment that
Neel Kamal: you know pipeline health is one such thing that everybody looks at, and everybody looks differently. But you've given me a very interesting way of looking at it.
Neel Kamal: So this is very useful.
Neel Kamal : Do you have more, Craig. I'd love to keep on going?
Craig Handy : I have this lovely Thank you slide. That's that's the last one.
Craig Handy: No, I will. I will say one thing, though, and I'll i'll go back, and I'll mention this here because I I think it's relevant, and it's relevant to this and and as we see things.
Craig Handy: There's there's a concept in I'll talk a little bit more about it on the side and whatnot. But especially around all these things, the the concept of the Bernoulli's principle
Craig Handy: and we talk about this from from fluid dynamics. We take it from our dynamics but it's mainly the concept that when when a fluid moves through a pipe, the faster it moves through the pipe, the less outward pressure it creates.
Craig Handy: So if we translate that into our go to market, pipe our our metaphorical pipe.
Craig Handy: The faster a deal, the more straightforward, consistent, predictable flow motion ideal moves from start to finish, the less outward pressure is going to create. So it's going to be more, it's more efficient. It's a more affordable deal. It's a more predictable deal. Everything's great about that. When the velocity slows down, when the 4 momentum slows down, it starts to create outward pressure which puts pressure on your sales team, on your solution engineers, on your legal team, on your pricing specialists, on your marketers sometimes. All of that adds to the cost of actually getting a successful
Craig Handy: customer, it decreases the predictability. It decreases your your overall success of the business. And then it means you actually need more people to even get that done. And so, when when we look at these, you know, these canary type reports one of the ways that we're looking for, that is saying, are we contributing to positive healthy behaviors in that go-to-market process? And if we are great. If we're not, let's use these tools to like double down and identify where is it that we're we're missing the mark? Where can we
Craig Handy: you know spend more or focus more or whatnot to improve that. And and there's a there's a multitude of different factors like Bernoulli's principle that that really relate to that story, and it's just about uncovering you know what is actually going on and ultimately asking better questions of yourself and of your go-to-market team as a whole.
Neel Kamal: Yeah, actually, you know, you're making me think about how did the concept of the terminology of pipe come to the world of modern selling.
Neel Kamal: I know, because fluid dynamics or the concept is very powerful actually, and Bernoulli's principle is applicable for anything that is floating, and business need to be floating and growing. So you look at it from a pressure to the type perspective, or you look at it from a health of the business which wants to just cruise through and flow,
Neel Kamal: It all makes sense for for fluid dynamics to be the inspiration behind
Neel Kamal: How revenue team should be operating. However, come to think of it, I think the pipe term was borrowed from
Neel Kamal: car and assembly line.
Neel Kamal: is what I recall.
Neel Kamal: Craig, I wanna thank you for your contribution to the Revenue Operations Group. You continue to be a talk leader and welcome and congratulations to be a Revenue Maverick.
Neel Kamal: We will post this video. People will watch it. I'm sure they will have questions, and they will reach out to the community over LinkedIn, or whichever form they can. So for the watchers, thank you so much for listening, and feel free to tag us for where if we can be of value to you.
Craig Handy: Wonderful! Thank you for having me
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