Driving Business Development - Managing your Sales Pipeline

In today's episode, our hosts Brenton Gowland and Ron Tomlian continue the series on Driving Business Development. Today's episode explores Monitoring your Business Development and in particular, how to create and manage a Sales Pipeline.

The topics covered in this second part of the series are: 

• Monitoring Business Development relies on Sales Pipeline Management
• The definition of a Sales Pipeline
• Create a Sales Pipeline by mapping your sales process
• How lead times affect your Sales Pipeline
• The sales funnel
• How to create lead measures when you map your sales process
• How to estimate the value of your sales pipeline
• Including a qualification process in your Sales Pipeline
• The importance of visualising your sales process
• The importance of mapping lost opportunities
• Sales Pipeline tools - CRMs and Spreads
• The importance of the Sales Pipeline to your whole business

Adapt_CO
Helping businesses find their new shape.

SA Business Builders
Business leaders social group based in South Australia

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Transcript

Brenton Gowland: 0:01

Today on The Business Builders podcast, we're continuing our series about driving business development and our topic is monitoring. So we're looking at how to manage and monitor your sales pipeline. Ron talks about the necessity of establishing lead measures to keep you on track. And I talk about the difference between internal and external business development. Well, welcome to the Business Builders podcast we are your hosts, I am Brenton Gowland.

Ron Tomlian: 0:26

And I'm Ron Tomlian.

Brenton Gowland: 0:28

And Ron been a great little start to this new series we're talking about if you've just joined us business development and driving that within your business. So really excited for these next few episodes. Because last week, we did planning and that was talking about a business development plan. And now we're going to get into the nitty gritty of getting that plan into action. This week's episode is on monitoring.

Ron Tomlian: 0:49

Yes. And I'm looking forward to talking about your perceptions in terms of how businesses do that, and how they don't do it. More importantly,

Brenton Gowland: 0:58

But before we get into that, I just wanted to ask you Cabaret Festival's in town, we have always a pre chat, everybody, just before we do these podcasts, and Ron told me he was going to go see a show but it got cancelled.

Ron Tomlian: 1:11

Yeah, probably a good thing too, because I was going to see Kathy Lette's how to kill your husband and other useful tips. But unfortunately, they got COVID. Probably fortunately for me.

Brenton Gowland: 1:22

Yeah, cuz you and your wife, we're gonna go see that one. Why did you choose that title? It sounds great.

Ron Tomlian: 1:28

I'm a great fan of Kathy Lette.

Brenton Gowland: 1:30

Yeah.

Ron Tomlian: 1:30

And yeah, just seemed like a little bit of fun. And maybe my wife could pick up some useful tips.

Brenton Gowland: 1:35

Yeah, well sometimes Fortune favours the bold and they got COVID And your wife didn't get to see

Ron Tomlian: 1:40

those lately. Luckily, we still went and saw Trevor Jones, which is always a festival favourite.

Brenton Gowland: 1:45

Yeah, look, if you're listening to us, and you're not from Adelaide, Cabaret Festival's here once a year, and it's, I think, the second largest Cabaret F estival in the world. And it is absolutely fantastic. And my favourite time of year, I went to see Marcia Hines and Circus Bon Bon last week and not disappointed in any way. Now, Marcia is amazing. You know, she's almost 70. And she.

Ron Tomlian: 2:06

Hey, hey, hey, that's fine.

Brenton Gowland: 2:07

I shouldn't say that out loud. You can google her. She's amazing. She looks like she's like way younger. And her voice is just amazing. There you go. There's my there's my fandom coming out at this particular point. So I try not to reveal too much of my fandom moving forward. But

Ron Tomlian: 2:24

It's nice to know there's people you admire out there. That's fantastic.

Brenton Gowland: 2:27

She was really good. She did a gospel show like her influence from when she was a kid with the people that were influential in her life. And it was all based around church at that particular point.

Ron Tomlian: 2:36

I think Tina Arena has done a fabulous job in putting together another cabaret Festival. It's just a showstopper.

Brenton Gowland: 2:43

100% agree. Loved it. Anyway, just before we get into the main topic today, let's talk about our sponsors.

Ron Tomlian: 2:52

So SA Business Builders,

Brenton Gowland: 2:54

Yes, a group of business professionals that comes together about once a month to build quality business relationships, where you quality business relationships, just don't mean selling, it means finding mentors, it means finding people that you can work with. And that doesn't necessarily mean they're coming to your business, but that you can call them up and say, Hey, I need some help with X. And they're there for you. So those kinds of relationships in business, and we'll do a series on networking, probably in the strengths of having different kinds of relationships in business at another point, but that group, SA Business Builders is an exceptional resource for people. So if you're in Adelaide, and you want to join a group that's quite good at finding quality relationships, then reach out to us.

Ron Tomlian: 3:38

Yes, and of course, Adapt_CO. That's you.

Brenton Gowland: 3:41

That's my business. And we're probably about I said this a while back, we're a few weeks away from having a website. Well, we're getting there, we've got the draft version ready to go. So probably give us another four weeks me saying that probably eight, because we got a lot of work on at the moment but Adapt_CO basically helps you take control of the marketing within your business. And we work to make ourselves redundant over time and build your in house capability while we're doing that. So

Ron Tomlian: 4:03

It's so refreshing to hear. So refreshing to hear.

Brenton Gowland: 4:06

When we leave. And sometimes it takes six months, sometimes it takes 12 Sometimes it takes a little bit longer. But as we eventually leave, you have a marketing capacity within your business that's well managed. And we can always come and check in on you along the way. But that's what Adapt_CO does. It helps you build your marketing function and grow your business through marketing, which sometimes is sorely missed.

Ron Tomlian: 4:25

I think in the majority, when you think about a lot of businesses built up around a technical capability. How do they get marketing capability? How do they get business capabilities? Well, oftentimes, it's by importing that into the business with people like yourself,

Brenton Gowland: 4:41

Correct. Okay, and so now we will get into our topic. So this week, Ron, so in our series about driving business development within your company, we started by looking at planning, there's four things we're going to look at. Its planning, monitoring, aligning, and then winning us Tameside planning UbD, we talked about doing a business development plan in the last episode it looks like and how to do it. Today is all about monitoring. And that really is about sales, pipeline management. We'll talk about that in a second. The other one is aligning, aligning is all about aligning your team to actually deliver as a team. And then the last one is winning as a team and the importance of using your whole team to win not just one person. Yeah. So today is monitoring wrong.

Ron Tomlian: 5:24

Yeah. And what's really important in this is to understand how your customers buy from you, and what process you use to get to those customers. And it's going to be different for different businesses. So building an understanding of your sales funnel, or sales pipeline, you can use all sorts of different models. But it's important to individualise that for your business, because every business or every industry is going to be slightly different as to how they get to customers.

Brenton Gowland: 5:57

And I think the place to start is, you know, it's an obvious question, but what is the sales pipeline? And I'll answer that in my view. And look, if you look it up, and aligner will say something similar. It says it's a visualisation of your prospects, journey or place in your purchasing process. Right. The important word for me is it's a visualisation, you got to be able to see it, you know, you were talking about whatever your process is, you got to be able to see I've got this many clients in bucket a, I've got this many clients in bucket Bay, and they're moving through, as you said, a funnel.

Ron Tomlian: 6:31

And aligned with that visualisation is measurement. Yeah, being able to measure things. And we'll talk about that later on in terms of lead measures, lead indicators, but being able to visualise it, and being able to measure how we're going in each of those steps along the way. And as I said, different organisations depending on whether they use a CRM, or whether they use spreadsheets or whatever, will have different models of how they get a customer. But it's good to get with your business development people get with your salespeople, and find out what the typical process is, and be able to map that. And don't theorise it work with the people who are doing it to develop what you do along the way to get to the the end point, which is a sale, of course. So you know, for some businesses like for my business, I can't get a sale without putting a proposal work back from that it's

Brenton Gowland: 7:27

going to be one stage process working back

Ron Tomlian: 7:29

from that it's it's good to think of it sort of the front backwards, from the point you want the end the endpoint, and we'll talk about what the endpoint really is in the model that we're going to use. I have to get a proposal to get a proposal I have to get a meeting and so on. Yep,

Brenton Gowland: 7:46

absolutely. And I don't think this is actually a very difficult process at all, because you just look at your clients that you've got now and do exactly what you were saying earlier. And if you need to, you know, I'm a big fan of actually interviewing clients and going talk to us about the process. Talk to us about how you found coming on as a client. How did you find out about us? Well, I met your business development manager at and, you know, obviously, it's probably going to be the business development managers working on this with someone in the business. And I'm a big advocate for the fact that they should help build these processes. But, you know, this is where we met is the process we went through, these are the discussions we had as a business. And the more you know about the clients that you've got now that are really part of your business, the more you can go. Okay, so that's the process that we can lead them on. And, you know, the other thing you find out in that process is what the lead time is to get a client on board. And sometimes a lead time might be with a certain type of business, a product might be three to four weeks, I've seen lead times that are like 18 months or more. I remember a website we were working on with a client. This is back in the days when I was actively involved in the agency that I own, from the regional discussion to actually getting that signed contract was 18 months. Sometimes you get people who in a real rush, it's one month, sometimes it's a three to six month process. But my point is when you talk to your customers, you start to understand general lead time.

Ron Tomlian: 9:06

Absolutely. And two things about that one, it will be different depending on the type of relationship you have with customers. If it's more transactional, it's going to be quicker. Yeah. If it's more relationship based, it's going to take longer, because it takes longer to develop relationships. The second thing is it will change over time. Yep. I know in terms of the work that I do with coaching and mentoring CEOs, it used to be maybe a month between the time I met someone and the time they came on board. Now, it's not unusual for those lead times to extend out to six months. Yeah. Okay, because it is much more relationship based. There are other options for them now. So under those circumstances, you need to be sensitive to the fact that these things will change over time.

Brenton Gowland: 9:53

Yep. And now, having said that, where we're gonna go with this in just a moment is mapping these stages based than what we were just talking about. And understanding the lead time means those people that you're bringing in now are not going to close in this quarter. So you've got to be working at people at different stages of the funnel. So before we get into how we map the stages, we probably should talk about the funnel. And everyone will understand in some fashion, what a marketing or sales funnel is, yeah, but you've got a good acronym.

Ron Tomlian: 10:21

Well, the the I know, in the old days of the advertising industry, when it was literally just the advertising industry, there was no social media in those days, they use the term ADA. So that was a nice acronym peace bullet for a ID A, and I've added an extra a after talking to you, but a Ida, which, for Verdi's opera was an easy way to remember it. Awareness. Yes, the interest, desire and action, you can pick up any marketing book, and you'll see the AIDA model in there, it's just as relevant for talking about business development. So first, I've got to get customers to understand that I exist, or I have to be aware of those customers in terms of business development, then I have to get them interested in the fact that I can do something for them solve some of their problems, then I have to develop a desire within them to be talking to me and using me. And somehow that has to translate into action on their part to engage me to do the work for them. The extra a that I've added at the end after talking to you is the stage after we've done some work for them, which is to get them to be advocates of our business. Yeah. 100%. So a i d A yesterday a new AIDA model, look, there's a

Brenton Gowland: 11:38

couple of different sales funnels, right. So you've got what's called an inbound marketing sales funnel, and an inbound marketing funnel. And you probably all know what this is anyway. But it's when you don't actually physically have contact with they're searching on the internet, they find your business and the online or the inbound marketing funnel usually always has, how do we turn those people into advocates at the end, because in an online space, if you've got people doing reviews on you, or customers who are speaking about you positively online does a lot for you. But I think that's so good. Because a typical BD sales funnel, the stages might be when you map it out inside of a business, from BD perspective, it might be identifying a prospect, so I identify that there's a prospect rather than than them discovering us. So I'm the one who's introducing apps to them, then the second stage might be first meeting achieved, right? Because you need to be able to get to the point where you're having a face to face. And then it's qualification, you know, are these people, someone who should be a client? Or do they fit a different buckets, they can become a lead refer, or they can become some other part of my business cycle, or maybe they're not suitable at all. Yeah, but you don't know that until you've generally had a good old discussion, then it's follow up, then its proposal, then it's closed one, so I've closed in one that will close last. And we'll talk about those things in a minute. But I really like putting in their advocate. So this is taking care, or this is what I call internal BD. So what I've just talked about is external BD finding new clients. But then if you can turn your customers into advocates, and be really passionately involved with your business, you can actually oftentimes get more growth from your existing customers, and you can from new customers, because you already got trust, you have the opportunity to surprise and delight them, which is terms that they use in the inbound marketing kind of jargon. And what I mean by that practical example, you might have a client that spending a million dollars a year and I have seen this within businesses that I work in why in the last year, you focus on some of those clients you've already got. And I think this is the job of BD people, it's not always recognised as this, but you might go and interview them, you might find ways of getting in making sure that the business delivers on your promise, etc, etc. But I've seen one company, a client go from being worth $1 million for the last few years to in one year, becoming worth$3 million to the company, you tell me how many businesses are going to be able to go out and find another $2 million worth of work just like that. But you build your capability with your existing clients. And sometimes growth comes a lot quicker if you do that. You grow with those clients.

Ron Tomlian: 14:22

And this is when we get to the the end of this discussion, but we're talking about your team is getting everyone to understand that if they are interacting with clients, they're potentially BD people as well.

Brenton Gowland: 14:35

That's right. And that's why Yeah, like you said, it's so important to not just have the BD people in one bucket, and they're over there doing this. No, you got to integrate it within your business because and I'm not saying that in every business that you'll be able to grow your clients like that. But I think if you focus on the client, you've got you got a much better chance of fast revenue growth than you have of just finding new clients. Sometimes

Ron Tomlian: 14:57

it makes sense because if you're doing In good work for a client, and they like what you do, of course, they're going to want to see whether you can do more for them, because they have other needs as well. And if there's a synergy between what they need to be done outside the project you're doing for them at the moment, then if you've developed trust, and you've developed a good working relationship, you've got the potential to look at more work for that particular client. Correct. It's in both of your interests to do that.

Brenton Gowland: 15:27

Correct. So again, what we're trying to do here is just open up to thinking about BD, right? If there's internal and there's external, and BD people often should be looking at doing both how do we grow the clients, we've got now, back to mapping the sales process. Maybe there's some other examples like of the processes you're talking about, about how we map that to a pipeline?

Ron Tomlian: 15:48

For me, I guess it's the typical I was I've seen is, you start with who's who's the target market that I'm going to be working with, who are the players within that market. So the identification of the prospects getting contact names. And so the all of these are activities, getting contact names, contacting those people, finding out the right people in the organisation to actually talk to then meeting with those people, then putting a proposal to those people and qualifying them and putting a proposal to them, and then hopefully getting work out at the end. Each one of those are defined activities. And you know, from experience and talking to your own internal staff, what sort of conversion rates you're typically getting on each one of those. So for instance, if you stayed at the end, like I suggested, maybe my business needs five sales a month to stay in business. If I need five sales a month, how many proposals do I need to have out there to get those five sales? And now we're getting into lead measures? Yes, absolutely. So if let's say I've got a 50% conversion rate, I need 10 proposals out there, if I want to get the five sales. And let's just make things easy. Let's say it's a month that it takes for those sales to come on board after a proposal. Let's say it takes a month between the meeting and a proposal going out, then, and I've got a 50% conversion rate on that, then I need, you know, pretty simple maths, if I need 10 proposals go on. I need 20 meetings a month, Bernie 20 meetings a month? How many contacts do I need to have contacted? Let's suppose it's a 50% conversion, I contact a person 50% of them, I get a meeting, then I need 40 contacts a month. And if I need 40 contacts a month, then I've got a 50% conversion on a dead vacation. I need 80 contacts a month to be able to get in six months time to be able to get the five. Yeah. So getting down to the the pipeline that you were talking about four measures? am I measuring along the way, how many contacts I'm getting a month? Or how many prospects I'm getting a month? How many contacts that translates into how many meetings that translates into how many proposals that translates into and how many sales that actually generates, I need to measure each one of those points of interaction along the way. So you're measuring activity now, usually measuring activity, you say this, that doesn't give you the endpoint now, but you're getting an indication of what are things going to be like, given the lead time of six months between actually identifying somebody and getting a sale?

Brenton Gowland: 18:28

Yep. It's really interesting what you're saying because like, yes, the lead measures and will map those out, and we can tick boxes and go, yes, I've got my eight meetings a week. And that then starts to materialise, as actual proposals as you were talking about, etc, etc. But the other thing it enables us to do, we can start to put figures on, we think we're having conversations with client x, we think that the piece of work that we're talking about might be rough order of magnitude worth about X, right? So as you can start to project and of course, until you've done the proposal, you can't narrow it down, but you can get a good gut instinct. So let's say our pipeline is identify prospect first meeting achieved qualification factory tour, because we've worked out that if we give someone a factory tour, they're 70% more likely to become a client. So whatever that process is, we map it out. But as we go along, we'll start to get a good view on how much that client is worth. And once we've put that into our, whatever our mechanism is for recording this, we can start to get an understanding of the value of our pipeline and each stage as well.

Ron Tomlian: 19:37

Absolutely. And and if as you get more sophisticated, you can put probabilities into that there's a feel that there's some type of good working relationship here, even though we haven't started working together. I've got a good feeling about this client. I reckon there's an 80% probability that we'll get him across the line. Yeah. appears we've got to the proposal stage now. And yeah, I think that's that's pretty Ready, solid,

Brenton Gowland: 20:01

sometimes just even putting them in a different bucket. Remember, we talked earlier about it's visualising. So whatever your total is, you visually put them in that bucket. And we know that if we get into a certain bucket that their likelihood of becoming a client increases, because any funnel, you've seen him, top end of the funnel is very broad, we get lots of people in the Filter, Filter, Filter Filter, and you end up with less people down the far end.

Ron Tomlian: 20:23

And I don't think you should underestimate the value of going through the process with clients, because not all clients are the type of clients you want. That's correct, for good reason. I mean, they might be, then they're not the type of people that we work with, because we can't add as much value. Or they're not the type of people we work with, because they don't communicate in the way that we appreciate a we like to do it, or they rub people up the wrong way. Yeah.

Brenton Gowland: 20:49

And I think that's part of the qualification process, too. You know, how one of those stages we talked about is a qualification, like I work in a couple of businesses, and they don't actually have qualification as part of their sales pipeline, right, or their funnel? And because as you said, what generally happens is it it becomes obvious over time by based on interaction? Because Are they really trying to screw us down on price, right, as part of the process? That's always a great indicator that it's a race to the bottom? Do you really want a client like that? If his volume, maybe if it's not volume? Is it worth the pain

Ron Tomlian: 21:24

or it the other thing too, is that you can you can modify your processes to deal with that type of client in a different way. And

Brenton Gowland: 21:32

that's interesting, because you might update those processes over time through practice and review.

Ron Tomlian: 21:37

Absolutely. And that, you know, then we're going to get into continuous improvement. And I don't want to go there at the moment, because that's a whole nother area. But it's it continuous improvement in business development is just as important as manufacturing. Absolutely, livery

Brenton Gowland: 21:52

Absolutely. So let's just recap just quickly. So we've talked a bit randomly all over the place about sales pipeline, but the sales pipeline is a visualisation of your prospects journey through your sales process. And then we talked about mapping out that sales process, which could be all sorts of different things. You know, if you've got factory tours, maybe that's worth mapping in your sales process that you get them to that point, if you don't have factory tours, maybe it's just a generic thing, as we talked about earlier, but then you've been talking about, we put lead measures, because to monitor, which is what we're talking about today, our business development, you need to have a sales pipeline where you can visualise because why do we visualise? Ron is, what's your view on that?

Ron Tomlian: 22:36

Well, it just makes it everybody easier for everybody to understand where we're at at any given time.

Brenton Gowland: 22:41

So the boss can actually come in and have a look and go, Oh, I've got a certain level of confidence. Right. But you know, how I was talking about putting those figures on things might not be until an AI, these are usually in columns or Kanban charts, you know, people use very often for pipelines or spreadsheets. But stage one and stage two, there might be no figure attached. It's just a whole bunch of names and businesses and why stage two first meeting achieved, it's after that when you get to follow up, because after the first meeting, you might have an idea of what this client could be worth, therefore that becomes a figure. So you start to get well in this stage of the pipeline, we've got this amount of value in this stage, this amount. Now, as you said, when when you have some sophistication around your pipeline, you can then see that I can close a certain percent, let's say it's 30%, therefore have a really high level of confidence that the business cash flow is going to be x. So your sales pipeline actually gives confidence to the whole business, which is why the business development role is so important. Yeah.

Ron Tomlian: 23:45

And the other side of the coin, too, is being able to measure this stuff, or going through the process of putting numbers to it gives you an indication of where in your pipeline, you might be falling down. That's correct. It might be that, you know, the problem is we're not meeting enough people. Because when we meet people, and we have a discussion with them, we get 80% across the line. Yep. But it might also be that I proposals up to scratch. Yeah, so we meet a lot of people, but we don't get them over the line with our proposals. So we need to that's what we need to improve.

Brenton Gowland: 24:19

So this brings me down to what we started talking about earlier, in a typical b2b sales pipeline. At the end, you'll have close one, like if you're using a CRM, for example, or you have closed last, so it's very obvious if you've won an excellent you know, blah, blah, blah, you researching, oh, well, why did we win this, but many people don't ask that question. And more important question to answer is why did we lose this? So people get I remember the feeling of disappointment when you miss out on the thing but you get used to as a bat person realising you win some you lose some, but the really important thing is what can you learn from the opportunities that you haven't closed? Because that's where that comes. And us improvement part comes in. I would as be the person ask as many questions as you can. And it's why it's important to keep a good relationship and not eat sour grapes to find out from those people, because they are the clients that you don't close are the biggest source of truth to how do we improve this process? In my view?

Ron Tomlian: 25:18

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, it falls back to the same issue that a lot of organisations have with complaints, they look at complaints, and they go, I don't want to talk to those people. Complaints are fabulous source of improvement for organisation they are Yeah. And if you like, by not buying from you, it's a sort of complaint. So treat it as gold and look at it, look at the opportunity for learning.

Brenton Gowland: 25:44

Think about this, you can also learn so much about your competitors, because often when you don't win something, it's because they've gone somewhere else. So well, why did you go to competitor x? Well, because they list that in the other? Great, let me write that down. Because we can improve in those areas. Just gold, right. But yeah, that's why it's important to have a healthy visualisation of your sales pipeline. And I find that a lot of businesses do not have that. Now, the tools, we've talked about CRMs. And we can go into details about CRMs later, but at the end of the day, the beauty of a CRM,

Ron Tomlian: 26:18

customer relationship management system, oh, yes,

Brenton Gowland: 26:20

I just assumed everyone knows what that is. It's basically a big spreadsheet. That means you don't lose anything. And but you can build intelligence into this spreadsheet. So as good CRM will flag with you, when you need to go talk to someone tell you the last time you've had a conversation, measure where they're at in the sales pipeline, they're very, very good tools if they're used correctly, but I find most people get a CRM, and then it sits on the shelf. Yeah, it's a waste. So bare minimum, you want to have a spreadsheet, you can use SharePoint, you can use whatever, but you need some way of tracking.

Ron Tomlian: 26:54

And to my way of thinking, when you're starting off in this area, keep it simple, you'll build sophistication into it as you get more information about what your your pipeline actually looks like. And as you said before, don't underestimate the power of talking to customers about their journey, how they made decisions along the way, because that will give you indications of where and how you can influence other customers in the future.

Brenton Gowland: 27:20

And look, if you if you are using a spreadsheet, it's just in this as I'm going to speak one on one for a minute. If you set up five or six columns, and at the top of one column, it's like prospect identified list their name, second column, it might be, as we said, first meeting achieve list their name, you treat the spreadsheet, like a kanban chart, and then you can just add one little column next to each column with the value as you start to understand them. And it's you were talking about, you could put a percentage close column, you just and if you need help with this again, reach out we'll we'll find a spreadsheet for you. There's heaps amount there. But what's massively important is that you actually have this pipeline. And that not only that, but other people have access to it, because that is when like your boss, that's when you start to have some responsibility. Responsibility also drives us right accountability, let's call it

Ron Tomlian: 28:08

and the truth of matter is you have a pipeline, whether you monitor it and control it or not. It's just whether you're in control. Yeah, whether you're managing it, or whether it's managing, which is

Brenton Gowland: 28:18

why bringing us back to that word, it needs to be a visualisation, so you can see where you're at at any particular point. Because if you don't have a visualisation, you lose opportunities, things dropped through the cracks, they,

Ron Tomlian: 28:30

you know, not just for you, but for your team. Yeah, everyone can see the same.

Brenton Gowland: 28:34

And remember what we were saying earlier, there's a massive importance of BD people that role within a business. Because if a pipeline is presented correctly, it gives intelligence to the business so they can make better business decisions more confidently. And when it's all working, it's literally a beautiful thing. That's my experience. Anyway, there you go. So just in recap, we talked a lot there, when bit all over the place. But what we're basically saying is if to monitor your business development plan and its activities, you need to have a sales pipeline that you manage effectively. And to fill the sales pipeline, you need to establish some lead measures that you can also record so that you know that you're tracking correctly. And the beautiful thing with lead measures is, once you've got them down and is see that you're not getting the right result, or you aren't getting the right result, you then can analyse those lead measures and go, What is the thing I'm doing? Is it am I going to enough networking events in my having enough meanings and are making enough phone calls, or whatever the initiative is, you can see what's working and what's not. And then focus more on those things that are working. So the idea of recording those lead measures, so that you can actually see how they play out. So two things in monitoring, sales pipeline and lead measures that you track.

Ron Tomlian: 29:50

And if you do those things, you're ahead of most other businesses out there.

Brenton Gowland: 29:54

You really are. So there you go. That's our episode for this week. We hope you found it useful. also that is, we started off with planning. This was monitoring. And the next episode, which is in two weeks time, is going to be all about aligning your team, which is basically what Ron was just getting out a little bit earlier. So we're starting to see,

Ron Tomlian: 30:15

we're getting ahead of ourselves. But that's, that's because these things are interrelated. Sometimes you can't help them.

Brenton Gowland: 30:21

Yep. And the message that I really want to get out there is because sometimes, and I'll say this out loud, sometimes BD can be under appreciated, because there are people who go out. And sometimes they're called to sell lunch, a lot of you ever heard of a BD person

Ron Tomlian: 30:34

might have been called that in my time,

Brenton Gowland: 30:35

very good. But what I'm starting to really want to do is highlight the importance of this role and the critical nature of this role to our business. And if it's done well, if you're in a BD role, you can develop if you're a CEO who's listening to us. And even if there's just a couple of things, you think, Alright, well, I really need to start to establish the management of a sales pipeline. So it's not just seen by the BD person, but it's socialised through the right people in the business, it starts to add immense value to your business. And as you were saying earlier, some level of sophistication.

Ron Tomlian: 31:07

And like I said, most organisations don't do this. So your streets ahead, even if your state with a spreadsheet.

Brenton Gowland: 31:13

Okay, so that's us for this week. That's all that's all for me. And that is all from me. So look, if you're out there and you're listening, we would really encourage you to go rate us on Apple podcasts. If you're enjoying the show, that really helps out a lot. So we're asking you to help us out by giving us a rating. And if you want to reach out and give us any advice or feedback on the show, we find that really valuable down the road. Absolutely.

Ron Tomlian: 31:36

And if you've got any ideas for what you'd like us to explore in the future, please reach out as well.

Brenton Gowland: 31:40

Yeah, that'd be great. So until next time, it is bye from me

Ron Tomlian: 31:44

and from me