4 Tips for Better Deal Pipeline Management

Growing deal complexity in B2B & SaaS demands a better approach to pipeline management.

As the founder and CEO of Prelay, the world’s first team selling platform, I’ve seen how revenue teams navigate the most complex deals. Across cutting-edge industries from solar management and cybersecurity to networking and beyond. 

To effectively scale your deal volume and pipeline, or move upmarket to land bigger accounts, these are some battle-tested tips that can help, even for the most complex and technical products.

1. Efficiently track account data across teams

As more internal stakeholders get involved in the sales process, you want to root out the potential for duplicate work. These tasks aren’t just wasteful – each redundant entry is an opportunity for error and risk.

Make it as easy as possible for AEs and SEs to collect and hand-off account data, so CS can hit the ground running with full context once the deal is closed.

Data tracking is especially important for technical products, which can undergo a series of hands-on scoping and tests. For any advanced scoping process, you want to be thoughtful in gathering solutions requirements and success criteria in a centralized way.

2. Enable everyone with well-defined buyer journey playbooks

With promising deals harder to come by, today’s sales teams need to maximize their chances of success with every opportunity. You want to equip your team with clear playbooks that support your differentiated value for each product line or market segment.

Guided, step-by-step workflows give both sales and buyers confidence. They increase your ramp time for new reps, and lift conversion rates across the board. They also make it easier to adjust your process as you scale into new product lines and regions.

3. Continually update roles & responsibilities 

In B2B, go-to-market models are undergoing tectonic shifts. In just the past few years, cloud-based SaaS subscriptions eclipsed traditional on-prem licenses. Now, consumption-based pricing is blending pre and post-sales. 

It’s not uncommon now to see Solutions Architects help with expansions, and Customer Success jumping in during evaluations. Freemium and product-led growth (PLG) are additional game-changers, turning AEs from hunters to nurturers.

Wherever your sales team is in this journey, make sure to regularly audit and enforce your roles and responsibilities throughout the deal cycle. You want to avoid unforced errors, and more importantly, be able to pivot effectively when new competition rears its head or a greenfield market emerges.

4. Align both internal & external stakeholders

As you move upmarket, things get complicated. Selling to any enterprise is a team effort that requires input from product, engineering, legal, finance, on up to the C-suite. 

To land big deals, and not fumble the smaller ones, you need to keep everyone aligned in a clear, smooth buyer journey. That means not only putting yourself in the customers’ shoes, but also delivering a great experience for your internal teams who need to execute the deal at various stages in the pipeline.

With a better approach to data capture and tracking, you not only reduce your pipeline risk. You grow your database of proprietary sales process data, which can enrich other sales tools in your stack and generate the AI-powered insights you need to drive continuous efficiency and productivity gains.
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About the Author
Gabriella is the Founder & CEO of Prelay, the world's first team-selling platform. Gabriella is a go-to-market and sales strategy leader with deep experience in scaling GTM at fast-growth organizations and beyond, including tenures scaling GTM strategy & Ops at Fountain and Truework. In a past life, she was an Olympic Trials hopeful and a competitive D1 cross country & track athlete at the University of Michigan.