IBM Improves Pipeline Accuracy and Increases Sales by $1 Billion

The Challenge

The sales organization at IBM was consistently missing sales and forecasting targets. Sales managers lacked a clear objective way of helping sales professionals qualify opportunities in the pipeline using the correct values such as probability to win, time to close, and value. They also did not have a process for coaching them to win more business. As a result, overconfident sellers gave an inaccurately high projection of sales and managers were unable to identify gaps in the pipeline and act before it was too late. They came to Richardson Sales Performance, previously SPI and Richardson, to teach sales professionals how to accurately assign sales opportunities with the right values, consistently qualify which deals were most relevant to focus on, and ensure sales managers can help sales professionals how to identify gaps in the pipeline and actions to close gaps.

Our Approach

We partnered with IBM to build and implement a sales methodology with a clear framework and guidelines for assigning pipeline values to sales opportunities. This research-based framework for opportunity management helped to reach the key objectives mentioned above by the customer. We implemented a sales management cadence and meeting structure to ensure they were ready to coach to both deals and pipelines. The training was successfully deployed to 40,000 sellers and sales managers globally.