At the start of every new financial year, the board wants to know:

“Is there enough pipeline to meet our revenue goals for the year?”

Although often, you can interpret it as an instruction instead of a genuine question.

So, salespeople knuckle down to creating opportunities in Salesforce.

Often, this is a desk-based activity. There isn’t necessarily a massive amount of customer-facing deal qualification to support this new pipeline.

However, many successful Sales VPs do something entirely different:

Rather than worrying about pipeline size, they focus on account development plans.

Naturally, it helps if you have an account management framework in Salesforce to underpin that process.

Fortunately, if you want to know how and why to build this framework in Salesforce, then this article is the right place to start.

Sales Team Response To Pipeline Pressure

At the start of the year, the sales team is often under pressure to show a healthy funnel.

Of course, it doesn’t help that likely the budget is bigger than last year.

Many people tell me that’s true even when there is a pandemic raging.

Naturally, there was pressure to close deals in Q4 of the previous year. That means the pipeline has shrunk. These won deals were removed from the funnel.

So, what do salespeople do?

First, they shift deals that didn’t close in the previous period to the new year.

Salespeople do this because removing dormant deals creates even more pressure. It’s far easier to shift the close date.

Pro tip: Sales managers can use pipeline quality metrics to identify deals that no longer have legs. The most important of these is measuring the number of close date month changes.

Second, salespeople take a hard look at their customers and prospects in Salesforce.

Often, they create lots of ‘optimistic’ pipeline deals against these accounts. “Acme will buy something this year, I’m sure. I’ll put in an opportunity with a far-off close date. The deal is bound to close sometime this year’.

If your financial year matches the calendar year, you may even find many of these deals have a close date of December. Or some other internally relevant date.

But likely, this date has nothing much to do with the customer buying process.

Indeed, the prospect might be surprised they figure strongly in the salesperson’s upcoming funnel if they heard about it.

The Downsides of a Rose-Tinted Sales pipeline

But why does it matter that many of the new opportunities are not qualified?

The good news is that the top-down pressure has gone away, and salespeople can now concentrate on what they do best—finding genuine deals to work.

Unfortunately, there are downsides to this approach. These include:

1. Poor visibility of the actual pipeline size. You have a rose-tinted view of whether the pipeline really is big enough to meet your sales targets.
2. Low-quality information on which to base hiring, marketing, or customer prioritization decisions.
3. Distorted metrics on sales performance. For example, how can you rely upon opportunity win rates if many of the deals are, at best, hopeful?
4. Distraction from creating value-adding account development plans.

So, what’s the alternative?

The alternative is concentrating on building proactive key account plans for promising customers and prospects.

Account Development Planning in Salesforce

Account plans define how you will drive profitable revenue with specific customers and prospects in the upcoming period.

Each plan represents the strategy for promising customers and prospects. To do this in Salesforce, you need an Account Planning Template.

This means building your own framework; or using the GSP Account Plan app available on the AppExchange.

Straightforward yet powerful Account Plans that drive profitable revenue.

Visit the AppExchange: Key Account Planning by GSP

Either way, here are the four steps your account development framework must support:

1. Segment your customers and prospects.
2. Build proactive account management plans.
3. Create early-stage opportunities that reflect genuine customer demand.
4. Review and iterate the account development plan throughout the year.

Let’s start with segmentation.

Customer and prospect segmentation

Many companies segment their customers and prospects in two ways.

First, they do it by the existing segment. This defines your current relationship with the company.

Second, the target segment. The defines how you want the relationship to be at the end of the account plan period.

For example, these are the specific picklist values one of our customers in the professional services sector uses. It’s how they segment their clients and prospects.

• Strategic Customer.
• Steady Supplier.
• Expert For Hire.
• No Relationship.
• Dormant.

The first critical step in the account development process is defining each customer’s current and target segment.

Account Development Planning in Salesforce

Next, salespeople think-though the business development ideas for each account.

Specifically, for each customer and prospect, the team thinks about:

• What does the white space analysis in each customer tell me about cross-sell and upsell opportunities?
• How do I move an account from the current to the target segment? Or,
• How do I make sure the account stays in the current segment, rather than slipping down the ladder?

The account management plans they create describes the path in each case. Where appropriate, it also includes proactive retention or renewal focus.

I recommend you cover the following vital elements in each account plan:

1. Goals. These are the high-level outcomes you aim to achieve.
2. Objectives. The specific, measurable steps that are needed to achieve the goals.
3. SWOT analysis. This includes a description of your company’s strengths and weaknesses in the context of the customer. Avoid elevator pitches. Make the SWOT analysis highly specific to each customer or prospect.
4. Internal support. People often forget about this. What help do you need from people and teams in your organization to be successful?
5. Next Steps. These are the specific actions you will take over the next 6 to 8 weeks. They kick-start your account management plan.
6. KPIs. Tracking revenue performance is critical on each account plan. Roll the value of won and pipeline opportunities up to each account plan to measure target achievement.

Incidentally, for expert-written tips and guidance on creating successful account plans, I recommend this article:

How To Create Account Plans That Actually Work. 10 best practices for powerful account plans. 

Review and iterate

As salespeople start implementing their account development plans, new opportunities will likely emerge.

These opportunities reflect genuine customer buying scenarios based on two-way dialogue.

Of course, the account development plan will need updating as progress continues. I recommend you implement a monthly cadence of account management reviews to adjust and adapt each plan.

Account Management in Your Business

You may not be able to avoid the pipeline building pressure that often comes at the start of each year.

Nevertheless, remember that account development trumps opportunity fabrication every time.

If you want to get started, I recommend reviewing the GSP Key Account Planning app. Here’s where you can find it on the AppExchange.

And of course, don’t hesitate to get in touch to talk about account management in your business.

Over 1,000 companies have installed the GSP Sales Dashboard.

We’re proud of that statistic.

One of these companies described itself as “a USA based, diversified technology company with worldwide operations”. They use the dashboard for global sales performance reporting and forecasting across multiple Divisions.

The company is a household name in many markets.

However, this interview describes some of the critical behaviours and processes that make them so successful.

For that reason, we’ve changed the name of the company to ‘Novum Inc’ and the interviewee name is a pseudonym.

But there’s no fake news. The interview is as recorded and published with Novum Inc’s anonymized requirements.

So enjoy, as Dirk Kyrvelt and GSP Managing Director (the very real) Sally Torkington, discuss CRM implementation, sales management, key account planning and sales team coaching.

CRM interview with Dirk Kryvelt

His first CRM system at Novum was a shoebox.

That was back in 1978. Since then, he’s gone from youngest sales rep to senior executive. He’s sold, coached, innovated, implemented and inspired sales across Novum.

In 39 years at Novum, Dirk Kryvelt has seen and done it all. He’s a walking mine of experience and expertise.

Oh, and by the way, that shoebox is now a global salesforce.com CRM implementation.

So GSP co-founder Sally Torkington, interviewed Dirk this week. The insights he gave on how Novum approaches CRM implementation, sales management, key account planning and sales manager coaching are compelling.

Here are 11 things you will learn from this interview:

1. The benefit Novum gets from mapping the sales process.
2. Why sales managers must start as you intend them to carry on.
3. When 0% overdue opportunities is realistic (and when it is not).
4. How Novum drive salesforce user adoption.
5. The compelling importance of front-end pipeline management.
6. Three questions Novum sales managers must ask about each new opportunity.
7. How Novum coaches sales managers.
8. The four steps in the Novum key account planning process.
9. The vital importance of customer partnership at Novum.
10. The metrics Novum track in salesforce.
11. Why Dirk loves our washing line!

CRM in Novum

Sally: Tell us about the history of CRM systems in Novum.

Dirk: I joined Novum in 1978 as a sales rep. I created my own CRM system – a shoebox divided into sections, full of postcards with contacts and notes on it.

Sally: Most people kept everything in their head at that time. At least you had a system!

Dirk: Indeed. If I ever lost that box, I would have been sunk.

By 2000, we had Lotus Notes. It was horrible. So difficult to use. I don’t know what happened when we implemented it, but I thought by now there’s no point trying to fix it. That was when I realised systems can easily get messy.

We had various other CRM systems in Novum at that time. Siebel in some countries. Then, in 2001, we set about introducing a new system, Marketing Manager. This one turned out much better.

1. The benefit Novum gets from mapping the sales process

Sally: Why was this system more successful?

Dirk: The first thing we did was map the sales process. That was the smartest decision we ever made.

I learned from experience with the other CRM systems that you really need to base it on your selling process. Or even better, the customer buying process. After all, the customer mind-set determines the current opportunity stage. Not where you think it’s at.

That mapping helped us define what we actually want to record in the system. Finally, when the new CRM system arrived, we didn’t have to record everything. Only the things that we had identified in the mapping process as important. It meant avoided over-engineering the system, over-populating the data and being over-demanding of our sales reps.

Making the system easy to use was critical. In those days, if you saw a salesperson typing, they used two fingers. One on each hand.

When you see that, you know entering data into a system is not going to be a productive time for them. We only asked them to record important information, based on the sales process we had mapped, not every last piece of data.

Okay, everyone nowadays is much more keyboard literate. Nevertheless, the same thing applied when we rolled out salesforce. We mapped the sales process. That meant we only record the information that has some benefit, is worth recording. If it doesn’t add value, you don’t need to enter it into the system.

His first CRM system at Novum was a shoebox. That shoebox is now a global salesforce.com CRM implementation.

2. Why sales managers must start as you intend them to carry on with CRM

Dirk: Here’s something else I learned from the previous CRM implementations.

Start as you mean to carry on. More to the point, sales managers must start as you mean them to carry on.

If they don’t regularly review the pipeline reports in the first week, in the first fortnight, in the first month, then in six weeks…..the sales team will be getting away with murder! Once data is missing, it’s too difficult to pull it back.

You have to point out missing data, overdue activities, out of date opportunities, you have to do that from the very outset. Sales managers must do that from the very start of the CRM implementation.

Sally: That’s right, and another thing I’d also add is, make sure the data quality of data at launch is good. If the salespeople see poor data, missing records, duplicates, they’ll think, ‘Well, why should I bother either?’

Dirk: Yes, I agree. When we decided to standardize our CRM systems globally with salesforce.com that was a key message we gave to sales managers.

Sally: Tell us about your global salesforce.com roll out in Novum.

Dirk: In Western Europe, we started with three counties, Spain, Greece and Italy, in 2015. We finished the global rollout in April this year.

Everyone, both salespeople and sales managers, have been very positive. They find the system intuitive, they like the real-time information and reports. It’s in the cloud so they can access it anywhere. They think that’s very good. Not any negative feedback at all.

We have seen some differences between countries though. You can really see that in those counties where the managers have been involved, where it’s had top-level support, the quality of data in pipeline reports is far better. The pipeline is more up to date and sales forecasts are better.

In other countries, some of the pipeline reports look like what Gary calls, “The Washing Line”. A long straggle of overdue opportunities. I didn’t know he called it that at the time, I just saw some reports in salesforce that I thought didn’t look healthy. That’s not the graphic pattern in the pipeline I expect to see. (Editors’ note: More about The Washing Line later).

3. When 0 percent overdue opportunities is realistic (and when it is not)

Sally: In some countries, there are opportunities with overdue close dates?

Dirk: I asked one of our sales managers, ‘What percentage of opportunities should be overdue, have a close date the past?’

She said, ‘None’.

But that might be too difficult to achieve. I know from my Six Sigma training, an output error of 5% might be acceptable from a statistical point of view in some processes. The cost of getting it down to zero may not be worth the cost of the effort.

Sally: I think it depends on the business you are in. If you’re selling high value, capital items and each salesperson only has five opportunities, then zero percent overdue is a realistic expectation. If you’re selling smaller scale, transactional items and each salesperson has 500 opportunities, then 5% is probably a realistic target.

Dirk: Yes, I agree, it depends on the context of your business. The key thing is to track it. Then, when the report looks excessive, looks unhealthy, you can do something about it.

Where the managers have been involved, where it’s had top-level support, the quality of data in pipeline reports is far better.

4. How Novum drove salesforce.com adoption

Sally: Tell me more about user adoption of salesforce within Novum. How did you explain the importance of the system to the sales managers and sales team?

Dirk: Well, there’s lots of things.

Here’s one important point we made during the training when we rolled-out salesforce.

We asked everyone the question, ‘Why do you think the CEO is willing to spend millions of dollars buying the world’s most expensive CRM system and spending more money on implementation?’

In the training, people come out with all sorts of answers.

We explained it like this. Imagine today, the CEO is at the quarterly meeting with the stock analysts. Thus far he can only talk about what happened last quarter. Imagine, though, if he had good quality foresight of what’s going to happen next quarter? Suppose he predicts next quarter, and he gets it right, three times in a row, what do you think will happen?’

‘Ah’, say the sales managers, ‘the stock price will go up’.

‘If the stock price goes up, will that pay for the CRM software?’

‘Yes it will’.

That leads to the next discussion. ‘What do you think, from the top-down, is going to be the focus when we implement the CRM?’

‘It’s pipeline visibility’ everyone shouts. ‘Exactly’.

People understood there will be very strong demand, top down, for accurate pipeline visibility. ‘They’ve spent the money, it’s committed, the system isn’t going to go away, and it’s going to be part of your daily life’.

That’s not the only thing. Of course, there has to be a benefit for the salespeople too.

For example, we made sure sales reps can easily see whether they are going to hit their bonus. Before, that was hard to tell. We explained that if each salesperson wants visibility of where they are in relation to their bonus. Like the CEO, you want to wait until the end of the month. So we made sure there are reports and dashboards that give salespeople this information.

We also said, ‘You are the CEO of your territory’.

Here are the reports and dashboards that will help you manage your territory. ‘Start looking at your dashboards, start looking forward. Keep your pipeline healthy, keep your pipeline accurate or you will first fool yourself.’

That delivers a strong message about why it is important to keep the pipeline accurate and to maintain the quality of the pipeline.

Sally: What about the sales managers? How did you achieve full salesforce user adoption with the managers in Novum?

Dirk: The sales manager in the middle understands that his boss will be coming back to look at the accuracy and quality of the pipeline. In other words, he’s got a strong incentive to keep it accurate.

We also make it very clear to the sales managers, ‘you only succeed if your team succeeds’. If you don’t manage your team to success, if you don’t coach them, if you don’t look at the reports to see where they need your support in any of the four processes, then you’re not going to achieve your goal or your bonus either.

Your goal is to manage your team to success. Focus on the four core processes of territory planning, account planning, opportunity planning and conversation management. Here are the dashboards that will help you do that.

We didn’t leave them high and dry though. We gave them some training on how they can use reports and dashboards to identify the individual coaching focus for each sales rep.

It’s not a one size fits all for sales managers when it comes to coaching. We emphasize they need to have a coaching session with each individual rep at least once a fortnight. Oh, and by the way, in those sessions, you talk mostly about early stage opportunities.

We also make it very clear to the sales managers, ‘you only succeed if your team succeeds’. If you don’t manage your team to success, if you don’t coach them, if you don’t look at the reports to see where they need your support in any of the four processes, then you’re not going to achieve your goal or your bonus either.

5. The compelling importance of front-end pipeline management

Sally: Tell us more about early opportunities. Why is it important to talk about these?

Dirk: If you want to have a healthy pipeline, you need to manage opportunities at the front end, not at the back end.

Sally: Can you expand on that, why is so important to manage opportunities at the front end?

Dirk: Well, here’s the situation sales managers find themselves in. I experienced such situations many times myself as a sales manager.

You get calls from salespeople when they are having trouble closing deals. You get pressure from your own management team, from upstairs, about when certain deals are going to close.

As a sales manager, you get pressure from these two sources. Bottom up from the sales reps. Top down from management.

That forces you to focus on the end of the pipeline, on closing deals. And typically, when you are in a hurry to close deals, when you are under pressure to close deals, it’s going to cost you money.

Also, you end up trying to close deals that with hindsight, were bad opportunities. They were in your pipeline too long, they’ve hung around, they get tossed about and the sales rep doesn’t know how to close them or want to let them go. Management get nervous and want you to close them before the end of the quarter.

Squeezed in the middle is the sales manager. He has to do something about these deals. That will typically cost the company margin and money.

Sally: So how do managers avoid that?

Dirk: There is a simple way to avoid this…..

6. Three questions Novum sales managers must ask about new opportunities

Dirk: When new opportunities show up on the dashboard, the sales manager must have an early conversation with the sales rep. “Why is this a good opportunity? Why is it worthwhile to pursue? Can we win it? Is it worth winning?”

Consider this. If you ask those basic questions, at an early stage, then it is developmental for the sales rep. But much more than that. If you have a good sales rep, he’s a bit like a British Bulldog, the longer he sinks his teeth into something, the harder it becomes to let go. On the up side, it’s much easier to let go early.

Once the sales rep agrees that it’s a good opportunity, he’s going to spend more time on it, put more effort into it.

There’s a social and psychological impact on the sales rep. He’s going to put his heart into winning this deal. Unlike other opportunities that really should have been qualified out, where sales reps easily lose interest.

Novum is a diverse Group of businesses with 28 different divisions. So each sales manager has to use the context of his division, and his judgement to ask three early questions about each opportunity.

1. Is it real?
2. Can we win?
3. Is it worth winning?

For example, can we win? This considers the competitors. Is it realistic for us to win this deal? How can we compete? What can we do differently? What is our advantage?

These are the three questions sales managers in Novum ask about each opportunity.

Sally: If you’re going to lose, lose early. Qualify them out upfront. But many salespeople say that they’re managed on the size of their pipeline. That means they don’t want to take deals out, they leave them in. But the quality of the pipeline is poor, and you’re saying that’s why sales managers get trapped at the back-end of the pipeline.

Dirk: Exactly. Sales managers risk getting trapped if they don’t ask these questions up front. So, they end up spending so much time on the back-end of the pipeline they cannot get to the front-end! It’s a Catch-22.

Tip: Use the Leaking Funnel report to understand where deals are exiting the pipeline.

Why is this a good opportunity? Why is it worthwhile to pursue? Can we win it? Is it worth winning?

7. How Novum coaches sales managers

Sally: How do you deal with coaching and training of sales managers at Novum? Because the approach you describe does need training and development of the managers.

Dirk: In 2013, we started rolling out a training program for sales managers. My job was to rollout the training program in Western Europe.

So before we started the salesforce implementation, we had already had a two-year period in which we focussed the sales managers on the importance of coaching their sales teams. This means at least every fortnight, a one-one-one conversation about new opportunities. New pipeline, in other words.

The fact they’re taking place has to be recorded in the system. We use salesforce to look carefully as to whether the coaching interactions between managers and reps are actually taking place.

The second question is, what’s the quality of the coaching interaction? That’s harder to assess. You cannot judge the content of the conversation, because that’s private. But you can look at the pipeline reports and spot situations where you think, ‘that doesn’t look right’.

We use salesforce reports and dashboard to do that. For example, the cycle time of the opportunities is too long, or there’s other bad data, too many out of date opportunities, for example.

Then our regional sales trainers can offer to help. We have some tools managers can use. Sales trainers can offer to listen in to the call between the manager and his sales rep (with the consent of both parties). They can provide some advice about those conversations that the manager has with the sales rep. We invest a lot of time and effort in that activity, helping the sales managers.

8. The four steps in the Novum key account planning process

Sally: Tell me about key account planning in Novum. How do you go about it?

Dirk: There are four elements to it.

In summary, there’s four processes. Territory planning, the outcome of territory planning is account planning. The outcome of account planning is opportunity planning. The outcome of opportunity planning is conversation planning.

Territory management requires classification and prioritisation of accounts. Are all the accounts in that reps territory classified and prioritised?

Then, when you have that list, the sales rep develops an account plan for each account. What is your approach to managing and developing the account?

That leads onto opportunity planning. What are the opportunities that the customer agrees the rep will be working on?

Then they decide how often they are going to call on each account. That’s conversation planning. For every type of account or level of priority, they need to anticipate the number of times in the year they are going to visit the account.

Sales reps allocate their time and visit frequency. We use salesforce to manage that. The rep records that he’s going to visit an account 12 times in the year. The manager can use the system to judge whether the rep is on track with that.

It’s co-creation of opportunities. These opportunities, they are the ones that proceed to the next stage of your pipeline in salesforce.

9. The vital importance of customer partnership in Novum

Sally: Tell me about the relationship between account planning and opportunity creation in salesforce.

Dirk: They go hand in hand.

For a large part of most businesses, you rely on long-term relationships. Account planning, you do it to build long-term relationships.

It’s like your personal relationship at home. If either party no sees no value in the relationship any more, then you get a divorce. It’s the same in business.

So how do you keep a relationship going at home? Basically, you identify projects that you like to do together. In your family that might be having kids, going on vacation, buying a new kitchen, whatever. You do projects together.

It’s the same with a business relationship. You need to identify projects that are value creating for both parties. Those projects are a good reason to invest in the relationship and keep it going.

Sally: I love that take on it. Developing projects together, that’s the key. It’s not transactional, either at home or in business. You have to work on these projects together.

Dirk: Exactly.

It’s really about understanding what the people at the customer value. Same with your personal relationship. You find out what your partner values.

In business, what the customer values will vary. For example, if you have a high-growth business, the customer will be much more sensitive to managing cash flow.  So, if we are working with a high-growth business, we might say, ‘If you reduce the number of suppliers, you can reduce your stock-keeping, and therefore free-up cash that you can invest in growth’.

The sales rep needs to understand, for the account, what is their environment, what do their customers expect, what are their threats and opportunities, what are their ambitions? Those are inputs to the conversation about potential projects. It means we can identify the areas that we can solve or address.

Sally: So how do these projects translate into opportunities?

Dirk: Once we have identified those projects, we can put them into salesforce as opportunities.

But we need to take them to the customer. Bring them to the table, and say ‘These are my observations, other companies like yourself have similar challenges, here’s how we worked together to address those challenges. How does that translate into projects that will improve your business?’

From that conversation, you come to an agreement about the projects, the opportunities. These might be fewer that what you had originally identified. But you have a list of opportunities that they agree, the customer agrees, you will work on together.  

They agree to invest time and energy to work with you. The opportunity might not be successful. But remember, it’s not me working on it, it’s us. It’s co-creation of opportunities. These opportunities, they are the ones that proceed to the next stage of your pipeline in salesforce.

10. The metrics Novum track in salesforce

Sally: How do you track and measure the four processes of territory planning, account planning, opportunity planning, conversation planning in salesforce?

Dirk: For each of those four processes we have identified metrics that we track in salesforce.

Processes needs inputs and outputs. It’s the outputs that you can track and measure.

For example, the output of territory management is classified and prioritized accounts. That you can see in salesforce. Either all the accounts are classified or they are not. If they are not, what percentage are not classified? Can we live with that percentage?

Then, visit activity. We can clearly see in salesforce whether every prioritized account has a visit frequency attached to it. So has each sales rep allocated available time in terms of the visits?

We measure the number of planned visits per account per sales rep. Does it add up? Are there more visits than the rep can possibly make? Is our capacity aligned with the opportunities we have?

Sally: By visit, do you mean a physical visit? Or does it mean a phone call? What is a visit?

Dirk: For field reps, it typically means meeting the account face-to-face. Of course, it’s different for inside sales.

Obviously even for field reps, a visit can be done over the phone, provided it’s a structured and arranged meeting. Yet many meetings still need to be face to face if it’s a targeted account. That’s especially true when you need to meet with multiple people from the account at the same time. You want all the stakeholders in the room at the same time. You want to interact personally, see body language and reactions.

It also needs to be an onsite visit when you need to physically see the manufacturing or production facility.

As the relationship matures, it becomes easier to have meetings over skype, for example, where you can still see each other. But face to face meetings are very important for key accounts.

Sally: Tell me more about metrics within key account planning.

Dirk: We have a number of fields in salesforce that we use for account planning. So one simple metric is, have the account planning fields been populated? We want to see some analysis, priority areas we can collaborate on together with the customer. The sales manager can check this easily.

Again, we want to know that sales managers are having regular interaction with their reps about the account plans. These interactions are recorded in salesforce.

At the moment, from a central perspective, we’re not judging the quality of the plan. We expect the sales manager to do that. But we do track that the plans have been created.

Sally: Key account planning is a very common reason why people get in touch with us. To create account planning functionality in salesforce.

Dirk: I’m not surprised. Key account planning is so important.

You need to meet with multiple people from the account at the same time. You want all the stakeholders in the room at the same time. You want to interact personally, see body language and reactions.

11. Why Dirk likes the washing line

Sally: What was it about our 12 charts ebook that made you get in touch with us?

Dirk: Sales managers can easily see from our dashboards what their pipeline looks like.

But no one had a reference. No one knew what ‘healthy’ looked like. In other words, ‘this is the graphic shape of a healthy pipeline chart’.

So I thought, ‘What should these reports look like?’ That triggered me to start searching the internet, looking for examples of what these reports and dashboard charts should look like. And I found your website.

I particularly love the washing line concept. It’s brilliant. I saw something that looked like a washing line in our system – a pipeline dashboard in one country with lots of out of date opportunities.

I started searching the internet. And I found your blog post. I saw Gary called it a washing line. I thought ‘exactly’. Then your blog showed what a healthy chart looks like.

Sally: You originally downloaded the 2016 of the eBook. 10 salesforce dashboard chart. We produced a new version for 2017. It’s now 12 Charts That Should Be On Your Dashboard.

Dirk: I know, I thought, ‘wow’. That’s the information I’m looking for!

Sally: Dirk, it’s been fantastic talking to you. So much insight. Thank you very much for your time.

Dirk: You’re welcome, it’s been a pleasure.

Useful links

• 12 Charts Blog
• 12 Charts Ebook
• How To Plug A Leaking Sales Funnel In The Right Place
• Sally on LinkedIn