FOUNDER’S GUIDE TO B2B SALES About pipeline scrubs Dave Kellogg explains why, in his experience, “always” scrubbing the pipeline often actually means never scrubbing the pipeline. READ HOW MANY OPPORTUNITIES CAN A SELLER EFFECTIVELY HANDLE? OPPORTUNITIES PER SELLER, CURRENT AND FUTURE QUARTERS 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 SELLER 1 SELLER 2 SELLER 3 SELLER 4 SELLER 5 SELLER 6 SELLER 7 SELLER 8 CURRENT QUARTERS FUTURE QUARTERS While much attention is paid to pipeline coverage (value of pipeline compared to targets), it’s often easier and more intuitive to ask: how many opportunities can a seller actually manage? It helps to split that by timeframe – e.g. current-quarter opportunities usually require more focus and attention than future ones. It also helps to split by type of seller – e.g. a velocity seller turning a high volume of small deals can handle more than an enterprise seller working a small number of large transactions. In this fairly typical enterprise example, the goals are indicated by the dashed lines. The company would like sellers to have nine current-quarter and 21 all- quarters opportunities in their pipeline at the start of a quarter. Breaking this out via a bar chart is important because averages can hide very uneven distributions amongst sellers. SPRING 2023 .24