Week by week: Using pipeline data to stay ahead of your forecast

In this Outreach on Outreach episode, learn how Senior Director of Enterprise Sales Greg Baumann uses the Pipeline Movement Report to track weekly progress, identify stalled deals, and stay on target for long-term goals—all with actionable insights from Outreach. 

Hey there, my name is Greg Baumann. I'm one of our senior sales leaders here at Outreach. I'm working with our enterprise teams here and I'm speaking frequently with my peers and the sales leaders across our customer base. And so today, in today's Outreach on Outreach, I wanted to answer a question that we're getting all over the place. 

How can I understand what my team is doing week over week to build into our number for the year? And so luckily, Outreach has an answer for that. So here, we're gonna be talking about our pipeline movement report. This is something that our team was quietly working on and put into the platform and has delivered a huge amount of insight and value for myself on a weekly basis. 

So as I'm thinking about my forecast submission on a weekly timeframe, it's very easy for me to understand not only things more bottom of funnel, how are these deals progressing? You've seen that video, you probably are using Outreach to do those sort of things down funnel. We won't talk about that today. This is for me to be able to have a bird's eye view of what came in and out of the pipeline and in and out of the forecast week over week so I can coach and work with my team on it below me and then above me can make them aware of what's happening in my business. 

How to Use the Pipeline Movement Report 

So I'm going to do something really quickly here and say, okay, it is Monday, I'm going to get ready to submit my forecast. I wanna get a quick understanding of what happened last week to come in and out. So I'm gonna set the time period that I wanna explore. I love working at this on a weekly basis. 

It gives me just the clearest view of what's happening within my business but this is something that I view, people that are within our customer base are doing this on a monthly or even quarterly basis is totally fine. We're gonna be able to have all those granular data points and surface them up across really any level, right? So as you can see, you can even do custom reporting on this too. Now there's something here too in terms of understanding what is the close date. 

So I wanna understand what happened across the sales period. There's something here where we can do it across during the same time period. We do not have a very transactional motion here at Outreach within the enterprise. So me looking at the week to find out what happened last week isn't particularly insightful. 

I can understand what happened during the sales period and that for me is gonna be the quarter but we're enterprise, we're looking at year-long deals. I wanna be able to just really quickly set and understand what happened last week to be able to make, to be able to inform and shape my entire fiscal year. So I'm able to quickly set the dates for that period and I'm able to look at this by either stage name or forecasting category. For the sake of simplicity, I'm gonna look at this at stage name, but you can see here with just a click that is going to resubmit from a forecast category perspective. 

Again, if you're looking at this to understand what are win rates and different categories, how are we moving through that? It's great and same with stage name too. I'll say this as well, if you're new or like considering Outreach, stage name is exactly what's in your CRM and we have that bidirectional sync set with. So you'll see some language on here that is very much Outreach language for how we run our own shop, but it would look very different potentially for how you are running your shop and how you are managing your CRM. 

Understanding the Good, the Bad, and the Idle 

So I'm going to look at here really quickly. So what happened last week, I'm able to see the amount of pipeline created. Everybody was traveling or out of office last week, so we had no pipeline created last week. I'm able to understand what happened in terms of pipeline movement. 

So I'm able to understand key deals that were won, I'm able to see what opportunities were moved and I wanna see what opportunities were idle. So I like the good, the bad and the ugly. And so here we're able to see like the good, right? So what deals were won, great, love to see that. 

And my team has probably already told me about those because that's good news that everyone will share. I wanna understand from like a moved perspective, right? And again, I highly recommend this. Anytime you'll see like a little eye within the platform, you can hover over it and see what exactly what that means. 

So if it moved, it means revenue and opportunities that changed groups, but we're still open by the end of the selected period, right? So movement happens within our sales funnel just in the same way that happens within yours. So this is showing me that about 40% of my open pipeline moved over the last week. I love the sound of that. 

It is mid quarter for us. That means we have things rolling through the funnel. Now what I don't wanna hear, and this is kind of where the bad and ugly come into place, is things that are idle, right? So this is giving me specific guidance in terms of the opportunities that I can work with my team to make sure that we're progressing. 

From Insight to Action 

So at the end of the sales period, our leadership is saying, team, we've done a fantastic job. We've broken yet another year over your record and we're gonna do it again. So being able to see here those opportunities, it gives me the view to see who is assigned to the deal, what is the name of the deal, what sort of deal healthier. And as you all know, I can quickly click into that opportunity and it's gonna give me the vantage point to say, hey, Connor, let's work together and make sure that we have a plan for this opportunity to keep things moving. 

That's it for me today. I'm Greg Baumann and thank you so much for joining on this Outreach on Outreach. Hopefully you've learned a little bit about the pipeline movement and how this can inform your weekly forecasting practice.