Strike Zone: How this AE stays on track to hit her pipeline goals

In this sales climate, AEs are having a harder time than ever hitting their goals. Using Outreach's Pipeline Generation Report, we can hone in on the exact data points they need to hit their targets.

Outreach VP Angela Garinger teams up with Amanda Lockwood, Sr. Account Executive at Outreach, to break down her unique goals and how to conquer them utilizing the Strike Zone philosophy and the Pipeline Generation Report.

SQL value and conversion rate

I've got one of our best reps here, Amanda Lockwood. She's on my team, and she does a great job of both creating and closing pipeline. We're gonna take a look at her numbers and walk through how we coach her to make sure she stays on track to to continue to hit all of her goals.

We're looking right now at our Pipeline Generation Report.

I have it filtered by my name, and then let's look at this last month here.

"And looking at the coaching calculator, I put in my overall pipeline quota," says Amanda. "So $800,000 is what I am targeted for this quarter. My average SQL value, which I worked on last quarter to help increase. So that was really my goal last quarter was trying to increase that average SQL value to be thirty four thousand four hundred.

"And then my SQL conversion rate tends to flux between sixty five to seventy five, so I figured putting in seventy percent here is a good, happy medium to be conservative."

I love that. So Amanda's pipeline quota at $800,000, you chose that because you need to make sure you have enough pipeline coverage. And that, of course, is, derived from your win rate.

How much pipeline coverage do you have based off of your close one revenue goals with that $800,000?

"So right now, I have in terms of what I have today in my pipeline, I have about $600,000 today, in pipeline so that I'm currently working active opportunities," says Amanda. "And, so this I'm taking to account, generating the full eight hundred. I wanna have at least five X my quota."

Beautiful. So with the twenty percent win rate, five X pipeline coverage, this is why you got the $800,000. Let's look then how many meetings you booked last month.

Meetings Booked Rate

Let's check it out: you got fifty-one, which is amazing. And based off of your goals that you put in here, how many prospects do you need to sequence? And how many calls did you need to make each week to book the X number of meetings?

"I needed to get fifty five people into sequence," says Amanda. "And then I needed to get about 219 calls for outbound cold calling."

Lovely. And then that would yield the three meetings per week, which would get you to your targets. So you were able to book fifty one meetings last month?

"Yes," remarks Amanda.

No small feat. Good job! So let's scroll down to see all the things that you were able to do. So it looks like your meeting conversion rate was 33%, which is so high.

We won an a minimum of 10% on that meeting conversion rate. And really what that means is, of course, is that when you get the right person on the phone, you're converting them into a meeting booked. And like I said, a minimum we want is 10%. Amanda is, a third of the time, converting that into a meeting booked, which means every time she gets she talks to three people, one of those is gonna get to a meeting, and that's amazing.

A really high meeting conversion rate, which is probably why you were able to book fifty-one meetings last month. Fantastic. And then your hold rate, 90%. That's amazing. Your hold rate too! We want a minimum of about 70%, or 80% on a meeting hold rate. So that means that the meetings that you're booking were really high quality.

So incredible doing activities to make sure they stay. I love those confirmation sequences. All that good stuff.

Correct Connect Rate

"I'm gonna scroll down a bit," says Amanda. "This is gonna give me more information around the calls I'm making. So what I did last month was around 200 outbound calls and then my connect rate being about 4%. I have a feeling I know what you're gonna say here, but I'm curious what your thoughts are."

For the Correct Connect Rate, 4% is lower than what we wanna see. Right? We wanna see a minimum of 10%. When you have a low correct connect rate, a lot of times you should be looking at who are you prospecting? What time are you calling them?

Is there a lot of numbers where you're calling, like, phone trees? Is your data what it needs to be? All of those things can contribute to ensuring that you're talking to the right person. The insurance policy though is that if you get the right person on the phone and you're able to book a meeting, like Amanda's able to do with that 33% meeting conversion rate, she can afford to have a lower Correct Connect Rate because that means when she gets him on the phone, she's still booking the meeting. So that's great.

The only thing you'd probably wanna do is, if you see that start to tick down from 33%, your Meeting Booked Rate, your Meeting Conversion Rate, you'll need to figure out what exactly is contributing to that low Correct Connect Rate. Or even if you're able to solve that, you make even less calls and still hit your goals. Makes sense?

"Yeah," states Amanda, "I noticed too. I am at the lower amount of calls than what the report told me I should be doing, which is around 219. So definitely, you know, could increase that."

But your meeting conversion rate is so high. So I think that that is probably the first lever you would pull. If you start to see your meeting booked your meetings getting booked at a lower velocity, there's less coming in, then you go, that's okay. The first thing I can do is make those extra twenty calls a week, and I'll get back on track.

Oftentimes, though, people wanna make more calls and they think that's the answer. In Amanda's case, it might be, but really, that oftentimes isn't the answer. Most of the time, it's increasing your Correct Connect Rate or, ensuring that once you get somebody connected, you can convert them to a meeting booked. You're doing a lot of those things really well already, so you can afford to, I think, be only at 200 rather than 219.

Quick takeaways

Takeaways, then, for coaching:

1. Whatever you're doing to keep your meeting getting your meetings to hold is working. Keep doing that.
2. Figure out exactly what you're saying when you're getting somebody on the phone so I can make sure all the reps are saying it because you're converting at such a high rate!
3. We should check out your Correct Connect Rate. If you're at 4%, let's maybe shift your call blitz times. Maybe if you called during certain hours, different times, we could kinda track that for the next two weeks and see if we can make a dent in that 4%. At least bump it up maybe two.

You're definitely gonna hit your goals this quarter.