How Pipeline Coverage in Sales Can Prevent Missed Targets and Ensure Sustainable Growth

In B2B sales, having a robust pipeline coverage strategy is the difference between hitting your targets and scrambling to stay afloat.

You need to reach your sales goals to succeed in B2B sales. To do this, you must spend time creating new opportunities. If you don’t create enough opportunities, you risk missing your targets and failing to reach your quota. But succeeding means you need enough opportunities so you can replace any that you don’t win.

Pipeline coverage aims to ensure that you have enough opportunities so that the loss of any one opportunity doesn’t prevent you from reaching your sales goals. You want to acquire the pipeline throughout the year. As time goes on, it becomes more difficult to replace deals you lost or stalled.

Why Does Pipeline Coverage Matter in B2B Sales?

Let’s look at two different salespeople, who have the same goal. The first salesperson creates new opportunities every week. She has enough opportunities to reach her sales goal, but she continues to create additional opportunities, providing coverage in her pipeline. This person needs to win 12 enterprise-level deals. She creates 18 opportunities.

The second salesperson doesn’t love prospecting and is working on the exact number of opportunities that will allow him to reach his goals. He goes about his business until he reaches the 12 deals he needs. Then, he stops, satisfied that his opportunities will be won, as the prospects are serious about making a change.

The first salesperson has lost two deals and had two others disengage. Because she was diligent, she still has 6 additional opportunities, making it certain she can still hit her targets. In the end, she succeeds.

The second salesperson, who started with 12 deals, also lost two and had two disengage. His 12 is now down to 8, making it impossible for him to reach his goals without hustling to create replacement opportunities, something that is more challenging when he is stressed. While he is able to add two deals to his pipeline, he cannot close them in time and fails to reach his sales target.

How to Evaluate and Enhance Your Sales Pipeline Coverage

Some of you may disagree with me on the amount of pipeline coverage you need. My approach is that salespeople with high win rates may not need the same coverage as salespeople with low win rates. Many sales leaders tend to require the same pipeline coverage. It may seem fair to require every sales rep to have 2X their sales targets, but the salesperson with a low win rate may need much more coverage.

The seller with a high win rate still needs the coverage because the Gods of Sales are fickle, sometimes taking deals away and other times giving the gift major wins. They are not to be trusted.

One sales manager shared with me that he requires all salespeople to have 12X their sales targets. Their sales force was only responding to RFPs (requests for proposal). I thought he was out of his mind until he shared the math and revealed how low his team’s win rates were.

Strategies for Monitoring and Maintaining Pipeline Health

There is a common mistake that sales leaders and sales managers routinely make when it comes to the pipeline. They look at the many opportunities listed in the CRM without assessing the likelihood of winning them. Most sales leaders and sales managers require their sales team to log a new opportunity as soon as they leave the first meeting. This is a mistake because some number of deals never make it to a second meeting. By monitoring the opportunities and movement of each deal, you can understand the salesperson’s chance of winning it.

Throughout the quarter, your salespeople will win some deals, lose some deals, or have clients that disengage for all kinds of reasons; their priorities change, their budgets are tight, they fall in love with one of your competitors, or a new decision-maker brings their partner from their last job.

The Critical Importance of Pipeline Coverage for Sales Success

It is critical that you maintain a healthy pipeline to ensure that you hit your net new revenue goals. First, you need to ensure you have high-quality opportunities and enough coverage for each salesperson to hit their quota. The sales rep that fails to acquire additional opportunities will need to prepare to lose deals and still succeed.

The second priority is to take the temperature of each opportunity by looking at its progress over time. When a deal stops progressing, that’s a sign that it might be lost, which means the salesperson must work on the additional opportunities they created in their pipeline coverage.

This is personal. Each salesperson must have the pipeline coverage they need. They also need to move the deals forward. Any stall or some other loss of momentum means that the salesperson must look to other deals that are engaged in the sales conversation.