What are some of your best practices for sales pipeline management? Drop a comment below!

Just a few obvious points to call out are:
- Have a target goal for total contract value as well as a number of opportunities within your pipeline.  A bad place to be is heavily concentrated on one or two opportunities to achieve your revenue goal.  There should be a diverse mix of opportunities with regard to size, solution and probability of winning.  
- I am a firm believer in only "real" opportunities being in the pipeline especially if that pipeline is being used for forecasting to potential investors or for strategic purposes.  Having defined qualification standards on what officially enters the pipeline is key. 
- measure the health of your pipeline by #of new opportunities, organic v net new growth potenial, total revenue potential, #of overall accounts, etc.  

Discovery never stops. Qualify early and often. 

Use deal rooms and/or slack channels to inspect and ensure deals are in the right stage. 
Are there clear next steps? Anything missing from buyer committee? etc...

Is there agreement that the problem is worth solving right now?

Inspect and coach to improve at individual level. 

For VP of Sales, current quarter is priority but a CRO will be looking further out. 

A big help has been leveraging buyer engagement data collected in digital sales rooms. The data not only tells us what the buyer is interested it, the timing, frequency, and duration of their engagements show us which opportunities to prioritize. 

I subscribe heavily to the "Create, Move, Close" idea.  While we all want closers, that tends to take care of itself, if your sales process works.  But, if you don't push reps to keep creating and moving deals through the stages, and all they do is focus on closing, your pipeline will vanish quickly - and immediately after a huge quarter close.  So in my deal reviews, I'm always asking about what's changed, what's new, and what needs to be done - making sure that we are not "waiting" on anything.  

Focusing on the deals most likely to close within the next quarter as a top priority, followed by ensuring the top of the funnel is strong. Too often, filling the pipeline is overlooked as we focus on what's in the middle.