Once Upon a Sales Meeting!

Once Upon a Sales Meeting!



It was an awkward silence in the meeting room "Uproar." John Kowalski, the new sales manager, was not happy with the team's performance. After scribbling something in the notepad, he decided to break the silence,

John: I cannot believe you guys have been working like this. No reports, delusional forecasting, random targets, and no eye on the ball.

Kevin: We followed Richard's orders.

John: Well, Richard is not here anymore, is he?

John walked up to the whiteboard, and wrote in big bold letters: "TARGET - $50 MILLION". He then turned around to see the poker faces of his 6-member team and asked, "Thoughts?"

Kevin: Our last year target was $15 million, and yet we missed that by 20%. This new target of $50 million is almost four times what we did last year. Do you think it is practical?

John: Kevin, we make software for salons and spas. That's a 3-billion dollar industry. I'm asking you to capture less than 2% of that industry. Now, you tell me if that is impractical.

Kristin: But John, with the same team of 6, we'd need a magic wand to achieve that target.

John: Wand, not sure. Magic, well yes. We certainly need the magic of proper planning and reporting. We need to analyze relevant data and make strategies. What does our sales pipeline look like today?

Kristin: I can quickly check the CRM and let you know.

John: Please do.

Kristin (reading from CRM): We have 135 open deals as of today.

John: And what stages are they in?

Kristin: 93 cold, and 42 hot

John: Is that it? What about more granular stages? Those in the demo stage, or proposal stage for instance?

Team looked blank. John decided to continue.

John: Anyway, can you tell me who among you has the highest probability of topping the closures this month?

Kristin: That would be Kevin.

John: Kevin, how much is in your pipeline right now?

Kevin: I am about to close a 200,000 dollar deal, and have few more follow-ups to do.

John: Could you give me your sales forecasting for this month based on conversion probability?

Kevin: Well, if you give me sometime, I could pull that for you.

John did not know how to react. Perhaps, he was expecting more numbers from a team that brought 12 million in sales the previous year.

John: It's alright, Kevin. Team, let me show you how we are going to keep track of our leads and prospective deals going forward.

John projects the following image on screen:




John (continues): We'll have five primary deal stages - New (or cold leads); Talking (or showing interest); Meeting (or Demo); Proposal (or Quote); and finally Closed Won or Lost. This is how we'll prepare our sales pipeline. We'll also map probability percentages in these five stages based on our previous record. If we capture the appropriate data into our CRM in time, we can pull other important reports as well. Let me show you another example. 



Conversion or Sales Funnel report is essential find out where our leads leak in the process, and then tighten the gap. Sales Funnel reports can also be pulled by regions, or lead owners. These are some useful metrics that we could use to streamline our approach. For instance, if we see a low conversion rate for some of you, I can work closely with you to help analyze and improve.. Any questions?

Kristin: John, few of my clients take too long to close and that affects my targets for that particular quarter. Can we also do something to reduce the conversion time?

John: That is an excellent question. It is important to learn about sales cycle time or velocity so that we can set realistic targets for everyone of you. Also, shorter sales cycles would mean more ROI for our team.

Kevin: John, I like to take time with my clients and build relationships with them. That is important because if they like the product and service, they are going to renew their subscription every month, for a longer period. 

John: That's a great point, Kevin. Thank you for bringing this up. To monitor this, let's follow two more metrics - Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). 
John walks up to the white board and starts writing MRR formula. 

Net MRR = MRR at the beginning of the month + MRR gained from new customers for the month + MRR change gained from upgrading customers for the month - MRR change lost from downgrading customers for the month - MRR Churn from the month

John (continues): Recurring revenue is the lifeblood of any SaaS business. It’s what makes building a SaaS so appealing. You do not have to worry about one-off sales that may or may not return. If you have a solid product ,and like Kevin mentioned,, build a good relationship with clients, they automatically return for renewal. While new subscriptions validate our sales efforts, the Churn rate l lets us know where we went wrong. 

Kristin: What about Customer Lifetime Value?

John: Customer Lifetime Value is simply the total revenue we make from a single customer over the whole period of relationship with that customer. It's an important metric as it costs less to keep existing customers than it does to acquire new ones, so increasing the value of your existing customers is a great way to drive growth. Marketing team would be interested in this metric as well, as they compare this with Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), to calculate ROI.

Understanding CLV/CAC generally helps marketers unlock additional budget for their programs. For instance, it can help them determine whether they should be allowed to spend more on acquiring larger customers who'll likely stick around longer and pay more in their lifetime. This is what an “allowable CAC” represents. Allowable CAC is the maximum acceptable amount to pay for a customer. It's essentially a cap marketing team pre-negotiate with the finance team. They can justify a higher allowable CAC if CLV is higher.

Kevin: Sorry to return to where we started, John, but how are we going to divide the 50 million dollar target among ourselves.

John: All the reports, analysis and metrics that we spoke about, will help us set our goals and targets. Let's pull out all those reports from our CRM and come back for our next meeting tomorrow. We'll sit together and work out a target sales plan for each of us according to the insights we gain from reports. Sounds good?

All: Yes John

John: Alright then, see you. Hopefully, I'd get to hear from George, Lisa, Rajesh and Peter as well tomorrow, and not just Kevin and Kristin.

Everyone laughs and leaves the room. John left with a satisfied smile, as he believed he gave his team 50-million reasons to trust the sales reports and work with a plan.

    • Sticky Posts

    • As Sales Person, Here are my New Year Resolutions. What are Yours?

      Being a salesperson, I keep learning from my mistakes and have noted a few changes that I need to make in my approach. I take these resolutions going into 2021, hoping to keep it going for as long as possible :) 1. I will not say "Yes, our product has

    • Once Upon a Sales Meeting!

      It was an awkward silence in the meeting room "Uproar." John Kowalski, the new sales manager, was not happy with the team's performance. After scribbling something in the notepad, he decided to break the silence, John: I cannot believe you guys have been working like this. No reports, delusional forecasting, random targets, and no eye on the ball. Kevin: We followed Richard's orders. John: Well, Richard is not here anymore, is he? John walked up to the whiteboard, and wrote in big bold letters: "TARGET

      • Recent Topics

      • Canvas and Related lists

        Hi, As much as I like canvas, when adding in a asection with related lists,it doesnt mimic the same functionality as the standard view within the CRM e.g left hand panel will show the module and total number of records. Is there a way of indicating this

      • Email address ZOHO suggestions in replying - how to delete unwanted suggestions?

        Hi, I have some "unwanted" email addresses suggestions by ZOHO, and made some mistakes by replying for some tickets already. How can I clear this in ZOHO directly, I deleted all web browser history and cookies . Did not help :/ Below example, where one

      • Subform edits don't appear in parent record timeline?

        Is it possible to have subform edits (like add row/delete row) appear in the Timeline for parent records? A user can edit a record, only edit the subform, and it doesn't appear in the timeline. Is there a workaround or way that we can show when a user

      • Zoho Learn vs. Trainer Central

        Hi, I'm currently using Zoho One with a WordPress-based website and WooCommerce to manage my online courses. I would like to know what is the difference between Zoho Learn and Trainer Central and if it's possible for these two platforms to replace WP

      • How to Display a Logo Image on a Public Form?

        I would like to display a logo image in the header of a form. To achieve this, I added an Add Notes field to the form. The code below works perfectly for Zoho users accessing the form. However, when the form is made public, the image does not load properly:

      • Creating a Zoho Online Meeting in a Blueprint

        We are looking for an easy solution to schedule online meetings in a blueprint and ran into the same problem discussed in this topic: https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/community/topic/custom-function-to-set-meeting-to-online-meeting (After connecting Zoho

      • Enabling 'From Number' and 'To Number' fields in the Calls module

        Hello everyone, We've added "To Number" and "From Number" fields in the Calls module as part of our latest update to provide users with the option to enable or disable them through the Calls Preferences tab. When enabled, these fields will be displayed

      • Workaround for Zoho Inventory changing previous Fiscal Year Trial Balance in QBO

        We've run into an issue where Zoho Inventory syncs to QBO and makes adjustments to journal entries from previous fiscal years. Fiscal Year End reporting has been long completed, but the Trial Balance keeps changing. Zoho does not have a fix for this,

      • Route Optimizer

        Does Zoho Inventory offer route optimization for our in-house deliveries? It will save us time to manually route our daily orders. Thank you

      • Can documents attached to different ZohoForms automatically go to different OneDrive folders?

        Hi there, I set a workflow to track and store applications coming in from our website. I created two different Zoho forms, one for unsolicited applications, one for applications to job postings. After any of the forms has been filled in, a new record

      • TeamInbox down?

        Hi everyone, we are getting message "Sorry, this action cannot be performed due to an internal error. Please try again later. We are on the Canadian data centers. Can someone please confirm if the service is down? Thank you! F

      • Purchase Requisition in Zoho Books

        I want to understand if Zoho Books is having the following workflow: PR ( Purchase Requisition ) >> PO ( Purchase order) >>  GRN/SRN ( Goods/Services receipt note) >> Bill

      • Confirmation prompt before a custom button action is triggered

        Have you ever created a custom button and just hoped that you/your users are prompted first to confirm the action? Well, Zoho knows this concept. For example, in blueprint, whenever we want to advance to the next state by clicking the transition, it is

      • Marketer's Space: Streamline marketing and sales by integrating ZMA's Planner with Zoho CRM

        In a competitive market, clear goal-setting and seamless campaign execution are crucial for marketing and sales alignment. When integrated with Zoho CRM, Zoho Marketing Automation's Planner enables marketers to create, manage, and measure campaigns effectively

      • Custom emails for Portals not working

        I changed the standard templates to custom email templates for all three options, but the invitation is still sending the original email layouts. Anyone know why this would be happening? I changed them 2 days ago.

      • Switching scheduled webinars from Live to On-demand

        Now that On-Demand webinars has been added as an option for webinar presenting, is there a way I can edit already scheduled webinars from Live to on-Demand? These scheduled webinars already have people registered. Thanks

      • Zoho CRM v2.1 deprecation or sunset plans ?

        Hi Team Wanted to know if there is any plan to deprecate v2.1 CRM apis https://www.zoho.com/crm/developer/docs/api/v2.1/ and if yes by when

      • Forex Bank Refund Entry

        Hello, please advise how to enter refunds from our bank forex department. The refund was because we were on preferential rates but at the time of USD purchase were not given the preferential rate, therefore the bank calculated the excess that we paid

      • Auto-Populating Custom Field

        This is to request a feature enhancement for our invoicing system. We're currently creating invoices with a single item per invoice and have a custom field called "Related Vehicle." We would like the "Related Vehicle" field to be automatically populated

      • How can i Customize Delivery Note?

        I need to customize delivery note like change the tittle for language purposes and also include only the balance due

      • Delivery note template

        We have some reasonable templates for sales docs but the delivery note one is very limited. It would be nice if we could have the same options as the sales form templates or even create our own by cloning an existing sales template, modifying (ie: removing

      • INTERCOMPANIES INVOICING

        Dears , I paid expenses on behalf of our sister company from my cash account , then month End i issued an invoice to the sister company , my question is how to put the expenses GL in the invoices

      • Zoho CRM Theme Color?

        I've read multiple articles stating it's possible to change Zoho CRM theme colour (top menu bar) from personal settings menu, however, my zoho has no options for this at all and I've looked everywhere........has this feature been removed? I'm currently

      • How can i force the user to select a project when creating an invoice ?

        Hello I tried all the ways that i know , but no way is able to stop creating an invoice without project.

      • Sales

        1/ How can I make a discount on invoice exmple : invoice 5,100 le , custmar pay 5000 and I need to make this 100 le as a discount , how can i make it ?! 2/ Is thare any report can make me match my company’s balance with the customer’s balance?

      • Include Project Hours when Creating Estimates from Projects

        Hi Currently, in Books, you can create estimates from Projects by inserting tasks that pull both the task and the hourly charge rate. But it doesn't pull the budgeted hours for the task, so you manually have to remember the number of hours for a given

      • acc

        Regularly sending statements to customers is an imperative part of many business processes as it helps foster strong customer relationships and provides timely guidance on pay//

      • South African Payment Gateways

        Since the "Demise" of Wave many South African users have moved over to Zoho and yet for years users have been requesting Integration with a South African Payment Gateway to no avail. Payfast was the most commonly requested gateway as it supports recurring

      • CRM Implementation

        I need to implement Zoho CRM. Is there a useful user manual available to guide me through the implementation?

      • Zoho Social integration with Zoho Flow

        Is there any plans for Zoho Social integration with Zoho Flow?

      • Marketing 2.0 has been a catastrophe

        Anyone else having significant issues with their link between their CRM and Marketing automation since moving to version 2.0? We had an easy flow for triggering leads in the CRM to journeys in Marketing Automation but now nothing seems to work properly.

      • Cannot average "Duration (Time)" from Pick List History Tracking in Reports

        Okay, let's say I have a custom module. In this custom module I have a pick-list named "Status" with "New", "In-Progress", "Completed" values. I also have turned ON pick-list history tracking and chose "Time" to track the duration in (instead of "Calendar

      • Customer Statement Template

        Hi. how can i add order number "customer LPO number" in the customer statement. regards

      • Authorize.Net Update: Disable Transaction IP Velocity Filter to Avoid Payment Failures

        Update: The Authorize.Net integration was updated on November 20, 2024. To prevent recurring transaction failures, we recommend disabling the Transaction IP Velocity Filter at the earliest. We’re updating the Authorize.Net integration in Zoho Books on

      • Need to send a single email to up to 20 recipients

        I want to send a single email to ~16 or 20 recipients. It appears that I cannot do this in Zoho email as it gets flagged as unusual activity. I need to be able to communicate with this group on a regular basis. What am I missing that Zoho doesn't allow

      • Unable to Schedule One-to-One Emails in Zoho CRM

        Hi everyone, I’m using the Zoho CRM Professional Edition and facing an issue with scheduling one-to-one emails directly from CRM. While I can send immediate emails without any problem, I don’t see an option to schedule these emails for a later time. I’ve

      • Canvas Detail View Related List Sorting

        Hello, I am having an issue finding a way to sort a related list within a canvas detail view. I have sorted the related list on the page layout associated with the canvas view, but that does not transfer to the canvas view. What am I missing?

      • Repeatable Fields/Sections in Zoho CRM

        Hi Zoho Team, We have a module in CRM named "Clients". We would like to know whether it is possible to have a feature enables us to have repeatable sections in our clients' profiles? For example, if we customized a section in the clients' profiles named

      • Zoho Analytics: Requests for view access

        Hello, We have a user that might request access to a certain view, report etc. However this request for access is being sent to different admins within the workspace, is is possible to set who the "approver" is of these requests? If not what are the rules

      • Boolean Fields in Mail Merge Displaying as Checkmarks

        I'm really liking the new mail merge functionality. It's replaced the Zoho Sign extension for us. One problem I've seen is that boolean operators (i.e. Checkbox fields) in CRM merge as "True" or "False". This looks a little ugly in my final document — is there a way I can get those to display as checkboxes?

      • Next Page