A sales pipeline – what’s alfalfa got to do with it?

I learned about having a sales pipeline at a very early age. But I did not know it at the time. It was back in the 70’s on the family farm in Southern Wisconsin. You see, my dad grew and sold alfalfa (aka hay) for a living. He raised it on the family farm and sold it to large dairies and horse farms all across the Midwest and Southeast. Harvesting alfalfa was a very labor intensive process back in those days and I have a bad back to prove it. But so was his accounting process. He actually had this big ledger book. It was always open on his desk. He seemed to manage his entire business from this one book. I had no idea of its importance.


His list of clients and prospects were in the book. He posted all orders with full detail of purchase price, cost of goods, trucking, and profit margin. When demand was slow, he would page through the book and look for farmers to call. He would log the calls with a simple check mark next to the name. When he made a sale, it would go in a special section where he would track the order until it arrived at the client's farm. Does this process sound familiar? Folks, this simple log book was a CRM system.


My dad had a pipeline. Rudimentary to be sure, but he had one – to sell alfalfa. He knew what went in to the top of the pipeline, what got stuck, what leaked, what was discontinued, and what concluded in a sale. He had a full understanding of his bid-to-close ratio and his conversion rates. He focused on his pipeline daily, kept accurate records and used the information to forecast how much money he needed to raise to pay the bills and make a small profit.


He never used any of those fancy words like bid-to-close, balance or conversion rates. If I called him right now and asked him what his late stage conversion rates are, he would ask me if I’ve been drinking. Business has certainly changed and become much more complex. I would say that the required nuts-n-bolts of managing a pipeline are the same today, as when I first experienced them in the 70’s. The moral of this story is get back to the basics. Take a look at how you manage your pipeline. Are you using a sound process? Are you collecting and keeping quality data for forecasting? Are you focused on the entire pipeline and looking for leakage and stagnant areas? Do you know your conversion rates down to the rep level? Are you coaching to the pipeline? These are just a few, but big areas, you should be focusing on.


This past June, my family and I visited the farm, as we do every year. During that visit, I took a minute to peek in my dad’s office. Guess what? There on his big desk was the ledger. Sound business fundamentals never go out of style.