Advance and close deals, or babysit numbers.
A CRM is a place to record deals. PontemVelo is how a team moves them. Keep the CRM for what it is good at, and stop asking it to do a job it was never built for.
Most sales teams already have a CRM, and most managers still run their pipeline on gut feel and a weekly "what's new?" The data is in the system. What is missing is the movement: what has been done on each deal, what comes next, who owns it, and whether it is going faster or slower than the deals that closed.
You can't control the outcome. You can control the process.
Any single deal can still go either way. What a team can control is how consistently deals are advanced, and that is the part of a sales approach that is most under-represented in a sales plan. Most organizations had no way to account for it.
The 3 to 5 times pipeline rule is the tell. Needing several times your target in pipeline is a hedge for having no way to see and track how deals move. A CRM can count deals. It cannot tell you whether they are advancing. Velo is short for velocity, pipeline velocity and deal velocity, and PontemVelo exists to account for it.
Where a CRM stops
It holds a snapshot, not momentum
Stage, amount and close date are static, point-in-time fields. They are updated when someone gets round to it, often just before a forecast call. They say where a deal was last time someone typed, not how fast it is moving, so there is little in them to help a rep or a manager advance it.
It has no context for how a deal advances
The real work happens in disjointed, ad hoc conversations between a rep and the client. The CRM keeps a note or two. It does not hold the route: what has been done, what is agreed, and what has to happen next for this deal to close.
Updates are opinion, not a method
Next steps, stage changes and "probability" are subjective, and each rep has their own way of describing the same situation. Movement is guided by ad hoc conversations between reps, peers and managers, not by one consistent company approach.
Side by side
This describes how CRMs are typically used on sales teams. Many are configurable, but the fields are only as current and as consistent as the people filling them in.
| A typical CRM | PontemVelo | |
|---|---|---|
| What it holds | A snapshot: stage, amount and close date as last typed. | A route of defined steps, each with an owner and a date, worked as the deal moves. |
| How often it is current | When someone remembers to update it. | As the rep works through the steps. |
| Next steps | Free text and a date. | Specific steps with an owner, a due date and a status. |
| How a deal moves forward | The rep's judgement, deal by deal. | The same route for every rep, set by the company. Progress is the steps actually completed. |
| Pace of the pipeline | Close date and age of the deal. | Cycle length, close-date slippage, and steps completed against steps due. |
| What a manager learns | The numbers a rep chose to enter. | Quantitative and qualitative velocity measures, including which steps tend to come before a conversion on your own deals. |
| The 1 on 1 | "What's new?" | A Rep Synopsis and a 1 on 1 prep built from the rep's actual numbers. |
The 1 on 1 your managers wish they were having
Too many 1 on 1s are generic. Without data on how the deals are actually moving, the manager has little to go on but a few open questions.
"What's new?"
"What's going on with the Initech deal?"
"What do you need from me?"
The rep answers from memory and from what they would like the manager to hear. Neither side can check it.
"Three of your open deals have had their close date pushed twice. What changed?"
"Stakeholder mapping is still open on four deals, and it is the step that most often comes before a conversion on our team. Where are you stuck on it?"
"You logged 24 meetings and the calendar shows 9. Walk me through it."
Illustrative examples. The Rep Synopsis and 1 on 1 prep build questions like these from each rep's own numbers, for the manager to use or ignore.
See the reporting, the Rep Synopsis and the 1 on 1 prep →
Keep your CRM
PontemVelo does not ask you to rip anything out. Your CRM stays your system of record for accounts, contacts and forecasts. PontemVelo sits next to it and runs the part a CRM leaves to chance: the route each deal follows, and the numbers that show whether it is moving.
- Start with the deals you haveUpload an Excel or CSV export from your CRM and the deals come in as plans, with a preview of every row before anything is created.
- Integration is availableWe can connect Pontem Sales to Salesforce, HubSpot and other major CRMs on the Growth and Enterprise plans, so stage, close date and owner are entered once.
- One consistent approachManagers set the route, so every rep moves deals the same way, and "next step" stops being a matter of opinion.