The Emerging Role of a Pipeline Strategist with Krystal Diel, Pipeline Strategist at Panther

The Emerging Role of a Pipeline Strategist with Krystal Diel, Pipeline Strategist at Panther

Krystal is a Pipeline Strategist at Panther

Krystal is a Pipeline Strategist at Panther, a cloud-scale security analytics platform that alleviates the pain of traditional SIEM with detections-as-code and a scalable security data lake. She initially got into sales operations as a personal trainer.

Krystal brings over seven years of experience in various Sales and RevOps roles and leadership positions. Before her current role, she was the Director of Revenue Operations at Capacity and the Manager of Sales Development at BizLibrary. She also ran a fitness and wellness business for over seven years, having helped hundreds of people improve their quality of life, both physically and emotionally.

Today, Krystal joins us to share her career journey from Sales to RevOps and into Pipeline Strategy and how this new role collaborates with the go-to-market teams to optimize strategies and processes to increase revenue.

Key Highlights:

2:07 – 4:41 – Find Repeatable Processes That Work – Krystal started her career in personal training and found that her success relied on repeatable processes with her clients. As she transitioned into her first SDR role, she brought that same mindset which quickly brought success and a promotion to a leadership position. Next, Krystal moved to a Sales Operations role understanding that the repeatable processes that worked in Sales Development could be operationalized to benefit the entire Sales org. Eventually she led the RevOps team, overseeing all business operations teams.
6:50 – 10:00 – What Is a Pipeline Strategist? – Krystal starts by asking how we can target the right accounts in the most efficient way and use technology to help accomplish that task. Platforms like 6sense can align with strategies to understand who the buyer is, to see that buyer in Salesforce and provide the sales team with the messaging and content they need relevant to that person, creating an omnipresent experience with the prospect. Ultimately, success is measured on pipeline velocity.
10:01 – 12:45 – A Day in the Life of a Pipeline Strategist – Like RevOps, the Pipeline Strategist is a cross-departmental collaborative role. Krystal works closely with marketing, sales, and customer success to identify key milestones, understand where any bottlenecks are and to work with key stakeholders to fix them.
12:45 – 18:35 – Managing the Process – Krystal finds objective moments in the process to track. For example, Stage 0 Opportunities are opened when initial meetings are set to remove any subjectivity. Whether the deal stops there or continues on, tracking this first engagement is the easiest way to close feedback loops internally. Contact Roles are used in the Opportunity to track multiple buyers and also ensure that people are associated with Campaigns, so that they can accurately measure influence.
19:50 – 27:46 – Where To Start – Krystal compares building a strategy to a road trip – You can hop in the car and figure it out as you go – where to stop, roads to take, etc. Or, you can take the time to plan your trip ahead of time – doing this will likely get you to your destination much quicker.
- Define the Vision
- Share the Vision with others
- Identify the milestones
- Work towards it and use a Gaant chart to plot it out and execute

Who Would Krystal Like to Take For Lunch in the Ops World?

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“Are we targeting the right accounts, are we prioritizing them and how quickly are they moving through the pipeline? – what is the pipeline velocity of those things? So that’s pretty much the angle of the job that I look at it all through.”

Krystal Diel, Pipeline Strategist at Panther

“If I’m a pipeline strategist and my job is to help us increase pipeline, it starts with who we’re targeting, and are we targeting the right people? And if we are targeting the right people then we will know that, if we can close those deals as quickly as possible.”

Krystal Diel, Pipeline Strategist at Panther