Ways to Boost the Efficiency of your Sales Pipeline
What is a sales pipeline?
A sales pipeline is a visual representation of sales prospects and where they are in the purchasing process.
Pipelines also provide an overview of a sales rep’s account forecast and how close the rep is to making quota, as well as how close a sales team as a whole is to reaching quota. This enables sales reps and sales managers to forecast the number and dollar amounts of deals that will close in a given period of time.
Benefits of accelerating your sales pipeline:
Shorten your sales cycle
A long sales cycle isn’t always a bad thing. A quick sales cycle isn’t always a desirable thing, however, there is a connection between shorter sales cycles and higher revenue. A short sales cycle implies your team can reach out to more customers and close more deals throughout the quarter or year, resulting in higher income. Accelerate pipeline analysis will help your company reduce unwanted bottlenecks and obstructions that extend the sales cycle unnecessarily.
Increase revenue
Your goal is to increase income, and one of the most effective ways to accomplish it is through sales acceleration. Turn your pipeline into a proactive tool for creating closed-won’s rather than working reactively to enhance sales team efficiency from month to month or quarter to quarter.
Improved internal communication
Without the support of the marketing and sales teams, sales acceleration will not be possible. While relationships between sales and marketing teams might be difficult, there’s no doubt that aligning the two departments would provide more value to prospects and increase corporate performance.
Teams will be more aware of their common aims and more inclined to collaborate if marketing and sales work together.
Best practices to manage your sales pipeline:
Track progress at each stage of your sales pipeline
Basically, a sales pipeline constitutes 5 stages and the vigilance of the sales team at each of these stages can prove to be critical to evaluate the success of the sales pipeline.
The 5 main stages of the sales pipeline include:
- Prospecting
- Qualification
- Proposal
- Closing The Deal
- Repeat Business
It is important to assign reps in sales teams the job of evaluating the efficiency at each stage in order to surmise the overall success of the sales pipeline. Sometimes the clogging of leads at a particular stage can slow down the progress of the pipeline and can ultimately lead to loss of potential prospects and ultimately a lower conversion rate.
Understand the potential of your sales pipeline
Every sales team needs to have a plan in place before starting to execute at each stage of the sales pipeline. It becomes vital for sales personnel to identify the potential opportunities at each stage of their sales pipeline and make the most of them.
For this, the first and foremost requisite is to understand whether the prospect or lead is at the ‘ready to buy’stage or still requires ‘convincing and nurturing’ to be able to proceed to the buying stage.
Once this vital understanding is obtained then the process is fairly simple, sales reps need to adopt different approaches and strategies to make the maximum conversions happen.
Push forth the velocity of each stage of the pipeline
Tracking the velocity of the pipeline includes ensuring constant prospecting and the setting up of digital metrics to measure the success rate at each stage of the pipeline.
Some of the important metrics that can measure your sales pipeline success include:
- Number of qualified opportunities
- Win rate
- Size of deals
- Sales cycle length
Each of these metrics will help not only estimate the success of your sales marketing strategy. But also help to map out the buyer’s journey in a systematic manner. Thus, aiding optimal changes in product design, marketing, and sales strategies.
Identify points of lead leakage and control lead loss
With continuous prospecting and an inflow of leads, sometimes tracking each lead’s progress across the pipeline becomes difficult.
This often results in unforeseen leakage of leads due to clogging at a particular stage or not enough nurturing.
Lead scoring can be extremely helpful in categorizing leads into sales-ready and those that still require nurturing. Lead scoring prevents clogging of leads at different stages of the pipeline and also helps in effective lead management. Controlling lead leakage and lead loss is an important step to ensure the efficiency of the sales pipeline.