With GetAccept, flexibility is at your fingertips to engage buyers in new ways and increase win rates by 75% on your documents.
With GetAccept, flexibility is at your fingertips to engage buyers in new ways and increase
win rates by 75% on your documents.
A sales pipeline is a visual snapshot of the journey from a potential Lead to a confirmed Sale. It will visualize every step in your sales process. Your sales pipeline will reflect the buyer’s journey — showing you where your leads, prospects, and existing clients are in the pipeline to conversion.
Every business operates differently. There is no standard blueprint for a sales pipeline — it's unique to your business and the product you are selling.
In the most generic sense, the sales pipeline is about:
The sales pipeline can be segmented into the following stages:
Lead generation or sales prospecting involves attracting prospects and getting them interested in your product. It's a critical step in the sales process because it helps you identify and target individuals or organizations that may be interested in your product or service. You need to convert these leads.
Leads are generated through advertising, social media marketing, email marketing campaigns, networking, referrals, etc.
Lead generation is important because it helps you build a pool of potential customers to whom you can market your product or service. By identifying leads and targeting them with relevant messages, you can increase the chances of making a sale and growing your business.
Lead qualification is the process of evaluating and filtering leads to determine which ones are worth pursuing.
You need to measure your leads across certain metrics:
This is an important step in the sales process because it helps you focus your efforts on the most promising leads and saves you time and resources by eliminating those that are not a good fit for your business.
Lead qualification helps you prioritize your leads and focus your sales efforts on those that are most likely to result in a sale. It can help you identify the best opportunities and increase your chances of success.
If the lead qualifies and is interested, you can initiate the contract process. This involves sending them proposals and quotes. Lots of back-and-forth communication to understand their problems and your capacity to solve them.
This step will start to narrow your pipeline. Meetings and demos will help bridge the gap between client expectations and the services you deliver.
This involves lots of communication and explanation. Meetings and demos help leads understand exactly how your product or service works and how it can help their use case.
You will have to explain the features and benefits of your product in detail and answer any questions or concerns your potential customer has.
Meetings and demos can effectively move the sales process forward and convince the potential customer to buy. They allow you to have a more in-depth conversation with the lead and provide the information they need to make an informed purchasing decision.
During the negotiation process, both parties may need to compromise to reach an agreement. The goal is to find a mutually beneficial solution that meets the needs and interests of both parties.
There are a few key things to consider when negotiating a sales deal:
A good negotiation will build a good long-term business relationship with your customers, this is invaluable to your brand reputation.
Closing the deal in sales refers to the final step in the sales process, where both parties agree to the terms of the contract, and the deal is finalized.
This typically involves signing a contract or placing an order and can also involve other activities, such as setting up payment terms or arranging for delivery or implementation. Hopefully, there is champagne involved.
Closing the deal is only the beginning of your relationship with your client. This is where your customer experience begins. You need to hand-hold them through the implementation of your product and follow up regularly.
This is why cultivating a good relationship is so important. It is a long-term game.
A sales pipeline's purpose is to track each opportunity's status and forecast future sales. By monitoring the progress of opportunities through the pipeline, sales managers can see where they are in the process and identify any bottlenecks or issues that may be holding up the sales process. They can also use the pipeline to identify trends and patterns that may indicate problems or opportunities.
Pushing your lead over the edge from a window shopper (opportunity) to a closed deal (sales!) seems like it requires the stars to align.
The process of converting leads to customers is always complex. Some factors leading to a lead falling out of the pipeline are within your control, while others aren’t.
Leakages happen at different stages of the pipeline. As a sales leader, you must identify these points of friction, categorize them and investigate the reasons for the leaks.
Watch out for these common reasons sales pipelines get leaky:
For example, If no one is seeing your message because Google detected it was entirely AI-written then it would clearly be ineffective.
Creating a picture of your sales funnel that accurately reflects your sales process will be the most important. This will be unique to your product and process. To map out your sales funnel, you will have to:
So much of this sales process is about understanding your leads and forecasting closes. This requires data. And the data requires analysis. Data-driven decision-making is the most informed and practical way to drive growth. Data is your most powerful tool for insight and understanding.
(Let’s be honest, is there anything more fun to a sales leader than a presentation full of dancing graphs?)
So how do you analyze your sales pipeline?
All funnels leak.
But knowing where, when, and why there is leakage gives you control over the problem. Investigating leakage in your funnel means asking the right questions.
The quality of your leads is defined by how well you know your audience and your product.
You need to define your ideal customer. This is something your sales team and marketing team need to be on the same page with.
Focus your effort on targeting the right kind of leads that fit your defined buyer persona. Don’t waste your time and resources on leads that don’t fit the profile.
Using targeted content with the right long-tail keywords will bring in the right traffic — high-quality leads. This could include providing free and valuable content, being active and up-to-date on social media, using email marketing campaigns, etc.
Then you need to nurture these leads. Build a good rapport with them and help them trust you. Show them that you understand their problems and their pain points.
Develop a good relationship and reinforce that relationship by maintaining a connection — during and after your deal is closed. Maintaining a good relationship is important even if they do not close. Your audience should feel welcome back even if things didn’t work out.
There are several ways to nurture a lead, but many brands prefer to use methods like email marketing or newsletters. This method does require the lead to opt-in first, so it’s a good idea to explain the value they receive if they sign up for communication.
An example of this can be seen on the website of a leading LOTO Kit manufacturer, where they offer leads the latest information on sales and new product releases via email. This is a great value-driven way of securing valid email addresses.
You can win at sales with marginal improvements. Fractions of a percentage. Choosing the right tools will help with that.
This means choosing the right CRM platform. You need to optimize for:
Picking the right platform requires you to diagnose your system and products and identify exactly what you need in CRM software. Your criteria should allow you to:
You need to constantly experiment with your process — in a controlled way while tracking your results at each iteration. This will help you understand what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s the tiniest things that are the most significant.
Testing will also help you clean out your sales pipeline — eliminate all the redundancies. It will ensure that your data is up-to-date and accurate.
The sales process is dynamic. You should constantly adapt your strategy to new data, to changes in the environment, etc., and compare the results. This will ensure that you are always improving.
Understanding your product and your audience is the key to an effective sales pipeline.
Your pipeline is bound to have leaks and friction points, but minimizing the causes of these leaks on your end is crucial.
This is only possible when you commit to constant improvement by being data-driven, using the right software, and constantly testing. This will help fix your leaky pipelines before they start dripping hard-earned revenue.
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