Do you ever feel like your sales pipeline is stuck in a rut? Are you spinning your wheels but not getting anywhere? Do you feel like you’re always playing catch-up and never really making any headway? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. No, this is not an ad for a self-help book. We’re just noting how it can feel when you’re trying to build a sales pipeline and don’t have enough solid leads.
Building a healthy pipeline is like starting a new diet. In order to succeed, you have to change your behavior, develop new skills, and face an uphill battle with new challenges. Just like many dieters fall off the wagon and fall into slumps trying to reclaim their health, salespeople face similar issues when trying to maintain the health of their sales pipeline.
Whether your pipeline has just sprung a minor leak or needs a full rebuild, now is the best time to grab your metaphorical plumber’s tools and get to fixing it. A healthy sales pipeline will ensure that your business is always bringing in new leads and making those sweet sales. In this post, we’ll share pro tips for improving each step of your sales pipeline so you can reach your business goals!
What is a sales pipeline?
What is a sales pipeline? And how do you keep it healthy? The “sales pipeline” is a way that salespeople understand how to guide customers through their journey with a company. It opens with prospecting, and lead qualification, flows on to needs assessment and proposal, and (ideally) ends with closing. When reps follow a systematic process, they can effectively manage their sales process and increase their chances of making consistent sales!
A healthy sales pipeline is one that’s full of qualified, profitable leads that are moving through each stage at a good pace and will generate a consistent stream of sales and long-term business. It should also retain enough leads to meet revenue goals and have low churn. This indicates that the sales team is not only effective at generating new business, but also maintains a strong close rate. How do you achieve this balance? The most important thing is to have a clear understanding of your ideal customer and what motivates them to move through each stage.
But keeping it healthy isn’t a once-and-done situation. It needs to be regularly monitored and tweaked, through sales pipeline management as your marketing and sales teams polish their prospecting, lead generation, pitching and presentations, engagement, and closing strategies.
What’s the difference between a sales pipeline and sales funnel?
Let’s clear up any sales pipeline vs funnel questions you may have. The sales pipeline is to identify where salespeople are in their sales process (i.e., prospecting, making an offer, closing, etc). A sales funnel represents what stage customers are in their buyer’s journey (i.e., discovery, evaluation, purchase, etc). They’re two sides of the same coin.
Why do you need a sales pipeline?
Many teams find that having a sales pipeline or similar visual representation is crucial to their success. A pipeline breaks down the sales process for representatives in simple steps. It also provides a clear overview of where each opportunity is at, and helps ensure reps are following up with leads before they get cold and the sale is lost. Like a plumber testing a pipe for the telltale hiss or bubble of a leak, sales teams can check each stage of the sales pipeline to see where leads are getting stuck or leaving—or where better tactics or technology can be implemented.
Pipelines can also be used to forecast future sales activity and performance. For example, if a particular salesperson is consistently losing deals at the final stage, it may be time to provide additional training or coaching on closing strategies. By understanding the sales pipeline, managers can help their teams improve their performance and grow revenue.
What should be in a sales pipeline?
A sales pipeline should encompass each step that a rep takes, from prospecting to closing. Reps can organize their pipeline anyway they please, but one typically includes:
- Prospecting: This is the exciting stage where salespeople begin to look for potential customers. A prospect is anyone who’s shown interest and been initially qualified as having a budget and authority to make a purchase. In this phase, you can have a list of your best prospects.
- Initial contact and lead qualification: In this sales pipeline stage, salespeople get contact information and develop a pitch, email, or phone script. It’s the first step to building a relationship and developing trust, and the end goal of the stage is to set up an appointment, presentation, or demo. Next, salespeople further qualify leads through conversations about their need, pain points, budget, and timeline for an immediate or near-future purchase, and any other questions specific to their industry.
- Engage and make an offer: Here, salespeople continue to build the relationship through email, social media and/or calls. They’ll keep their leads interested by sharing an ideas and solutions to help their business problem that the potential customers can discuss with reps, online or within a community. This stage also further helps reps tailor, refine, and perfect an offer.
- Negotiations and closing: Finally, all that hard work pays off when reps get prospects to make a purchase or sign a contract. To succeed, they need a strong understanding of their product or service, as well as thorough research on the lead. It’s important to anticipate pain points and objections so they can sail smoothly through any tense negotiations in the final closing rounds!
- Follow-up: Don’t let your sales pipeline end with the close! One of the best ways to increase revenue is to follow up with customers who got stuck or slipped out of the pipeline. Send them an email or phone call to see how you can help them move to the next stage in the pipeline. They’ll appreciate the personal attention, and in addition to a possible sale you might get valuable feedback on how to improve your process. Follow-up also means maintaining a relationship with closed customers and increasing pipeline sales.
How do you structure a sales pipeline?
Building a sales pipeline is a lot like building a house. You have to lay the foundation, put up the framing, and then add the finishing touches. And just like with construction, if you don’t do it right, your structure will leak and crumble. Here are some tips to help you build a healthy pipeline:
Start with a sales strategy that knows your customers like the back of your hand.
A business without customers is like a house without walls—it won’t stand up (and it’s impossible!). The best way to attract customers is through effective B2B sales strategies. However, devising a strategy can be tricky, and there are a few key factors to take into account. First, you need to know your product inside and out. What are its unique selling points (USPs)? What needs does it address?
Once you’ve figured out your USPs, you can start thinking about your target market. Who are your ideal customers? What motivates them? If your buyer personas or ideal customer profiles need an update, you can use Lusha, our B2B lead enrichment app. It’s a LinkedIn email finder tool that delivers contact info and firmographics on leads, customers, and company profiles in your CRM—up to 37 data points! Use it when you’re prospecting on LinkedIn, your Gmail, or B2B websites. This will help you become familiar with your target market and spot high-value leads. Once you’ve answered these questions, you can begin to develop a sales strategy that resonates with your target audience.
Pipeline management will determine if your process succeeds or crumbles.
Pipeline management means tracking customers as they move through the sales pipeline, with an eye towards improving relationships. You want to ensure that each customer is getting the attention and care they deserve, and that the sales team is moving them through the pipeline efficiently. To be effective at pipeline management, sales teams need to have a clear understanding of who their most important leads are; this is where lead scoring comes into place. Once you’ve identified hot leads, you need to follow up with them quickly (like within 24 hours quickly) so they don’t get cold.
By understanding the needs of each stage of the sales process, you can ensure that your sales team is always working on deals that have a high likelihood of closing. Additionally, by monitoring the progress of each deal through the sales pipeline, you can identify any areas where deals are falling through and make changes to your process to correct the issue.
Use sales metrics to gauge the performance of your team.
Sales pipeline metrics measure the health of your process. They track the number of leads and opportunities at each stage, and the conversion rate from one stage to the next. A few key numbers stand out as especially helpful to sales managers: new deals, deals in progress, deals won, and deals lost. By tracking these metrics, sales managers can get a better sense of how their team is performing and where they need to improve.
A healthy pipeline has a high conversion rate and a low churn rate. Churn is the percentage of deals that fall out of the pipeline; a high churn rate indicates that your sales reps aren’t qualifying deals properly, or are losing too many deals at each stage. Meanwhile, a low conversion rate means that your reps aren’t closing enough deals. If this applies to your organization, you may need to improve your training or hire more experienced sales reps.
Set sales goals so you’re not shooting in the dark.
What are the best sales pipeline goals to set? More sales? More qualified leads? A higher close rate? More sales is always a good goal, but it’s not always the best place to start. After all, there are only so many customers that fit your ideal profile. A better focus might be on generating more qualified leads. By increasing the number of qualified leads, you can increase the number of sales without necessarily increasing the number of sales calls. You’re just focusing on quality over quantity; it’s better to have a few high-quality leads than a ton of low-quality ones. And who doesn’t want to make fewer sales calls? Another goal to consider is a higher close rate. Even a tiny increase in your close rate can have a massive impact on your overall sales numbers.
Take advantage of sales pipeline tools.
Your pipeline can become a magical place where deals go to die… or be born again and turn into sweet sales victories. But as you might have gathered, managing it can be a real pain in the neck. Luckily, there are sales pipeline tools that come to the rescue and make your life a whole lot easier.
From providing data-driven insights to streamlining communication, from tracking leads to generating reports, sales enablement tools can help you monitor activity inside (and outside) your pipeline, like a surveillance camera. They do it by providing sales reps with access to the right information to overcome objections, monitor behavior at key touchpoints, and identify buying signals—so they can have full control over the quality and performance of their pipeline.
Sales pipeline analysis
In a nutshell, sales pipeline analysis is all about analyzing and interpreting the actions and movement of your prospects through each stage of the process. However, sales pipeline analysis can be a bit of a dry topic. In order to make it more interesting, let’s take a look at it through the lens of a salesperson’s worst nightmare: the sales pipeline from hell.
The pipeline from hell is full of leads that will never convert. It’s the bane of every rep’s existence and the source of endless frustration. If you find yourself in the sales pipeline from hell, there are a few things you can do to try and escape:
- Understand the ‘why’ behind each decision you and your lead make. Why did you make a follow-up call 10 days later? Why has your lead stop engaging with you on LinkedIn?
- Gather all of the relevant pipeline data. This includes everything from sales figures and customer purchase histories. Once you have all of the data compiled, it’s time to start crunching the numbers and identifying trends and patterns.
- Draw conclusions and make decisions based on your findings. If you noticed your high-value customers come from in-person events, ramp up your event marketing and sales.
Where to build a sales pipeline? 3 examples to get started
Created with PipelineCRM
In this sales pipeline example, PipelineCRM organizes deals into qualified leads, info requested, presentation, negotiation, won, and lost. It also shows how long a sales cycle takes and the average size of a deal won.
Created with PipeDrive
PipeDrive has simple and easy-to-use software where you can see all your future pipeline sales in order from qualified, contact made, demo scheduled, proposal, and negotiation. There’s also a forecast feature where you can see how much you will bring in monthly.
Created with HubSpot
This sales pipeline example created with HubSpot has a lot more stages (shown offscreen). It also includes appointment scheduled, qualified to buy, presentation scheduled, decision maker bought in, contacts sent, closed won, and closed lost.
Key takeaways
- A sales pipeline is a visual representation of a rep’s sales process. It maps out each stage of the buying process from lead generation to close.
- A healthy sales pipeline has enough qualified leads in each stage to reach revenue goals and create consistent revenue.
- The #1 way to keep your system healthy is to know everything about your leads and customers. Which is why you should check out Lusha, our B2B LinkedIn email finder extension for Google Chrome. Lusha delivers contact info and firmographics like company size and revenue on each lead. It’ll help you flesh out your ideal customer profiles, create targeted campaigns and know which leads to prioritize in your pipeline.
See how Lusha can speed up your workflow
