Even if you’ve been in sales for a while, you might not have developed your own pipeline yet. Perhaps you’ve been part of a pipeline or haven’t had enough contacts to keep track of. Whatever the reason, we’ll help you create, manage, and track your sales pipeline efficiently.
Read on to learn how to create your own functional sales pipeline to turn leads into customers and track the status of your deals.
What is a Sales Pipeline?
A sales pipeline describes the process you go through to turn your prospects or leads into customers. This process helps you increase your conversion rate and close more deals through an organized system that guides prospects through the process simply and effortlessly.
Why Should You Use a Sales Pipeline?
If your daily work consists of dozens of calls, hundreds of names and companies, and you use different methods to store them, you urgently need a way to track it all. The process ensures that none of your leads fall through the cracks.
A good sales pipeline serves to manage your leads and contacts and give sales representatives an overview of where they are in the sales cycle. Creating a pipeline gives you a guide to manage the different lead statuses and thus makes daily routine easier. The pipeline makes it easy for both your potential customers and you to see the next steps.
To ensure your work doesn’t go unnoticed, you need to establish a process for each customer they go through. The best way to do this is to define the stages and manage your sales pipeline correctly.
What are the typical stages in a Sales Pipeline?
Unlike a sales funnel, your pipeline helps you track where your prospects are in the buying process. This can vary depending on the company, product, or service.
However, there are universal stages and pipeline definitions, which are as follows:
- Prospect – A company or person you have identified as someone who could benefit from your company’s services. It should also indicate where the prospect came from (e.g., via LinkedIn, at a networking event, etc.). Using LaGrowthMachine helps you contact potential clients across multiple channels in this stage.
- Qualified Lead – These individuals are typically identified through lead scores and thus have a higher probability of purchasing than a prospect.
- First Contact or Scheduled Meeting – Once you’ve had a conversation with your lead and scheduled a demo or meeting, the lead has entered this new stage.
- Closing – Regardless of whether you won or lost this lead, you should assign it to the closing stage. This way, you know that no further work is needed here.
- Customer Retention – Once the lead has become a customer, your goal should be to maintain a good relationship with them. In some cases, this may also be the responsibility of marketing.
Before you start defining your stages, you should first analyze what your typical process currently looks like. From this, you can deduce where there might be gaps, how to set up your template, and which tools will be most useful for you.
Define Your Sales Pipeline
Now that you know the status quo, you can set your desired goals, such as new sign-ups and actual business closures. These goals can then be converted into a relevant metric and help you concretize the design of your workflow.
Even if your ultimate goal is to sell, we’re talking about the smaller steps and opportunities that lead to a sale. For example, how many leads does it typically take to achieve a sale? What is your average sale price? Have the leads gone through your entire pipeline?
By answering these questions, you’ll learn what’s most important to your customers. This allows you to optimize the process for both sides. It also shows you which steps you can control and which steps lie with the customer. This way, you can focus on what matters!
Metrics for sales pipeline goals include, for example, the number of calls made.
calls, the number of upsells proposed, or the number of quotes sent. Whatever information you choose, make sure it’s SMART. The workflow should be designed to be as intuitive as possible, making it easy for you to follow and thus work more efficiently and relaxed.
Best Practices for Managing Your Sales Pipeline
Creating your sales pipeline involves a series of different steps, from evaluation to creation to management. There are some aspects you should consider during creation:
Follow-up
Allow appropriate waiting times between contacts and inquire about where prospects are in their buying cycle. This also helps you stay memorable to your customers.
Be Realistic
If customers don’t respond to your outreach, don’t waste more time. Use your time wisely by talking to those who are genuinely interested. Find the time frame that suits your sales cycle.
Review and Clean Up
Set a regular interval to review your leads and clean up your list, which saves a lot of time on future calls and contacts. For example, you can forward leads that are not yet ready to buy to marketing so they can maintain contact.
Analyze
Set an interval to perform an analysis of the sales pipeline with all your results, perhaps this can happen at the same time as the cleanup? For example, every month or quarter, you can update lead scores, number of sales, opportunities for pipeline improvement, etc. The best way to improve your work is to know and understand your prospects and your data.
Listen Properly
Ask your leads questions that indicate whether they are at the stage you expect in their decision-making process. This way, you can align your expectations with the lead’s current stage. It also helps you determine the next steps.
Track and Record
Remember: the more stages there are, the more complicated the process becomes for you and your potential customers (read more about Sales Automation in our guide). Therefore, keep it simple and focus on the sales pipeline metrics you have chosen.
Make Your Process the Guide for Your Work
Maintain the status weekly, take notes on each communication, and record sales ideas. A well-chosen tool can help you build more important relationships and thus generate more revenue.
And don’t forget to include them in your pipeline process!
Create and maintain a sales pipeline that is simple and clear for you. Only then can it become a success.
Helpful Tools for Creating a Sales Pipeline
There are a variety of tools that can assist sales representatives in creating and maintaining a successful sales pipeline. Here’s a selection you should consider:
- LaGrowthMachine – facilitates setting up a cross-channel workflow and thus contacting people throughout your sales pipeline.
- Trello – helps you visually represent your customers according to their current stage.
- ClinchPad – visually displays customer stages and additionally offers reports and lead scoring, for example.
- Hubspot CRM – facilitates visual representation of your pipeline and logging sales activities.
- Zoho CRM – as a CRM application, makes tasks like territory management and forecasting easy.
- Pipedrive – tracks pipeline stages and calls or emails for each lead.
- Salesmate – offers power dialing and email campaigns.
In addition, there are numerous other tools that can make your daily work easier. Find a tool that optimally supports you and your company. Whichever solution you choose, make sure it is easy to handle so you are not tempted to fall back into old habits.
Agile Process
If you don’t know everything about your sales process yet, that’s okay too! All you need to do to start is review what you do and see where you can fill in the gaps. The beauty of this process is that it’s fluid. It can constantly change and adapt to your customers and your way of working, so get started and go with the flow.