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10 Ways to Control the sales pipeline
Are your sales going stagnant? Are you looking for ways of enhancing the efficiency of
sales? In your sales pipeline, the response may be.
If there is
one thing that is well achieved by high performing sales teams, it's handling
their pipeline. But, how can the pipeline and processes be enhanced?
Improving
your sales pipeline means updating, from sales admin to follow-up, your entire sales process. Here, we share 10 ways
for your pipeline to be better handled.
In any
effective organization, it plays an important part.
72 percent
of sales, managers conduct sales pipeline analysis meetings with their sales
representatives multiple times a month, according to research by Vantage Point.
63 % of
respondents, however, claim that their businesses are doing a poor job of
handling their revenue pipelines, which
indicates that there is significant potential for improvement!
Sales and in
today's digitally-connected world is even more data-driven than ever before.
This ensures that we not only have access to a wealth of data to work with, but
we are much more responsible for it as well.
A recent CSO
Insights study found that "Executives are under more pressure than ever to
grasp their company's pulse"-and the sales pipeline is at the core of most
companies.
What is the pipeline for sales?
A sales pipeline is a visual snapshot
of where the sales process is for
prospects. org shows you how many deals are expected to close by salespeople in
a given week, month, or year and how close a rep is to reaching their sales
quota.
If you have a contract value pipeline
worth $100,000 and your conversion rate is 10 percent from lead to a sale, then
you can expect a new company worth $10,000 to close.
If the sales goal is $20,000, so twice
as many leads would have to be converted. This is where the study of pipelines comes in. If you can recognize
changes within your pipeline that will allow you to transfer more prospects
from one stage to another, then you will be more efficient in your job And what is the greatest reason for
your pipeline to improve?
It is the growth of profits!
A Harvard Business Review study found
that between firms that described a structured sales process and firms that did not, there was an 18 percent difference in revenue growth.
Additionally, Businesses that have
mastered three particular pipeline practices have seen 28 percent higher sales
growth!
In particular, for B2B transactions,
maintaining a healthy sales pipeline enables you to:
1. Enhance the method of revenue
2. Anticipate potential market outcomes
3. For your business, evaluate various
sales strategies
4. To close or service upcoming sales,
manage and assign capital
5. For the current financial year, and
check your progress
6. Know how far from the goals you are
7. A sales pipeline has a vital role to
play as a bot
10 best practices for handling the pipeline of sales
We’ve put together 10 best practice
tips to help you transform the way you manage your pipeline. We’ll start with
the more practical sales techniques and then we will show you how to improve
the entire pipeline management process to make your business more successful.
1. Remember to follow up
Today, consumers have more options
than ever before and need more guidance to make the right choice and choose
your product or service with it. It took only 3.68 sales calls to close a deal
ten years ago Today, it takes more than 8!
In order to land the deal, the best
salespeople can make sure they keep following up with leads. But, in fact, after 2 calls, most
sales professionals give up, so make sure that you always follow up.
It is not quick to follow up.
In reality, it is currently ranked as
the sales teams' third biggest challenge.
One way to follow up is to set up a reminder that notifies you each time a prospect needs to be followed up.
Another option is to fully automate the process by using one of the sales email
templates to follow up automatically on a particular date or after a certain
time span (i.e. two weeks after the initial phone call).
2. Concentrate on the best leads
If you look at the sales process in more detail, you will
probably find that it takes about the same amount of time to close each deal. Instead,
make sure that you focus your attention on the strongest, most sales-ready,
high value leads, and avoid distracting yourself from something that will not
push the needle for you or your business.
For instance, if you sort your sales
dashboard from high to low, you can immediately see the leads are the most
important to your company instead of by date. You will determine which leads
are the most involved and which ones you should then concentrate on by viewing
your sales activities with each lead.
3. Dead Leads Drop
As important as concentrating on high
value leads are, it is just as important to realize when to let go of a lead as
well.
Letting go can be difficult,
especially when you have been building and maintaining a relationship with them
for weeks or even months.
When they explicitly indicate that
they are not involved, when they cannot be reached, or you have talked to them
many times, a lead is dead and they cannot be moved forward to the next step of
the pipeline.
4. Pipeline metrics track
A living, breathing organism that
changes all the time is your sales pipeline. Therefore, you need to monitor the
main sales metrics it creates, which include items such as:
In your pipeline, the number of deals
The average size in your pipeline of
the deals
The average proportion of deals you
win (close ratio)
A deal's average lifetime until it is
closed (sales speed)
Make sure you set aside time to
periodically review these metrics on a weekly basis as they will provide you
with an 'at a glance' view of the health of your sales pipeline and your
business.
Watching the outcomes over time would
also, provide you with a clear indicator of how any improvements or adjustments
you make to your sales process lead
to overall growth.
5. Evaluate the pipeline processes (and strengthen them)
Tomorrow, a sales tactic that works
today does not work (remember cold calling?).
With the implementation of GDPR and
how it affects sales teams, this is particularly true.
To ensure that things are fine-tuned
and highly optimized to ensure optimum performance and profitability, the best
sales companies periodically review their sales pipeline and techniques.
When it comes to sales, everything can
be changed and modified over time before you find a good formula, from the
first sales pitch, the number of follow-ups to the deals you make.
The best way to handle these changes
is to look at where you think your pipeline has bottlenecks or blockages and
explore ways they can be cleaned out. You may test improvements or run mini
"sales tests" from there to try to constantly develop each part of
the process.
Your pipeline will become a well-oiled sales machine in no time if you look at
making these adjustments bit by bit and one at a time!
6. Regularly update the pipeline
Your sales pipeline is evolving
constantly.
Fresh leads are introduced, leads from
one point to the next pass through and deals are closed.
Your sales pipeline will begin to get
a little disorganized and messy if you're not careful, which will render you
inefficient and may lead to lost sales.
To prevent this, you need to ensure
those specifics on every single lead are kept up-to-date by adding daily notes
and information for each sales point.
Yeah,
this means you need to spend more time on admin, but if you use this time to
delete dead leads or update outdated contact data, then it's well-spent time.
7. Keep a fast sales period
The sales period for B2B businesses
can belong, unlike B2C.
75% of all B2B sales currently take at
least 4 months to close, with 18% taking 12 months or longer! 27 percent of sales reps believe,
according to CSO Insights, a long sales cycle is one of the greatest
obstacles to sales effectiveness.
The explanation for this is simple:
the longer your sales process, the
more likely you are to change your mind or find an alternative product or
service to solve your dilemma.
That's why keeping your sales process as short as possible is
crucial.
If you find that most of your leads
are cold and you don't sell enough to meet your sales goals, then you may have
a problem with the duration of your sales
process. Lowering the duration of the sales process does not mean that you should bombard the leads in a single a day with all 8-12 follow-ups, but it does mean that you should consider ways to
shorten it where appropriate.
This may mean reducing the number of
days between follow-ups or finding ways to provide more details upfront for
your prospects to help shorten their decision-making time.
Try to play with a different, quicker,
sales process and keep an eye on how the sales outcomes are improved.
8. Create a standardized sales process
It’s easy to think that each customer
is different and requires their own custom approach to closing a sale. More so,
you may notice that your sales reps are employing varying sales techniques.
They may create their own routines, be it outreach, sales calls, one-on-one
meetings, live demonstrations, or follow-ups.
But, if you really think of it, your
ideal target customers have a lot of things in common. The truth is that their
underlying needs and reasons for buying from you are all broadly similar – and
it’s this you should use to your advantage to standardizing your sales pipeline.
Not to mention that the best
performing sales teams do follow a standardized sales process, which enables
them to scale and consistently win new business.
This is why 1 in 3 sales managers rank
optimizing their sales process as a top sales management priority. It takes time
for custom sales strategies to add huge overhead, which affects the bottom
line. A structured, repeatable, overtime sales process can be fine-tuned to
perfection and can scale up as the company expands.
9. Giving more material to your prospects
Although telephone calls and emails
are at the center of most sales contact, prospects may also need more
comprehensive information to help them understand whether their company is
right for your product or service.
Think about what kind of content you
can offer your prospects for and stage of the pipeline that will help
strengthen your message and carry them through to the next level.
Content plays an even more significant
role in pushing prospects forward.
As for subjects, the solution lies in
listening to what your prospective clients have to say.
They'll give you insight into the
types of content they want at each point of the pipeline during sales meetings.
For instance, they might ask you for something as simple as "Do you have
an article explaining this feature?" or "may I download a product
sheet?" ”.Send it if you have this sort of
content!
If not, then your marketing department should be fed back with this data. The problem
here is that only 27 percent of sales managers who are out in the field and
meet with prospects work with content development marketing.
You will generate content that
potential consumers want to buy (which is a crucial part of the consumer
journey) by allowing sales and marketing
departments to work together, rather than putting out content that ends up
being wasted.
10. To control your sales using a CRM (consumer relationship
management)
You need to make sure you handle it
efficiently because the sales pipeline is full of leads and leads are all at
various stages of the process.
If you are a one-person sales company
with a small budget and only make a few sales a month, then you can monitor all
the information in your pipeline using a simple Excel spreadsheet. However,
you'll need to start using a CRM
(consumer relationship management)a framework to keep track of all your sales
activities as your company expands.
A CRM (consumer
relationship management) can not only automate many processes for you, but
it will help you monitor metrics, handle large volume leads easily, and allow
your team to access the correct information quickly at the right time.
Completion
It is possible to equate a sales
pipeline to the beating heart of your business. That's why it is hard to
overestimate its meaning and importance.
This means that if you don't
effectively manage your pipeline, then you risk missing out on potential
customers and your company will suffer from more than 60% of sales managers
claiming that their business does a bad job of handling their sales pipeline,
you may need to change the way of working, too. The 10 best practices we have
provided will help you keep your sales pipeline beating at a healthy rate, make
your job more structured and coordinated, shorten and speed up your sales
cycles, and achieve your sales quota faster, all the while giving your company
growth and benefit.