The management of your sales pipeline has a big effect on the number of deals your business will be able to win. Sales pipelines have to be managed carefully to get win the most deals possible, with Vantage Point sharing that 72% of sales managers have sales pipeline review meetings with their sales representatives several times per month. This article will go through the different ways you can manage your sales pipeline to increase your efficiency and productivity when winning deals.
Before looking into how you can manage your sales pipeline effectively to make the most sales possible, let us look into what a sales pipeline is. A sales pipeline is a representation of the journey a customer will go on when purchasing a good or service from a business. A sales pipeline works in parallel with the sales funnel as a customer moves through their buying journey. The steps in a sales pipeline are as follows:
Sales pipeline management is very important to businesses, with the Harvard Business Review sharing that a business that manages its sales pipelines effectively grows by 15%, while businesses that do not manage their sales pipeline effectively grow by only 4.6%. To effectively manage your sales pipeline, you must:
Continuously review and adapt your pipeline – To manage your sales pipeline you must consistently track and evaluate its performance. This will result in your business making insightful decisions to update and adapt your pipeline when necessary to garner the best results.
Focus on the most valuable leads – Your sales pipeline management should be centred on the most valuable leads for your business. Focusing on less valuable deals may make you spend unnecessary resources and reduce potential revenue.
Always remember to follow up – You must make sure that you embrace follow-ups in your pipeline and that it is a priority within your business. Follow-ups are a necessity for high-performing sales pipelines as they can make or break deals. This means that your sales representatives should embrace reminders for sales follow-ups to ensure your business wins the most deals possible.
Standardize your pipeline – Your approach to customers should be personalised to them, however, it is likely that a lot of your customers will have similarities in traits and characteristics due to them being in the same market. This gives your business the opportunity to standardize your sales pipeline to increase your productivity and efficiency.
Adopting CRM software for the management of your sales pipeline can completely enhance your organisation and the efficiency of your management. A good CRM software will also include automation features, like TEB, which will streamline your sales processes and reduce the number of manual tasks your sales representatives will need to complete in the sales process. This section will look at the benefits that CRM software will bring to your sales pipeline management.
CRM software will increase your data visibility by providing accessible information for the sales team, management, and leadership. This information can be on everything a business can think of, from details about customers to information about how business processes are performing. Some good CRM software will present this information to your business with charts, graphs, and reports, meaning it is very accessible and you can choose how to analyse the data. This will benefit:
Sales representatives – Sales representatives can use CRM software to view insightful information on their customers. For example, they will be able to view information on the industry of a customer, where the lead was generated from and more. This information will allow sales representatives to offer customers a better more personalised service.
Management – Management will be able to get information about how their sales team is performing at each stage of the sales process, meaning they are able to make insightful adjustments to their team structure where needed to increase the number of sales made.
Leadership – Leadership will be able to use the data collected by CRM software to make insightful, well-informed decisions. These decisions can be about investments, business structure, processes in the pipeline and more. This will help a business run at its most efficient level possible, generating high revenue and profit.
CRM software can streamline your pipeline management, making it easier to move a customer through your sales pipelines. Some CRM software, like TEB, offers Kanban-style pipeline management, and your sales team can seamlessly drag and drop clients through the sales pipeline as they progress. This streamlines your pipeline management for your sales representatives and gives your team and management an easy overview of how you’re your pipeline is performing.
This section will go through the different benefits that you will get from effective sales pipeline management:
By effectively managing your sales pipeline, you will be able to track the progress your business is making towards its organisational goals. You will be able to view information on how well your team is performing and how your product or service is selling. As a result, you will stay aware of your progress towards your goals and alter anything necessary to stay on track.
Sales pipeline management will give you the ability to view where sales representatives are in the pipeline with different clients. This will allow you to make estimates of how long it should take for your clients to move through the rest of the pipeline to complete deals. This will mean your forecasting is more accurate resulting in better planning.
With data collected through sales pipeline management, you will be able to better nurture your leads. This is because you will have a better understanding of your customers and their wants and requirements. Your business will be able to provide a more personalised service to your customers with this information, improving the process of nurturing leads.
The main benefit that effective sales pipeline management will give your business is an increase in revenue and profit for your business. Your business will make more sales due to effective pipeline management helping your business grow in its market.
TEB is a sales automation CRM software that will help streamline your pipelines to improve your efficiency and productivity, as well as your data visibility. TEB does this with its key features such as:
To find out more about how you can streamline your sales pipelines, schedule a demo with us where we will show you these features first-hand.
