Create your sales stages of the pipeline

In this internship, you learn more about your lead’s needs and challenges before sending over a proposal. Usually, it could be a discovery call, or even a long email thread – again whatever works for your specific business. After this stage, you can present your product or service to the lead in a way that ties to their specific needs.

Negotiate and close

Usually, your leads will try to negotiate the terms of the deal. Whether it’s reducing the pricing plan, or curating one for their specific needs, once you finalize this, you can close the sales deal and they become a customer.

Again, your sales pipeline will vary depending on your business type. In some cases, you might also need more than one sales pipeline especially if you have multiple products or services. In this case, you want to use a tool like lemlist to help you curate and build this pipeline. You can start with a free trial to see if it’s a great fit.

Sales Pipeline Management Tips for Your B2B Business

Once you’ve set up your sales pipeline and you already have leads going through the activities you’ve set up, you need to constantly review your sales process. This constant review and optimization is what makes up your pipeline management and here are some ways you can do this;

Set and Constantly Review Metrics

Before looking for what to optimize, there are some metrics to track that will improve your sales pipeline management. When you track these metrics, you can identify the underperforming areas of your sales pipeline and take steps to improve them.

Some metrics you should definitely track include;

• Conversion rate

This is the percentage of leads that move from one stage of the sales pipeline to the next up until they become actual paying customers.

• Sales cycle length

This is the average amount of time it takes to close a deal. This can tell you whether you need to optimize the stages in your pipeline or the negotiations for a faster closing time.

• Win rate

This is the percentage of deals that are closed. If only a few people end up becoming customers, it’s an indicator that you don’t have enough quality leads to begin with or, you need to evaluate the entire pipeline.

• Pipeline value

This is the total value of all the deals in your pipeline. Think of this as your potential ROI. Is it worth it?

You don’t need to find the formula to calculate these metrics at all. Using a CRM will automatically help you track these important metrics. So we recommend opting for one with enough data reporting features.

Automate your sales activities to save time

The stages in the sales process are time-consuming especially with finding leads, building the outreach strategies, reaching out to the customers and manually keeping track of where each lead is in the sales pipeline.

There’s also a high chance that whoever is handling a particular lead or account will change and there might be no time to pass on these key details to the new salesperson in charge. So you need to invest in a CRM that takes care of these repetitive boring tasks so your team can focus on the more important stuff.

With lemlist, you can automate these processes; finding leads, verifying and adding to the database, scheduling calls and setting follow-up reminders, setting up workflows for emails and social outreach, cold calls and more.

3. Update the sales pipeline and reorganize sales activities

Depending on your business needs, you might find out that a sales step is a redundant one. There’s no point moving your leads through that route especially if it doesn’t help with the conversion. For example, if one of your sales activities is to offer a guided product tour, there might be no reason to offer a free trial again because it just lengthens the process.

The longer the process, the more time your leads can change their mind. I know how to identify the sales activities and even channels that take up the most time and switch things up. You can even choose to change what stage you do your follow-ups by making the time in between much shorter.

Remove deals from the pipeline that are no longer viable

One of the biggest issues with sales pipelines is that there are too many deals in progress and often times, these leads are no longer interested. When you remove these unviable leads, you can focus your resources and time on leads that actually benin telemarketing list have a chance of converting thereby lessening your workload.

So sort your leads from oldest to latest, make one final outreach to see if they are still interested and remove the ones that aren’t. Depending on their response, you can move them over to marketing for more nurturing.

Train your team on pipeline management

Pipeline management isn’t just a one-man effort, on the contrary, it takes a team. You need everyone onboard constantly looking for ways to optimize the process. However, they have to first understand what the current process is.

For example, if a sales rep doesn’t know that ai features are not included in the free the follow-up period should be a maximum of three days, they have a tendency to lengthen the duration thinking that there’s enough time.

So teach them how to use your CRM for their different things. Let them be able to decipher what stages are affecting the sales pipeline, what leads need their most attention and more. At the end of the day, this will help them reach their quotas faster.

Key takeaways

A well-managed sales pipeline helps you forecast sales, identify bottlenecks, and close deals faster. Build your pipeline with stages japan number list like lead generation and qualification and maintain it by adding new leads, tracking progress, and removing inactive ones.

Analyze metrics like conversion rates and win rates to improve your pipeline and boost sales. A great way to start is by using lemlist to find, contact, and convert leads in one spot.