Reading time: 14 minutes
The term ‘sales pipeline’ is one that gets thrown around a lot. If you’ve spent any time with Sales or Marketing teams, the likelihood is you’ve heard the phrase being used. But it’s important to remember that ‘pipeline’ is more than just a buzzword.
The greater visibility, control and understanding you have of your pipeline, the more revenue you’ll generate. In fact, HubSpot found a direct correlation between the number of quality opportunities in your pipeline per month and revenue achieved. Though you need to ensure your pipeline is healthy, accurate and honest to reproduce this. Filling your pipeline with false opportunities won’t help you deliver your sales target each month. Similarly, a stagnant pipeline will fail to generate the required sales you need.
Whatever a leads origin, you need to be able to assess the quality of the opportunity they present. Understanding: how long to leave a prospect in your pipeline; removing prospects when needed; and reconnecting when necessary, is an important skill for a salesperson to possess.
In this guide, we’ll explore how you can clean up your existing pipeline, as well as revive those prospects who aren’t quite lost yet and manage your pipeline going forward. First, it’s important to understand exactly what we mean by sales pipeline.
What is a sales pipeline?
The sales pipeline is about far more than just selling. It encapsulates all the hard work, preparation and planning required to consistently generate sales and hit targets year after year. It can help you visualize your sales process, see where deals are at in your funnel and identify the activities bringing in the most profits.
A sales pipeline defines the steps a lead takes to become a customer and the activities required to move them along this process. Once a contact has completed one stage, they are progressed to the next. Whilst it varies from company to company, a standard sales pipeline may consist of the following stages:
- Prospecting
- Lead Qualification
- Meeting
- Proposal
- Negotiation and Commitment
- Opportunity Close
- Post-Sale Engagement
The breakdown of the sales process into distinct parts allows for you to better anticipate revenue and cash flow, sales cycle length, where bottlenecks appear and how to overcome shortages.
Clean up your sales pipeline
With 56% of sales managers saying their company’s effectiveness in managing pipelines is either poor or neutral, it’s something many salespeople dread: a stagnant pipeline. So firstly, how do you know if your pipeline has stagnated? And secondly, how can you keep your leads progressing down the line to stop it from happening?
One of the first warning signs to look out for is a full pipeline with nothing converting. Your prospects should be moving nicely from one stage to the next. The time this takes will be different for everyone, but if one prospect is taking an exceptionally long time, you need to re-qualify their value.
When you realise you have a clog in your pipeline, you need to ask yourself a number of questions:
- • Which part of the pipeline needs unclogging?
- • Are the sales team wasting valuable time and energy on prospects that will never convert?
- • Are there too many processes within your company that confuse the sales process?
- • Your sales team are brilliant at finding the opportunities, but are they followed up effectively?
- • When do your prospects drop off your pipeline? Do they make it to the end or are you losing the majority of them at a particular step?
Once you have diagnosed where your clog is, you need to do something about it. Like a blocked drain, the clog will continue to grow until there is a total lack of flow in your pipeline otherwise.
It is completely normal for a few contacts to drop off throughout the sales pipeline, as long as it’s not every other contact! But if these contacts are not removed, they will clog up the pipeline, and make it appear (at face value) as more profitable than it really is.
Identify those who have been in your sales process longer than your average sales cycle
If a deal hasn’t progressed in the standard time, take a look at how realistic it is to close. There will be variation to every deal, but use your typical timeframes to identify those who need to be reviewed and your judgement on whether they need to be removed.
Remove the comfort
It can be reassuring to keep leads in the pipeline even when the chance of closing the deal is low. The thing is though, you’re only deceiving yourself. If you haven’t spoken to a prospect for a few months, qualify them out. They’re only being kept in to provide comfort that your pipeline is better than reality. You’re simply hiding the problem.
Clear out any bloated pipeline or bottleneck
Again, you need to be realistic about your deals. If there’s a low chance of them converting, or they’re simply a low-quality lead, remove them. Perhaps they need to be moved back to Marketing for more nurture until they’re sales-ready.
Consider the top of funnel
Do you have a lot of deals at the top of the funnel? They’ve been qualified as an opportunity but few are actually committing to a meeting? This is when you need to be thinking about whether or not they’re real. It may also be an indication that you need to tighten your qualification criteria to ensure only those with an actual need are being progressed through the pipeline.
Make sure your data is up-to-date
Previously, you’ve identified the right stakeholders in the right accounts to speak to. But since then, they’ve left the company. This deal will need to be moved back in the pipeline until you know who the new decision-maker is. Keeping your database enriched and refreshed will allow you to keep track of those who have left companies, and manage the opportunity accordingly.
Tighten your qualification criteria to ensure only those with an actual need are being progressed through the pipeline.
Manage your sales pipeline in 7 easy steps
Now that you’ve cleaned up your pipeline, you need to aintain and revive it going forward.
1. Convert leads to the next stage
However you generate your leads and MQL’s, you’ll need to nurture them to the point of being sales-ready to enter the pipeline. There are several ways this can be achieved through a combination of marketing and sales team efforts.
With a large audience reach, email can help nurture early-stage leads to commit to a meeting. With the wide range of segmentation and targeting options available with good-quality data, this can be focused on particular topics or contacts for a highly personalised message.
Telemarketing
One of the quickest ways to get quality appointments is through telemarketing. With a targeted list, telemarketing can convert leads to MQL’s and SQL’s through a combination of personalisation and regular contact. The direct communication telemarketing offers allows you to have a quality conversation, even with a cold lead. It also allows you to overcome objections as they arise.
Appointment Making
Calls focused on setting appointments also play their part. Remember, don’t expect the first call to make an appointment. Whilst it’s fantastic when it does happen, it typically takes around 8 calls to secure a meeting. Make sure you’re following up!
If your contacts seem to be getting stuck at the first hurdle, you may wish to reinvent the way they are approached. Start by exploring different avenues; e-shots, blogging, telemarketing, and social media are all a good place to consider.
2. Emphasise quality rather than quantity
A common clog is that sales reps spend a lot of time and effort trying to push along contacts who drag their feet. It is vital that the sales team are trained to spot the diamonds from the word go. A fast-flowing pipeline will emphasise quality rather than quantity. Focus on the leads that really pay off, and progress the others into a nurture pot where they can be worked on in the background.
3. Know when to let leads go
It can be difficult to bin a lead when you’ve spent months building and nurturing a relationship, but sometimes, it’s simply necessary. If a lead has stated they’re not interested, you just can’t contact them, or they just won’t progress onto the next stage no matter how many times you speak to them, it’s time to say goodbye. Learning to identify these leads quickly can save you a lot of wasted time chasing them up.
4. Boost top of funnel
If you’re struggling because you haven’t got enough prospects, where can you look to find more? There are a few places to start. Consider these 4 data pots for potential opportunities:
- • Existing Customers
- • Lapsed Prospects
- • Deals that stalled for reasons outside of the deal
- • Lost quotes over the last few months
5. Re-engage your existing business
It’s no secret that new business is the hardest to generate. In fact, as much as 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers. Whilst there certainly remains a place for finding completely new business through emails and sales calls, discussing new requirements with existing customers can offer a quicker and easier method of driving sales.
Look at your various stages in the pipeline and see what deals are sitting where. Then you can identify what proportion of sales will be filled by customer orders, and what needs to be generated in new business.
6. Take a holistic approach
Ultimately, a unified approach will be the most effective for maintaining a healthy pipeline. Using telemarketing alongside digital methods will help ensure a regular stream of new leads enters the pipeline. Social media, email and events will play their part, especially for brand awareness and a wider reach. High-quality data will enable better targeting of your leads and prospects, and telemarketing brings a personal touch to the process. The combination of these channels will offer insights that can be used to progress each prospect further along the pipeline
7. Regularly review your pipeline
Whilst your pipeline may be healthy right now, you need to monitor, review and update your pipeline regularly to keep it that way. Set time in the diary when you will go through your pipeline, remove any opportunities that have passed and identify who needs contacting again.
Working out which channel and audience bring in the most business means you can focus on producing more of it, and then when your pipeline is looking healthier, you can expand into other areas too.
How can GCL help?
With over 30 years of experience in telemarketing and data services, we’re well placed to help you wake up your sales pipeline. Through data enrichment, you can be sure you’re reaching the right contact, and our international, multilingual telemarketing service can nurture them through to a sales-ready opportunity. We have built our knowledge in a huge range of sectors and products, meaning we hit every campaign running to give our customers outstanding results.
