A sales pipeline plays a key role both in closing more sales deals and indicating the overall health and future direction of your company. In the modern business ecosystem, having to push the customer into buying your product will most likely be counter-productive. Instead, your sales process should be geared towards nudging the customer into looking at the proposed purchase as adding great value to their buying process.

In fact, a study by the Harvard Business Review found that there was an 18% difference in revenue growth between companies that defined a formal sales process and companies that didn’t. Keeping it simple, sales pipeline management is nothing more than estimating incoming cash flow or, how much you’ll make from your sales opportunities.

In the last blog, I’d stated the importance of having a Consistent Sales Pipeline. On the other hand, it is equally important to manage the sales pipeline to continue its consistency. Acc to a survey 44% of the companies think they are ineffective at managing the sales pipeline. Here, complex data and ever-changing market economy make things more complicated in today’s situation. But a complete sales pipeline management system can make your job easier.

So here are the 7 best practices to manage your sales pipeline.

1. Follow-Ups.

Customers today have more choice than ever before and with it, they need more help and attention to make the right decision and choose your product or service.

They say “Fortune is in the Follow-Up!” – It’s True.

Following up with customers and clients is one of the most important business action a business owner can take. However, there are many ways to follow up and all of them are important in their own unique ways. Following up with customers and leads also make them feel special and appreciated.

2. Focus on the Best Leads.

I’m not being partial over here but all leads are not the same. The interest of leads varies from lead to lead. Some may be excited about the product while some are just looking for information regarding the product.

So it’s very important that the leads are identified properly according to their quality and interest. By viewing your sales activities for each lead, you can identify which leads are the most engaged and which ones you should then focus on thus reducing the wastage of time, energy and money on bad or invalid leads.

3. Omit Bad Leads

As important as it is to focus on high-value leads, it’s equally as important to know when to let go of a lead, too. Letting go can be hard, especially when your team has spent weeks or even months building and nurturing a relationship with them. But when in spite of putting in soo much efforts the leads don’t move ahead in the sales funnel, it’s better to drop them and focus on other leads.

So learn to identify these dead leads quickly, so you can move on to the next sales opportunity to close deals without wasting any more time and money for those who aren’t responding at all.

4. Update your Sales Pipeline regularly

One of the biggest keys to a successful business is the generation of new sales leads and updating the status of the old ones. The sales pipeline constantly changes every week, every month, every quarterly. New leads are added, leads move through from one stage to the next, and deals are closed.

If you’re not careful, your sales pipeline can start to get a little disorganized and chaotic – which will make you inefficient and could lead to lost sales opportunities due to the chaos in your sales funnel.

5. Keep Sales Cycle short

According to CSO Insights, 27% of sales reps say that a long sales cycle is one of the biggest barriers to sales effectiveness.

The reason for this is simple – the longer your sales process, the more chances your prospect has of changing their mind or finding an alternative product or service to solve their problem

A shorter sales cycle means that you can meet with more prospects during the same time frame. Plus, most prospects prefer a shorter sales cycle as long as you have a helpful attitude, solve their problem or fill a need. That’s why it’s important to keep your sales process as short as possible.

The Best Way to Get Your Reps to Shorten Their Sales Cycle is by –

• Understand the needs and timelines of each prospect.
• Immediately booking the next call at the end of each call.
• Creating and maintaining favorable attention toward the leads and customers.
• Mapping out the whole process in advance.

6. Educate Prospects with more Content

I sincerely believe that one of the prime motive of any business and it’s marketing department is to find and reach a valuable audience and figuring out the different ways to engage with them. Nowadays, finding and engaging the audience has been a priority for almost all B2B Marketers.

While phone calls and emails are at the heart of most sales communication, prospects will often require more, in-depth information to help them understand if your product or service is right for their business. Content plays an even more important role as you move prospects further down the sales funnel.

Nowadays prospect’s form almost all fields are hungry for good and valuable information about the product or services they’re looking for in the market. Let’s take an example from us – We all research for products and services online before making a purchase. We study different cars, comparing prices and features, before ever entering the showroom. We compare & research for almost all products before buying them.

Effective content can help you build strong customer relationships. When you produce and promote quality content matching the interest of people, it’s likely that you’ll hear from more people who have already seen some or whole of that content.

7. Opt for a CRM to manage your Sales

Build Customer Relationships. Maintaining existing customer relationships is just as important to your business as acquiring new customers. CRM applications can store detailed data from each interaction with your customers.

Your sales and marketing teams can use this information to anticipate your customers’ needs. CRM software can give you an overview of your projected sales for a specific period and can help to shift the focus of your sales professionals away from peripheral tasks so they can spend more time selling.

Conclusion…

A sales pipeline can be compared to the beating heart of your business. That’s why its importance and value can hardly be overestimated. This means that if you don’t manage your pipeline successfully, then you risk losing out on new customers and your business could suffer.

With more than 60% of sales managers saying that their company does a poor job of managing their sales pipeline, chances are you need to improve the way yours works, too.

Apprise Marketing Services – AMS sales pipeline management and audience engagement services help clients design and execute audience engagement campaigns to meet their specific engagement goals, to continue to communicate with prospects to nurture and grow those relationships with the company over time.

If you want to learn more about how we can assist you in your AUDIENCE BUILDING & ENGAGEMENT CAMPAIGNS kindly reach us at info@ams-in.com or visit www.ams-in.com.

Thank you.