Whether it is a small business or a large eCommerce company like eBay or Amazon, it is important to effectively manage the sales pipeline. A sales pipeline visually represents where your prospects are in your sales funnel in real-time. If they are in the middle of it, maybe you need to carry on nurturing leads so they finally reach the end of the funnel.
To have an efficient sales pipeline, your sales teams should make sure that there is at least one lead in every phase of the pipeline at all times. This is effective as one case closes, the next one moves closer to the end of the sales funnel and ultimately a purchase.
If you find sales pipeline management difficult, then read this blog where we’ve put together our top 4 tips to make sure you are on a right track.
Four Actionable Ways to Manage Your Sales Pipeline
Managing the sales pipeline is not as scary as you might think. With the right use of these four simple strategies, you will be able to easily handle this task.
1. Set Clear Goals
For every project, you need to set clear and realistic goals, keeping your target audience in mind. If you don’t have a goal, you won’t have a clue what to concentrate on. The lack of focus will only slow the process of reaching your business goal. In order to have remarkable results, you need to understand what you are trying to achieve. Indeed, you want to increase your revenue. Then, determine the target revenue to reach.
2. Evaluate Your Leads
Evaluation of your leads is an important step to take in order to understand whether a lead meets your ideal customer profile and if he/she is likely to become your long-term customer. Some people neglect this step, but don’t skip it! If you do, your sales team will end up doing a useless job.
Instead, make a list of prospects and assess each of them. For lead generation, pay attention to which leads are the most engaged and focus your efforts on nurturing those leads. Consider hiring a data entry assistant, who will store this information into a spreadsheet so that you can easily do your assessment.
3. Regularly Update Pipeline
Your sales pipeline is regularly changing. It means that new leads are added, move from one to another stage, and then, deals are closed.
If you neglect your sales pipeline, it can start getting messy and disorganized. This will reduce the productivity of your job and lead to losing sales. So, make sure you track the lead journey, make notes about each customer, and have relevant information. Hire talented person who wants to become a project manager to manage your teams and build effective lead journey.
4. Track Pipeline Metrics
As we have already said, your sales pipeline constantly changes. That’s why, you need to monitor the key sales metrics that it produces, which contain things such as
- Number of qualified leads
- Win rate
- Average deal size, and so on
Make sure you devote some time to monitoring these essential metrics to understand whether your sales pipeline is in a good condition. If not, you will be able to make improvements.
Summary
Now that you realize the importance of the management of a sales pipeline and know how to build one, the rest is up to you. With our 5 tips on managing your pipeline, you’ll easily boost your revenue and the speed of your sales process.
