If you’re looking for a way to visualize your sales process, a sales pipeline is exactly what you need! This graphical image depicts where your deals are in the sales funnel, where they are trying to stall, and which sales are contributing to reps closing deals as well as bringing the most earnings.
This article will define sales pipelines, describe the steps of a sales funnel, how to build a sales pipeline, how a sales pipeline can help you achieve more of your sales goals, and demonstrate how to create one on your own.
What is a sales pipeline?
An organized, visual way to follow potential customers as they move through various stages of the buying process or a buyer’s path is a sales pipeline. The sales process involves moving leads and customers from one stage to another.
By dividing the sales process into manageable, smaller tasks, sales pipeline phases offer a degree of accountability and make sales goals simpler to attain. By using a pipeline, salespeople can always know where their funds, deals, or other sales activities are. This is essential since salespeople frequently manage numerous prospective customers and deals and thus can’t afford to let anything fall through the cracks.
How to build a sales pipeline
You’ll need several items before you can start creating a sales pipeline, including information about your target market, buyer profiles, articles, pricing, and your sales staff.
Determine potential customers
Look at all the places where you store customer data. This includes your CRM platform, social media, and mail inbox. Find the people who have shown interest in your goods or services and label them based on where they are in the buying process.
Review your buyer personas as well. The way you categorize and place your typical customers throughout your sales pipeline tools may depend on the particular issues or pain points they encounter. For example, you might serve clients who have children and clients who do not have children. When making purchases of goods and services, both personas could take several aspects into account.
List the pipeline’s phases
Start outlining each level of your sales funnels while having the information about potential buyers close to hand. Adjust your prospective buyer labels to correspond with the steps you determined and start adding prospects to the sales funnel.
Specify each stage’s tasks and allocate them
Make a list of things that need to be done to sell your product. These things should be divided up between you and your staff. For example, some things that need to be done during the recruitment stage are sending emails to potential customers, checking social media, and asking current clients for referrals.
After that, assign duties to your sales staff based on their backgrounds and strengths.
The length of the sales cycle
When creating a sales funnel, the average time it takes to close a deal is crucial. Take into account previous sales, the expertise of your team, the difficulty and cost of your items, and any other elements that have an impact on the length of the selling process.
After that, adjust your funnel stages and task list to account for the sales cycle. Investment products or more complex purchases require more time and more tasks during the negotiating phase.
Define metrics for the sales pipeline
You must decide the indicators you’ll track to assess how well your sales pipeline is working. These could be:
- How many deals are in your pipeline at any given time
- Which pipeline stages are generating the most deals
- The number of quality leads
- Average victory rate
- The price of acquiring new clients
Final Thoughts
Your sales pipeline stages will aid you and your sales team in smoothly tracking deals and activity — but only if they are correctly implemented, managed, and updated.
Remember, if it looks like your pipeline needs more or fewer phases, don’t be afraid to change it. Having a more accurate pipeline will help you reach your targets.
You can benefit from pipeline tools with Agent CRM.
Sign up today for a free Agent CRM trial account!