Pipeline Building: How to Increase Your Sales Volume?
Marketing a company’s services and products are essential to any business. Therefore, they need a sales system that will harness the knowledge of sales reps and will promote new customers for their business. Thus, building a pipeline is very crucial for any sales team. Every sales team desires and solely works for only one purpose – to get as many sales as possible and bring in new future customers for their respective companies.
A sales pipeline is merely a theory where the sales teams plan and strategize new campaigns to bring in new customers and contact these people with their brands. A well-structured sales pipeline includes all types of analyzed data, trends, and graphs. Altogether, these aspects make this pipeline highly effective and a more engaging strategy that lures many new future customers.
Therefore, we have curated this blog to make you aware of the bits and bites of Pipeline Building and how you can get 2X sales from it!
The Stages of Pipelines
A typical yet effective pipeline consists of mainly five stages. Each stage is exceptionally vital for the success of the pipeline. They are more like the simple steps that one can trail. The following stages are as follows:
- Lead Generation
- Qualification
- Consultation
- Proposal
- Sale
Let's discuss them in depth:
This is the very first stage of your pipeline. The sales team starts making the pipelines by looking at the potential clients for the business. In this stage, they first try to create brand awareness. If it is already present in the market, they try to improve it a bit more. If some of the customers tend to buy the services or product now, then there will likely be chances of showing more interest in the future. It is only possible, if they get proper awareness and importance about the brand.
The assembling of leads starts from social media platforms. These platforms create most of the hot leads as they are highly used programs on the internet. Also, the leads that are created from google ads, and other traditional ways are also quite effective.
You can also use B2B data platforms for lead generation. With several platforms available, ZoomInfo has the largest database. However, accuracy and relevancy have been a concern for ZoomInfo users. As a result, people are preferring to explore the ZoomInfo alternatives.
Overall, digital advertisements are the primary key to lead generation. This is because they are highly interactive and helpful in today's world, especially among the youth, who are the main contributors to future endeavors.
- Qualification
The team has now captured the audience's interest in the previous stage. Next, it is time to captivate their interest in the company's sales profit. But before you do that, you must check whether these interests are suitable for your company or not. That is where qualification comes into play. It helps you choose the only useful and most effective leads for your business goals and success and discard any dead leads.
A qualified lead is always a reasonable prospect of becoming a potential client. Once the lead has been chosen carefully; then your sales team can fully captivate their focus and efforts to ensure that they bring out the customers from these leads.
- Consultation
This is the third stage of sales pipelines. Here, it is time for the teams to consult and guide these leads toward their buying decision for your services or products. Generally, the teams should do the direct consultation on the phone or via video conference. It will significantly increase the chance of getting beneficial results from these leads.
However, how you approach this stage will depend on the type of business your company will do with the leads. Whether it is a B2B or B2C business, each type will need different techniques to get the desired sale and, ultimately, the result.
- Proposal
Now, this stage is crucial for any business-to-business deal. A proposal is basically placing an agreement on the table; at last, it is in the customers' hands to decide whether they want to make the buying decision.
In B2B, this proposal happens much more formally with a formal agreement. In the agreement, all the services provided and the pricing paid by both parties are clearly mentioned, and both agree to this agreement by marking their signatures on this formal paper.
Moreover, this stage has an entirely different approach toward B2C deals. In B2C, there can be several similar proposals for the people to see via advertisements and content and ultimately use the company's services or products.
- Sales
Now, after the proposals, this brings us to the final stage of the pipeline, which is selling and closing the deal. However, the biggest misconception is that the business is done once the deal is closed and the customer has paid for the services.
To serve the ever-rising clients’ expectations, there is always room for making this pipeline better and more efficient. Thus, the company's customer service team must ensure that it can live up to its sales and provide the most proactivity towards any customer issues.
This way, the company will go on longer journeys with these customers and create brand awareness and a positive image in the market.
If you have covered all these stages carefully, then most of the work while preparing a sales pipeline is done. Some might not know, but the timing in business also plays a vital role. Therefore, the results of your pipelines depend on the timing and the situation in which it is launched.
The Perks of a Proper Sales Pipeline
Here are a few vital benefits of building a pipeline for your business. Let's see how these pipeline build-ups can help your default project.
Monitoring – Sales has many stages that require a list of activities to excel. An adequately used pipeline design will help the team manager with the monitoring process stage and the ongoing efforts in a better way.
Allocating the Resources – With this sale cycle, it is much easier for the team head to decide and distribute sufficient resources for each stage of the sale growth. This way, there will be no wastage of any kind of lost leads, and full utilization of the company's resources will take place.
Creates Accurate Prediction – A promising sales pipeline will clearly highlight all the possibilities the sales stages can produce. This way, the company can know what they can expect from their project as they go along with their services or product sales.
At last, a pipeline can produce what any salesperson needs, profit and customers. Using a proper sales pipeline has shown relatively good results in increasing sales volumes and ultimately increasing revenue. While your revenue and income rise, make sure to maintain proper financial records and avoid receiving a defective notice about your income taxes or potential audit.
The pre-preparations for the Sales Pipeline
There are certain things that every sales team must know and have an understanding of to prepare a highly applicable sales pipeline that will get all the desired potential buyers. If this part is crystal clear to your teams, then a significant impact can be seen on your team and pipeline.
There is basically only one important thing that a pipeline asks from the sales team before they start preparing it. The team first visualizes and then works with the potential buyer persona. Since the one who makes the purchasing decision is the targeted person, the team must know how they think and what their expectations are.
You can start this preparation by looking through a few questions mentioned below.
- Who is your potential customer?
- What does this customer expect from your company, and how can you solve them?
- Why do these potential customers go with you rather than your competitors?
- And finally, where can you find these ideal customers for your services?
If all these questions are clear to your marketing team before starting your sales process, then the team can go for all the sales reps and finish the pipeline stages.
Efficient Management of a Sales Pipeline
It is not just about the build-up; properly managing and time-to-time renovations are also essential to get the targeted buyers. Some systems utilize data and crunches numbers to check every stage and guide the team through any improvement if required. This way, the sales teams can become capable of enabling more proficient sales cycles in a shorter period that produces much higher revenues to meet the company size.
Here are some ways, in short, to assist you in improving your sales pipeline management.
- There must be a rep that always follows up with the leads and processes the automation as soon as possible.
- In B2B deals, there is a narrow window of time, and if you give much time to closing the agreement, then there is a chance that your competitor might come into play. Therefore, decreasing the turnaround time and closing the deal quickly is better.
- No matter how easy this sales process seems, it is not. The teams must have time-to-time training and always look towards improving their documentation skills.
- Teams can take the help of pipeline management tools to speed up their processes and keep a check on their stages.
Ace with the Management Tool - Smartlead
There is one sale pipeline management tool that has been quite useful. It goes by the name of Smartwriter, powered by Smartlead. Smartlead is an excellent platform that helps several businesses with their marketing works especially email marketing. It has several cold email tools and templates to support the marketing teams.
Now, Smartlead has tools with customized pipeline templates, email sequences, and other python-based components that are the deal scoring feature. Hence, your team better adapt quickly to these new pipelines' root paths and establish yourself in the company hierarchies.
Tips To Build A Sales Pipeline That Increases Your Sales
Not only is a proper pipeline and a good sales process enough, but the marketing teams also need to grow daily to keep up with their company's rivals. Changes will always come in the market, and this pipeline must survive those alterations.
Therefore, here are some tips for the teams to create their long pipeline runs that will successfully work, attract, bring in new buyers and create new customer journeys.
- Maximize Lead Generation
The leads are the essential thing. Therefore, the teams must create as many leads as possible. This will not only present more options for buyers but also produce a large audience for creating brand awareness in the B2C world.
- Interact with the Market Regularly
The customer or buyer is the supreme authority in the business. Therefore, companies must better understand their targeted clients or customers. The more accurate the teams will have of their qualified leads, the better their chances to close the deals will be. This perception can only be achieved by regularly interacting and liaising with the market.
- Unification of minds
A team can only succeed if all its members have the same mentality and goals to reach. Therefore, it is the duty of sales leaders to instill in their teams a successful mindset to succeed with the customers and their company goals. This can be achieved by giving away every gram of knowledge to all the members.
- Establish the pipeline stages
The company doesn't need to follow the stages mentioned earlier particularly. These stages are the general steps of the overall pipeline run. The teams can seem fit to alter or add any particular stage they deem fit and vital for their team and work accordingly. All you need is a particular pipeline stage for your team, whether it is your own created or the mentioned one.
- Work with Numbers
The team must know how to work the numbers to their favor. Gather every type of numerical data connected to your services, such as average deal size, opportunity win rate, lead response time, etc., and start analyzing those numbers. The more teams understand the numbers, the more ways the teams will be able to get the ways to achieve their desired goals.
- Take help from the insights.
Managing the sales team in a disarrayed system is not good for the team. It will only promote chaos. Therefore, take the help of new technologies, and organize your team data and their insights. The proper arrangement will improve the visibility and management of the pipeline.
Wrapping Up
No matter how strong a sales pipeline a team may produce, a team needs a proper sales pipeline management system to look over their work and ensure that the custom components are in the proper place and the sales efforts of teams are instrumental. Hence, take the help of an efficient tool like Smartwriter and improve your sales performance.
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