Sales pipeline management is an integral component of selling. It ensures accurate forecasts for monthly and quarterly revenue projections, provides a means of tracking sales representatives’ performance over time, and gives managers full visibility into all opportunities as they arise.
Analysis of your sales pipeline data can provide invaluable insight into what works and doesn’t work in your sales process, identify commonalities among your most successful opportunities, and enhance marketing tactics and sales techniques.
Defining Your Target Audience
As part of an effective sales pipeline, it is key to identify your target audience. Doing this will allow you to target marketing efforts towards those most interested in your product or service and create content relevant for them and increase chances of making a sale.
To identify your target audience, it is crucial to define an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). An ICP includes characteristics of ideal clients that define them such as:
Once you understand your ICP, you can begin creating an effective sales pipeline. This begins with marketing qualification – where prospective customers are evaluated to see whether they fit your product or service well enough and, potentially, financially capable enough of purchasing it. This step can save time by eliminating customers that won’t benefit from what your product or service offers or are unsuitable customers that could end up wasting it all together.
At this stage, meeting with potential customers to explain your product or service can solve their business needs is also key to closing sales. Be ready to address their objections while showing them how it can make their company more efficient. Finally, negotiate the terms of a deal and close a sale before concluding your sales process.
Identifying Your Ideal Customer Profile
Before creating an effective sales pipeline, it is necessary to develop your ideal customer profile for your business. To do this, study your best customers carefully and identify any specific characteristics they share – this will allow you to identify those most interested in your product or service and how much effort is necessary in turning them into paying customers.
Note that identifying your ideal customer profile should be an ongoing process. Each interaction with potential buyers provides invaluable information that can make your selling tactics more successful; so it is vital to regularly evaluate and update your selling processes to achieve optimal results.
Assuming your star buyers come from one area or industry, as well as being at a certain size or stage in their development cycle. Once this information has been gathered, use it to develop your target customer profile and focus efforts on recruiting more similar buyers – this will boost sales while improving overall business performance.
Creating Your Buyer Personas
Once your research for ideal customer profiles and buyer personas is complete, the next step should be organizing all that information. Begin by searching for commonalities among each persona’s goals and challenges to create buyer personas for marketing campaigns.
Ideal of all, each member of your sales team should take part in creating each persona. That way, they’ll gain direct experience that will enable them to craft more accurate personas while better comprehending what it takes to turn an unsold prospect into a paying customer.
To create buyer personas, you can review data from CRM systems, social media and other online sources. By creating surveys using one of the many free survey collectors available online you can collect more specific and personal questions about your target audience – this allows you to gather additional insight into their interests and needs as well as gain a better grasp on which products and services will best serve them.
As part of creating buyer personas, it’s also crucial to consider secondary personas – these represent people with similar goals and pain points who may not fall within your primary target market but could still use your content. By developing secondary personas you will ensure your content resonates with as many individuals as possible.
Creating Your Buyer’s Journey
Once your buyer personas and product are considered, creating a sales pipeline that’s effective will become simpler. Start by reviewing CRM data and social media posts for leads interested in your products or services who fit your target audience or ideal customer profile as well as having needs (and budget) for what you offer. Label them according to where they are in their buyer journey journey for greater insight. This will also allow you to spot potential clogs.
Prospecting is when buyers become aware of a problem and conduct preliminary research – this may involve reading articles or searching on Google for solutions. When qualifying is complete, prospects meet either in person or over video conference with you or someone from your team to discuss their needs and ascertain if your services can meet them.
Finalizing your sale means when your prospect buys and begins using your solution. To keep your sales pipeline healthy, use marketing tools like videos, webpages, blogs and demos to generate quality leads and change up tactics periodically in order to reach revenue goals more reliably and efficiently.
Creating Your Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is an iterative process that moves potential customers from awareness to sales. Understanding your sales pipeline is critical in understanding conversion rates and customer journey. While each business’s sales model will differ slightly, its basic stages remain similar: Awareness – where prospects demonstrate interest in your product or service through initial contact, demo calls or downloading whitepaper from your website; once identified it’s important to nurture prospects through the sales cycle by offering education or creating experiences; Finally close.
At this stage of prospecting, your team should develop an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This will allow them to ensure they’re targeting potential customers with whom they should engage and not waste valuable time or money targeting those that don’t interest them or worse, incurring ineffective marketing efforts.
Once you’ve identified an ICP, prospects will go through the qualification stage, where they’re assessed for fit and value. At this stage, your sales team will assess a prospect’s needs and budget to ascertain if they make sense as candidates for your product or service. Proper sales qualification can save time by screening out those interested but unable to purchase at this point in time.
Creating Your Sales Pipeline
The term “sales pipeline” may seem vaguely familiar, but it’s more than just an empty phrase: It is an essential tool for managing your sales process and tracking revenue projections. A sales pipeline depicts how prospects move through your sales process and provides insight into future revenue projections.
Using an efficient pipeline for sales management, review your CRM and other data sources such as social media or your email inbox. This will enable you to identify prospective customers that meet your target audience and buyer personas who may have need for products and services offered by your business. Once identified, assign these prospective customers a rough pipeline stage such as prospecting or proposal.
At every pipeline stage, make sure that you accurately reflect the actions your sales team took with each prospect, such as reaching out, conducting a discovery call, or presenting a proposal. This will enable you to accurately evaluate their performance as well as ensure that opportunities at each pipeline stage correlate to likelihood of closing (e.g. 10% at qualification stage and 70% at negotiation stage).
An effective sales pipeline boasts a high sales velocity – the rate at which leads move from one stage of your pipeline to the next – which means increasing opportunities per stage and shortening sales cycles. To accomplish this goal, increase the number of opportunities in each stage while shortening them accordingly.