Sales Pipeline Management: Your Secret Weapon For Closing More Deals

What Is Sales Pipeline Management?

What is a sales pipeline? It is a representation of where your prospects are in your sales funnel. As they move through stages, they take certain actions that are indicative of their sentiment. Each action shows you how to best appeal to their needs and how to close a sale smoothly. However, don't expect everyone on the same stage to move around your funnel at the same pace. Some prospects may move quickly out of necessity for a solution, while others might be more relaxed. One of the most crucial sales pipeline management tips we can give you is to be fully aware of your pipeline's stages and categorize prospects effectively. That is because 63% of a survey's respondents said that their companies do a bad job at managing their sales pipelines.

So, the goal of a pipeline is to highlight certain key elements, including the number of open deals, the sales potential of each seller, the actions leads took to get to their current stage, and the things you still have to do to move them closer to a sale. It's clear that lead generation techniques are only the beginning of your journey to selling success.

In This Guide, You Will Find...

• The Stages Of The Sales Pipeline
• How Can You Build Your Sales Pipeline?
• 8 Best Sales Pipeline Management Tips For Success
• How Can You Clean Your Sales Pipeline?

The Stages Of The Sales Pipeline

• Prospecting

While often confused with lead generation, sales prospecting is the first of the sales stages. It is more detailed than lead generation, as you identify specific companies that may find your product valuable. You can locate these businesses based on their industry, size, geography, or overall needs and challenges. To attract them, you may send personalized emails, introduce yourself at events, or request referrals from existing clients.

• Lead Qualification

At this stage, you have gathered a list of leads based on certain aspects. It's time to analyze them and understand whether they fit your product. Is their budget enough? Are you in contact with a decision-maker? You may send them content like eBooks, case studies, guides, or webinars to see whether they are interested in your offering and fit your customer profile. One of the most crucial sales pipeline management tips is to try to find ways to disqualify someone from your list. It speeds things up and lets you focus on high-value leads.

• First Contact

Once your lead list is ready, it's time to put your selling skills on display. Start by sending them a message on LinkedIn or a personal email to get to know their needs and pain points. Book a meeting if possible to discuss all that in person. This B2B sales pipeline stage is crucial in getting prospects to like you.

• Proposal

Now it's time to make your official proposal. You know your prospects' pain points and needs. Let them know how your product can help them overcome their struggles. Focus on benefits, not features. Also, explain how the price aligns with the value. Don't forget to differentiate your solution from other, competitive options. The more personalized you get, the higher your chances of moving a lead to the following pipeline sales stages.

• Negotiation

Another valuable sales pipeline management tip we'd like to share is that you shouldn't expect anyone to say yes to everything you propose. Expect people to have questions, worries, and counter-proposals. While they may like your solution, they may need you to make some modifications for their needs only. Additionally, they might request a slightly lower price or a different payment plan to suit their needs. Try to find common ground and close a mutually beneficial deal.

• Close The Deal

Your SaaS inbound marketing tactics have worked, and you can officially celebrate closing your deals. Make it easy for customers to sign a deal by sending contracts online through an e-signature service. This way, they have time to read the documents and sign at their convenience. If they need more time to think about it, give it to them, and keep nurturing them by sending more valuable resources.

• Nurture

The final stage of the sales pipeline funnel isn't closing a deal. It's what you do after that that helps you maintain long-term relationships and reduce customer churn. The onboarding stage is an exceptional opportunity for you to offer guidance and show how much you care about helping your clients' businesses reach new heights of success. Later on, you can start upselling and cross-selling based on their needs.

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How Can You Build Your Sales Pipeline?

1. Know Your Buyers

Having a clear understanding of the sales pipeline stages and where each prospect is located is pivotal for your success. No sales pipeline management tips can work if you don't know how to appeal to each prospect. For example, if someone signs up for your webinar, they are probably in the lead qualification stage. If, on the other hand, they request a product demo, they are likely in the first contact stage. But that's not all. Converting B2B pros into buyers entails detailed research regarding their needs and challenges. So, you must uncover as much information as possible about them. All that information will help you in optimizing your landing pages for lead generation. The wrong CTA can deter someone from downloading your resources or booking the initial meeting.

2. Define The Number Of Opportunities

Now that you have the attention of your high-quality business leads, you should know approximately how much time they spend on each stage. This gives you time to organize your actions to ensure they move closer to conversion. For example, you may notice that most prospects spend two weeks in the demo stage. Also, where are most people more likely to purchase? For instance, 90% of prospects may buy during the negotiation stage, while 60% might do that from the demo stage. Making these predictions helps you anticipate revenue and organize your tactics.

Moreover, this forecast helps you understand how many leads you need in sales cycle stages to reach your revenue goals. Let's assume that you need to close 500 deals per year. This means approximately 42 contracts per month. To get there, you may need to make 2000 proposals and 8000 meetings annually. These numbers sound like a lot, but a team of 25 people can handle the workload. It all depends on your goal and the size of your sales team.

3. Decide On Your Sales Cycle

Not all industries and services have the same length in sales cycles. It depends on how complex your product is. For example, SaaS lead generation and conversion are very time-consuming. Small and medium businesses need around 1–3 months to purchase, while enterprises require 6–12 months to make a decision. Depending on your niche and industry, you should set a certain length. During each stage, every team should know which tactics to use to appeal to prospects and move them to the next sales pipeline stage. Additionally, check where your leads come from. Referrals and social media leads often arrive faster than outbound prospects.

Lastly, customization features affect the length of your sales cycle. If you customize your solution for every client based on their needs, your demo should be personalized too, which increases the duration.

4. Optimize Your Pipeline

This remains one of the most important sales pipeline management tips. Your pipeline often ends up having deals that have stayed stagnant for a long time. You may have tried your best to convert them by sending follow-up emails after no response, but nothing is moving the needle. Check how long these conversations have been on standby. If you still think there is a chance, prioritize them. Otherwise, remove them from your customer pipeline.

However, don't limit yourself to only the existing leads in your pipeline. Keep enforcing demand generation campaigns and prospecting to identify new leads. Keep in mind that the prospecting stage should always have many more leads than the closing stage. Why? Simply because the number of accounts moving down your funnel decreases at every stage.

5. Choose Your Metrics

When you set campaigns and promote content, you always measure marketing performance, right? You should do the same with your sales pipeline. To ensure you are healthy and your team is profitable, you should know the average deal value, average win rate, conversion rate, and average length of sales cycle. Also, you should track the number of active deals and the stage where most prospects either proceed or leave. For instance, you may realize that most people drop conversations during the demo stage. Maybe this is an indication that your demo is poorly designed or that it needs to be customized for your buyer personas.

8 Best Sales Pipeline Management Tips For Success

1. Always Follow Up

In 2007, it took 3.68 call attempts to close a sale. Nowadays, this number has risen to 8! Why? People have so many options, and they are probably bombarded with proposals. One of the best email marketing practices you should adopt is following up within a reasonable time frame. One sales pipeline management tip we can give you is to either set reminders so you know when to follow up with each prospect or automate the process. For example, you can send reminder emails automatically two weeks after your initial meeting. Make sure you personalize your messages so they don't sound cold and generic.

2. Choose Your Best Leads

Not all new leads are equally valuable and with the same intent. You should identify those who are more likely to convert and focus on serving great content. Your sales pipeline funnel shows you which accounts are engaging more with your content and using your free trial to its full extent. Sure, you may want to focus a lot on enterprises that are going to generate more revenue for you than an SMB. But if the former don't seem that interested, focus your attention on those who are.

Moreover, you should be able to create the best opportunities for your high-value prospects. Whether you promote case studies, SEO-optimized articles, events, or how-to guides, they should align with people's needs. Offering the right incentive can help you speed up your sales cycle stages and identify high-intent clients. To be successful in this effort, though, you need all departments to collaborate flawlessly so your content marketing ideas drive results.

3. Monitor Your Metrics

SaaS metrics should always be at the core of your sales strategy. Managing the sales pipeline means tracking metrics like the number of leads, the average size of deals, the close ratio, and the sales velocity. Take a look at them on a weekly basis to get a sense of your pipeline's health. Things change so quickly that even if you skip one week, things can change dramatically. Over time, you'll start seeing how changes and improvements in your processes change the health status of your sales pipeline. You will also know what helps you convert clients and what is a potential danger. In the post-purchase era, you can start tracking customer success metrics to ensure buyers are happy with your product and willing to stay loyal.

4. Improve Your Processes

Sales techniques that used to work wonders in generating new leads back in the day may be irrelevant today. Take cold calling as an example. This is not what helps you move the needle anymore. Also, with the addition of GDPR rules, sales teams have to be mindful of all regulations and laws. That's why you should constantly review your processes to make improvements. Everything, from your sales pitch examples to your closing techniques, should be optimized.

But how can you know which steps need fixing? This sales pipeline management tip will definitely help you. So, take a look at your pipeline. Where do many needs drop off? Is it the proposal stage? If so, why? Maybe you don't explain well enough how your product is ideal for a specific company's pain points and focus too much on features instead of outcomes. Once you identify bottlenecks, test multiple changes to see what works.

5. Create A Standardized Process

Did you know that companies with a standard sales process have 28% more revenue than their competitors? That's why it's essential to clearly define every step your sales team takes in their effort to close deals. Once you do that, you should also customize your customer relationship management (CRM) software so it aligns with these steps. Set your lead qualification criteria, follow-up sequences, effective incentives, and negotiation tactics. Once again, it's your data that will guide you through the haze. Study them to understand why some of your current tactics don't work. Maybe you can identify gaps in your content or mistakes you make during your meetings. For example, you may be overpromising on things that you have no actual proof of.

6. Give Prospects Great Content

Lead generation relies heavily on high-quality and educational content, whether it's articles, eBooks, case studies, or videos. B2B buyers do their own thorough research before making a purchase, so finding your SEO-optimized content on their own is significant. They also search for customer testimonials to ensure your company is trustworthy. Whatever content you choose to create for your CRM sales stages, make sure it's well-written, understandable, and evokes credibility. If people understand that you know nothing about your industry, they will certainly not buy from you.

Content marketing to B2B requires an easily navigable library on your website. It should be easy for anyone to find where your content is stored and locate what they need. Do keyword and competitor research to identify topics and keywords that receive a lot of traffic and can increase your clicks, too.

7. Strengthen Department Relationships

You probably have sales, customer success, marketing, and finance teams, among others, in your company. All these departments have their own sets of goals and performance metrics. Sometimes, they fight for funding and blame one another for miscommunication or mistakes. For any sales pipeline management tips to work, you have to ensure your teams collaborate closely and communicate clearly. Team members should understand shared workflows and individual processes to avoid silos. A sales execution platform connects sales activities with specific outcomes. This way, everyone can identify successful workflows and fix problematic areas.

8. Keep Your Sales Cycle Short

Going from B2B lead generation strategies to conversions, sales cycles can be really long compared to B2C. Buyers test out various tools before making a decision. They may speed up the process if they are in desperate need, but usually it takes them months to find their suitor. So, by making your sales pipeline cycle shorter, you make it harder for prospects to abandon you along the process. The more time they have to think about things, the higher the chances of changing their minds and finding another solution. Now, this doesn't mean that you should rush to close deals or bombard people with emails; simply reduce the number of days between follow-ups.

How Can You Clean Your Sales Pipeline?

Sales forecasts depend on the value of your proposals. To maintain accuracy, you have to clean your sales pipeline regularly and remove stale deals. For example, you may send a $3,000 proposal to a high-value B2B customer who has already spent five weeks in your sales funnel. It's been a month, and they still haven't replied to you or engaged in any way. Your SaaS sales strategy may recognize this type of deal as dead and remove it from your pipeline. Or you may think it's still possible to close the sale. You have to be realistic and remove these stale deals to allow your forecast to be closer to reality. Then, you can focus only on active prospects who still have a chance of converting.

Key Takeaway

There are many sales pipeline management tips that can help you improve your practices and convert prospects more easily. Once you've understood what your sales pipeline cycle looks like and what each stage entails, you are ready to optimize your processes. Nothing comes easy in the B2B world, where more and more companies and products appear every day. However, when you do things right, you can be sure that your customer lifetime value will flourish. This outcome requires you to know where each prospect is in your funnel and how many opportunities you have to convert them.

Making your pipeline too long increases your chances of losing prospects. So, keep it short and personalize your approach as much as possible. Follow up in a timely manner and without sounding pushy. Use your metrics as a guide to understand what works well and what needs fixing. Lean on your content to establish thought leadership and prove to potential clients why you are their best option. When a process is clearly defined and everyone works united toward the same goal, results will show.