Let’s talk about sales pipelines; better yet, let’s talk about all pipelines. The magic of pipelines happens between the interaction of other pipelines. For instance, a Renewal Pipeline should interact with the Customer Success/Activation Pipeline.
Here are a few pipelines that we’ve created at TrailBlazer6:
- Sales Pipelines
- Customer Success/Activation Pipelines
- Renewal Pipelines
- Partnership Pipelines
- Onboarding Pipelines
- Recruiting Pipelines
- Relationship Maintenance Pipelines
How to create a Sales Pipeline
When it comes to sales, it’s important to know what stage each prospect is in and how they’re progressing. A sales pipeline provides a visual representation of this information—and makes it easy for you and your team to stay on top of the process. A sales pipeline is a visual representation of your sales process from start to finish.
It shows you where each opportunity sits in relation to being closed and how much work there is left for you and your team until they are ready for the next step in the buying cycle.
The best way to understand what a sales pipeline is and how it helps you manage your leads, opportunities, and customers is by looking at an example:
You can create your own sales funnel with an Excel template or a CRM. We recommend HubSpot, partly because there is a free version and the user adoption rate is very high.
The classic sales funnel (CRM) is the original model that was created by Eben Pagan in 2001 and has been used in thousands of companies around the world since then. It’s based on the assumption that potential customers will follow different stages before they become paying customers; after all, no one ever buys anything right away!
So you have a series of steps they’ll go through before they become customers, like this:
Awareness → Interest → Evaluation → Purchase
The cross-sell/upsell/maintain revenues model (CUSUM).
This kind of sales funnel is based on increasing revenue by encouraging customers who already have one product from your company to buy more products from it.
For example:
If someone buys something from me for $100, I offer them another product for $10–20, which costs less than what they just bought (when it’s not necessarily less important). That way, I make sure my customer stays loyal and keeps buying stuff from me even though there are other options out there!
Pipelines that track prospects through different stages break the process down into manageable chunks and make it easier to assign roles and responsibilities.
You can create a sales pipeline by:
Clearly defining the stages in your sales process. For example, you might have five stages called “Inquiry,” “Qualification,” “Proposal,” “Negotiation,” and “Close.”
Give each stage a name that matches what happens there; for example, “Approach” instead of “Conversation 1-5” because it’s more descriptive. Defining the criteria for moving from one stage to the next; for instance, when an opportunity reaches 80% of its estimated value, it becomes qualified as an order worth pursuing further (or whatever criteria are appropriate for your business).
This will help keep track of how much time you spend on each stage so that you don’t spend too much time chasing low-value opportunities or leaving high-value ones behind due to budget constraints. Another term for this is sales cycle or deal velocity.
A well-defined pipeline helps you track where each prospect currently stands so that you know where to focus efforts without wasting time on activities that don’t directly contribute towards closing deals or making money from existing customers – this shows itself as increased revenue over time!
The four most common types of business pipelines are basic, extended, strategic, and value-based.
- A basic pipeline shows the number of leads and opportunities.
- An extended pipeline shows both the number of leads and opportunities, as well as how many deals have closed.
- A strategic pipeline takes this one step further by showing you what stage your deals are in, who’s responsible for each stage, and how much money they’re worth on average.
- A value-based pipelines also include an estimate of what percentage of deals will close at each stage along with their estimated value (if available).
Pipelines help you create a clear picture of what’s happening with your sales and identify potential problems in the process.
A sales pipeline is a process for managing and tracking your sales leads. The pipeline allows you to create a clear picture of what’s happening with your sales and identify potential problems in the process.
Conclusion
We believe that the sales pipeline is a crucial tool for any business. It makes it easy to identify and diagnose problems, track progress, and make sure that everyone in your organization is doing their job correctly.
