For those that are starting their own business or have been put into a position to handle sales processes for a company; having a fundamental understanding of how pipelines work is a crucial step in determining the success of a business not only in terms of revenue but also when it comes to creating healthy relationships with customers and prospects.
While it can be scary to think of handling one of the lifelines of a business, pipeline management is not hard of an area to cover. If you have the proper tools and information, you’ll be able to manage and go through each step of the pipeline process with ease.
One important thing to remember when it comes to pipeline management is once you’ve achieved making it reliable, all you’ll need to do left is to keep the steady pace forward while keeping potential threats in check.
The rest is just watching out for further possible improvements to outdo your competition.
In this article, we’ll be talking about pipeline management and why it matters for business strategies. We’ll list down benefits and practical solutions on how you can effectively manage your own pipeline.
How Pipeline Management Matters For Businesses
The concept of sales pipeline management can easily be summarized as “inspecting each part of the sales process.” This is all done for the purpose of being able to check into each part of how a customer goes through your entire funnel.
Think of it as splitting up a complex machine in order to observe, understand, and inspect each individual part. From there, you can easily see which areas you can further improve or fix if there are any problems.
Providing importance to creating optimized and reliable pipeline management can go a long way in improving revenue by making more successful sales as well as consistently meeting customer demands.
Now, let’s go through some main benefits companies can gain from having an effective and reliable pipeline management in their system.
1. Allow Proper Resource Allocation
One of the main benefits of having a sales pipeline is that you’ll be able to know which parts need the most focus and attention when it comes to resource allocation. Using the analogy earlier used on a complex machine (in this case, we’ll imagine a car), it would function the same as buying better headlights to replace broken ones.
The same can be said for pipeline management; sales managers would be able to see which sections of the pipeline customers tend to stay the longest or would have the most trouble with and, in order to fix the issue, would allocate more resources to improve performance.
2. Creating Accurate Forecasts
Pipeline management allows you toproperly create much more accurate forecasts for your business as you are observing each section of the sales funnel. Having a reliable pipeline means you can gauge how successful your existing operations are and, from there, create a forecast on what you can expect in terms of revenue for the foreseeable future.
The best part you can get from having pipeline management integrated into your business is that you can also use these forecasts in other departments such as marketing. At the sametime the data you gather can also be used not only for your business but also in industry-wide research. You can store these data in a data warehouse and analyze them with the help of data warehouse consultants.
3. Monitor Employee Performance
Each sales process has its own team of employees working on making sure that each client or prospect can proceed to the next level as fast as possible, all the while ensuring all their needs are also satisfied and their requirements are met.
With effective pipeline management, you can monitor team performances on how they handle their roles in turning prospects into clients for your business. From here, you can make sure each individual stage in the sales process isn’t holding your business back from being successful in gaining new customers.
7 Best-Practices To Manage Your Sales Pipeline
So, we’ve talked about the benefits of integrating an effective pipeline management scheme into your business. Now, let’s focus more on how you can manage, scale, and optimize your pipeline so that you can get the most out of your efforts.
I. Consider Pipelines As Supply Chains
The first thing that you should do is to imagine the concept of pipelines as a supply chain but in the context of customers. Rather than products going from manufacturing to shipping, you’d be more focused on finding customers than making sure they turn into clients.
Let’s use an example. Say you’re an eCommerce company that is focused on selling high-quality lingerie products to the entire United States. You can imagine the logistics and supply chain management in this operation isn’t easy to start or manage.
Now, to make your job much easier, you’d invest in making sure that the entire process is as streamlined as possible. Investing in supply chain visibility platforms to monitor the entire logistics line, buying in bulk, effective inventory management, and everything else.
The same concept can be said for pipeline management systems. If you can imagine pipelines as supply chains, then you’d be able to easily grasp the strategies you can use to make sure that your sales processes are optimized and effective.
It’s pretty much all the same but with different variables and methods. So, if pipeline management is a hard concept to grasp, just imagine them as supply chains for your products.
II. Set Realistic Goals
Always set realistic goals on your pipelines, especially considering the constantly shifting world of sales. It’d be a waste of resources and can even be a source of conflict between employees and management when unrealistic goals are set for them.
It will only stress your sales teams and create unwanted tension in the work environment. At the same time, it also shows incompetency. This is a circumstance you would want to avoid at all costs, as it can affect how your pipeline runs.
For example, during the pandemic, most businesses and employees had to shift to remote work, and plenty needed time to adjust to the drastic change at such short notice. At one point, statistics show that 71% of all employees in the US worked from home during the pandemic.
If you are a sales team manager and created goals for your time to achieve without putting these factors into consideration, then you’d probably have created unrealistic goals as you haven’t taken important elements of current circumstances into mind.
Make sure that your pipeline ambitions are always realistic. Creating far-fetched goals will only be detrimental and even threaten your existing pipeline and put it into a bad spot when changes are made haphazardly, adding more fuel to the fire.
III. Focus & Highligh Valuable Leads
Most businesses tend to just target every lead they can put their hands on and place them all in one single category when handling them in their sales process. That practice isn’t as ideal as you might think. There are always certain improvements to implement in every system.
With sales pipeline management, you would be able to take a closer look at how your sales process works and, from there, see which leads are the most optimal route to go for.
Handling sale