How to build a sales pipeline from scratch

 

How to build a sales pipeline from scratch

What is a sales pipeline?

A sales pipeline is an organized, visual way of tracking potential buyers as they progress through different stages in the purchasing process and buyer’s journey ,making sales pipeline management easier and more structured.

Often, pipelines are visualized as a horizontal bar (sometimes as a funnel) divided into the various stages of a company’s sales process. Leads and prospects are moved from one stage to the next as they maneuver through the sales process (e.g. when reps receive a response to outreach like a cold email or when a potential customer is marked as a qualified or unqualified lead).

Sales pipeline stages add a layer of accountability and make sales goals easier to achieve by breaking the sales process down into small, trackable tasks.

With a pipeline, salespeople are able to see exactly where their money, deals and other sales efforts are at all times. This is vital, given that salespeople are often juggling many sales prospects and deals and can’t afford to let anything slip through the cracks.

It’s also a powerful tool for sales managers who want to collate and analyze data on how well their sales process is working, or not, so that they can optimize it accordingly. As a sales pipeline tracks a salesperson’s activities, it offers visibility into which sales activities are giving a company the greatest return.

“Companies don’t know what their possibilities are,” says Michelle Seger, a partner at Atlanta-based SalesGlobe. “If you can actually look at your activities, how long they’ve been there and what are your conversion rates, it tells you where you are and what’s not working.”

What you’ll need before you start building your own pipeline

Given that a sales pipeline is such an important sales tool, you should take care to build it properly. Make sure you have specific information about your company, sales team, existing customers, target audience, target market, product and pricing before you begin assembling one.

Here are some of the basic things you should have on hand before you start building each stage of the sales pipeline:

• A list of your prospective buyers
• Your team’s sales process
• Your revenue targets
• A meeting scheduled with colleagues

 

How to create a pipeline for your organization

Step 1: Take stock of your prospective buyers

In the beginning, before you even have a pipeline, all you’ll have is a list of the potential customers you think would like to buy your product. If there are a lot of them, you will need something to help you manage not only those contacts, but also your interactions with these potential new leads.

One way to track sales opportunities is to use a spreadsheet tool such as Google Sheets or Excel. Here is a free sales pipeline template to get you started. Alternatively, dedicated sales CRM software also works.

Using a spreadsheet template like this makes perfect sense if the number of deals you need to manage simultaneously is fewer than 10, or if you’re just starting out and want to organize your pipeline before finding a purpose-built tool to manage it.

A CRM, however, is a more efficient tool if you’ve got more than a few deals or more than a few salespeople. CRMs allow teams to manage deals collectively, easily move deals from one stage of a pipeline to another and effortlessly link to prospects’ contact information. Importantly, they also allow sales managers to keep an eye on an entire team’s progress toward revenue goals.

Need more reasons to look into a CRM? We’ll dig deeper into the benefits of CRMs shortly.

Step 2: Set up your sales pipeline stages

It’s easy for reps to get overwhelmed by their goals; sometimes a quarterly or annual number may seem too big to achieve. There’s a way to control this sort of overwhelm: Break down each deal into the daily activities a rep needs to do in order to close a sale.

That’s what your pipeline is measuring and managing: Activities. By managing and focusing on sales activities, your team is likely to be more successful at making their sales goals.

To set up the stages in your pipeline, think about your team’s common sales activities and the ones you think have the most impact on sales. You can use the list of sales pipeline stages above to guide you, or work out the steps in your own sales process and sales strategy.

If you need more ideas check out our guide to activity-based-selling.

Step 3: Refine your stages as you go along

Once you’ve implemented your sales pipeline, you may see that certain types of conversations between reps and prospects happen consistently. For example, if you are a real estate agent, you may want to add a “reassure buyer” column if you face a lot of nervous buyers. You need to decide whether these regular occurrences lend themselves to being sales stages in your pipeline.

When clearly defined and planned, sales stages constitute your pipeline’s fundamental building blocks and set you on your way to predicting your sales revenue with decent accuracy. If you remember correctly, the pipeline definition for business is a graphical representation of all stages in the current selling process.

Both your marketing team and sales leaders at your company should collect relevant sales metrics (and refer back to them) as you continue to refine your pipeline stages.

It may take numerous attempts to figure out what pipeline business stages work best for your company. You’ll find that some stages end up being unnecessary and discover others that you actually need.

Step 4: Keep your pipeline up to date

You’ve built a pipeline and you’ve put your existing contacts and deals into it. Now, how can you make sure it stays updated?

This part can be tricky. Often, when a team hasn’t worked with a pipeline, they may have a hard time adjusting to the habit of entering contacts and deals into the pipeline and moving them through the stages. The key here is to develop a habit of moving deals through the pipeline.

The easiest way to do that is by thinking of the stages of your pipeline like a to-do list. Each stage correlates to an activity your team must complete. Once an activity is completed, your team will move a deal to the next stage. It may take a while for your team to get the hang of it, but after a while, the pipeline will be an invaluable tool for them because it shows them what they’ve done, what they need to do and where in the pipeline each deal is.

How to build a sales pipeline from scratch