Running a business is full of unknowns, surprises, and challenges, especially regarding predicting future click here revenue. That’s why it’s important to have a reliable indicator of how much new business is coming your way.
That comes in the form of the sales pipeline: A visual representation of how many prospects you have and where they are in each sales pipeline stage.
Your sales pipeline offers an estimate of how much business your salespeople expect to close in a specific week, month, or year. This estimate, in turn, helps with revenue forecasting, planning for growth, and preparing for whatever’s around the corner.
What is a Sales Pipeline?
Establishing a strong sales pipeline is a great way to gain visibility into the successes and failures of your sales efforts. By tracking your opportunities’ progress through the sales pipeline stages, you can gauge the average length of your sales process and identify ways to make it run more smoothly. You can also more accurately predict future revenue and spot resource or skill shortfalls.
Once you’ve established your sales pipeline stages, filling that pipeline up is crucial. The more sales opportunities cross your threshold, the more chances you have to convert them into customers—and the more chances you get to generate revenue.
A HubSpot study found that 72% of companies with fewer than 50 new opportunities in their sales pipeline each month miss their revenue goals. But as the number of opportunities increases, so does the likelihood of hitting your targets. Only 15% of companies with 51 to 100 monthly opportunities fall short of projections; for companies with 101 to 200 opportunities, that number is just 4%.
How to Build a Sales Pipeline
So how do you build a sales pipeline that works? Here are five steps for building a pipeline that brings the deals rushing in:
Step 1: Design your sales cycle
Step 2: Identify your ideal customers and target accounts
Step 3: Find internal contacts at those target accounts
Step 4: Move qualified leads through the sales cycle
Step 5: Use a CRM tool to make your sales pipeline more efficient
Site Title 