Building a sales pipeline is an awesome step forward in bringing in more sales for your business. But there are things that you can do with a pipeline that can improve sales even more.
We’ve put together a list of the things that you can do to adjust your sales pipeline for stronger conversion rates and don’t worry, they’re a lot less effort than putting the pipeline into place in the first instance.
Tips to Adjust Your Sales Pipeline to Boost Sales
1. Focus on qualification before entry to the pipeline – your pipeline should contain sales-qualified leads (SQLs) rather than marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Tightening up the entry criteria can help you focus your efforts better on selling and improve your marketing approach too, to ensure MQLs are becoming SQLs
2. Look at the customer’s buying process – are your pipeline’s stages the same as the customer’s? If not, one of the easiest things to do is make sure that they match. This means you can help your prospects work through their own questions and methodology without feeling forced into anything.
3. Make sure you have well-defined exit criteria – charting the progress of a customer from one stage of a pipeline to another is not a matter of guess work. It’s something that should be based on hard criteria that you can mark off on a checklist.
4. Encourage information sharing and communication within the sales team – simple communication tools like Slack are ideal for this and if you have the budget this can be integrated with your sales database. This makes it even easier to share data between team members.
5. Don’t just reward closing business – if you have a full set of criteria from moving from one part of the pipeline to the next, then you should be looking to reward salespeople who show high volumes of progress in moving potential customers from one stage to the next. If you only focus on closing, you’re disincentivizing all the hard work prior to the close.
6. Look to re-engage “lost” opportunities – a failure to close doesn’t mean that your competition did any better than you did. In fact, the “boomerang” deal can be a huge part of your business model. Look to revisit “lost sales” and start reaching back out to them within 60 days of them leaving the pipeline.
7. Broaden contact methods throughout the pipeline – it’s really easy for a salesforce to become reliant on one or two methods of contact (say calling and face-to-face meetings) but in today’s world there are dozens of different methods of contact. Get on social media, send e-mails, drop into their IM clients, etc.
8. Create events which are compelling opportunities to buy – if you’ve ever been into a store just before Christmas and seen Santa present, you’ll know that retailers do this very well. Sales, promotions, etc. help to tap in to the “fear of missing out” (FOMO) and encourage people to buy but they must be compelling if you want to close the deal.
9. Learn to call in the big guns when needed – sales managers often, mistakenly, believe that selling isn’t part of their job, but when it comes to closing deals, the intervention of a manager when the process is stuck, can help to unclog things. In fact, if the deal is big enough, the C-Suite ought to get involved too if things start slowing dow
10. Automate any tasks that don’t drive sales – any time that you can automate a workflow for a salesperson that doesn’t help them sell, is a time that you can boost your sales
How Do You Know Any Of This Is Working?
You call up your analytics using a package like Maralytics and you examine what your sales were like before you made the tweak and what they were like afterwards.
If you align your sales pipeline better with conversions, you ought to be able to see the results easily – though make sure to allow for the length of your sales cycle before making any data-driven decisions on changes.
