Build a Healthy Sales Pipeline

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Build a healthy sales pipeline.
  
• Evaluate and improve your sales pipeline.
  

Build a Healthy Sales Pipeline

In order for a pipeline to be considered healthy, it must flow. Prospects must move from one stage to the next in a determined time-frame or be filtered out from the pipeline. Reps can track this flow in a CRM, and regular pipeline reviews ensure you have consistent and reliable data about each opportunity. Reps can build a healthy pipeline by consistently bringing in fresh leads, qualifying those leads, nurturing leads to generate interest in your products, and, ultimately, closing sales.

Here are the most important parts of building a healthy pipeline.

Qualify Leads

Find out if someone is a good fit for your product by qualifying the lead. Each company has different criteria for what counts as a good lead, with many companies even using a lead scoring system to prioritize leads based on how likely they are to purchase. 

Ask yourself the following when qualifying leads.

1. Does this lead have a need for our solution?
   
2. Do they have a budget for our solution?
   
3. Is this lead in a decision-making position?
   

These questions are important because you don’t want stagnant leads clogging up your pipeline and throwing off your sales forecast.

Nurture Leads

Nurturing leads means developing and reinforcing a relationship by providing powerful insights that build trust in your solution. When it comes to nurturing, personalization and communication is the name of the game.

There are many ways to achieve this, but a common one is email nurturing. It’s cost-effective and easy to automate with email marketing tools like Pardot. You can send leads relevant content, whether it’s blogs, videos, white papers, or e-books, and email marketing tools allow you to track how long a prospect is engaging with the material.

Other forms of nurturing can include direct mail, follow-up calls, or social media marketing. No matter how you do it, it’s important to keep the water warm with consistent follow-up and outreach since prospects typically won’t make a purchase during their first interaction with you.

Convert Prospects into Customers

Guiding prospects down the pipeline until they’ve become customers is known as conversion. For each interaction you have with a prospect, be thinking of next steps. Focus and persistence are key when it comes to moving the conversation forward. Follow up, ask for feedback, and make use of a CRM so you can supervise prospects at each stage. If you’re in a position to do so, you can also offer discounts and incentives to give prospects a nudge.

Much of what happens at the end is decided by what you do at the beginning. If you’ve laid successful groundwork in qualifying and nurturing leads, the conversion step should flow naturally.

A healthy pipeline always has new opportunities entering and won opportunities exiting. A pipeline that’s top-heavy has a lot of opportunities coming in, but not enough of them making it to the final stages. A pipeline that’s bottom-heavy will have plenty of deals closing, but not enough new opportunities entering at the top of the funnel. Either scenario means lost revenue.

Evaluate a Sales Pipeline

Now that you know how to make a healthy pipeline, how do you check to see if you’re doing it right? A good pipeline will have high sales velocity, a short sales cycle length, and a high conversion rate. How can you get a handle on these metrics? Well, keep reading because data points like these can paint a clear picture of where your pipeline is at.

A pipeline needs accurate data on prospects in order to be meaningful. This data can change minute to minute, which is why it demands constant monitoring. By tossing dirty data and adding updates whenever a new lead comes in or a prospect progresses to another stage, you’ll keep your pipeline well-oiled. At Salesforce, we use dashboards in Sales Cloud to visualize the pipeline and see which stage deals are in.

To keep your data clean and deals moving forward, you can set up trackable metrics and prospect details in your CRM and review them regularly. Each sales executive should customize pipeline metrics to meet their own aims, but here are a few of the basics that are usually included. Monitoring these numbers will tell you a lot about the state of your pipeline and help you catch potential problems early. Here are some metrics to consider.

Work with Reps to Improve the Sales Pipeline

Your CRM should be your best friend when it comes to measuring and managing your sales pipeline, but don’t underestimate the importance of frequent communication with your reps. While maintaining clean data in your CRM is critical to a healthy sales pipeline, pipeline reviews are just as important.

Regular pipeline reviews, when managers and reps discuss the status of pending deals one-on-one, are usually a source of dread. But sales teams should instead see reviews as an opportunity to realign goals (if necessary) and get additional coaching. When properly done, pipeline meetings can accomplish several things.

• Create a system of accountability for both sales reps and sales managers.
  
• Establish action items and deal priorities with a specific timeline.
  
• Confirm the exit criteria for every pipeline stage.
  

Most importantly, managers have to practice empathy and patience in order to build trust with reps. This allows reps to better learn from mistakes, improves morale, and ultimately boosts productivity.

Resources

• Salesforce: What Is CRM?
• Salesforce: Pipeline Reviews
• Salesforce: 7 Sales Dashboard Examples Every Leader Needs
• Salesforce: What Is Dirty Data?
• Salesforce: Sales Cloud