Sales process: the company's sales process must be well structured so that teams know what they need to do to close a deal. If this is already defined, you can celebrate, you already have the pipeline stages designed.
Revenue goals: Goals are important because they allow you to design your pipeline. Think about your end goal to calculate how many deals you need to add to the top of your pipeline to meet your goals at the end of your pipeline.
In addition to this information, it is also important to include salespeople in the pipeline building process. After all, they are the ones who will use the tool on a daily basis. If they are part of the definitions, the chances of them adopting the pipeline will be greater.
Organize your prospects
Before you have a pipeline, you have a list of potential customers. If you have a large number of prospects, you may need to organize their information and the interactions they’ve had with your company using a tool like a spreadsheet or a sales CRM (customer relationship management).
Breaking the pipeline down into smaller steps is very helpful. It allows the team to look at the day-to-day tasks required to close sales.
Therefore, this step consists of defining the stages of your pipeline . The tip here is to think about the tasks that the sales team already performs and those that have the greatest impact on sales.
Keep your sales pipeline up to date
Once you’ve built your pipeline, it’s important to keep it up to date . This can be tricky at first: your team may not be in the habit of adding new leads and moving each deal to the next stage.
Leadership should encourage the team to do this until it becomes a habit . Over time, salespeople will understand that the tool makes their day-to-day lives easier.
Review the pipeline and implement improvements
After the first version, you need to constantly improve it . With time and experience, you may discover that some steps are unnecessary and others are missing.
Review and implement improvements to your pipeline whenever necessary!
Sales pipeline indicators
There are 4 fundamental and strategic indicators that a salesperson must monitor:
Number of open deals in the pipeline
Every pipeline must have an ideal volume of deals, which will depend on the average ticket and expected sales cycle. Keeping the funnel full of deals is important to ensure that there is always stock to supply a certain subsequent stage.
Regardless of the company's prospecting structure, the person most concerned about the volume of Leads in the pipeline should be the salesperson themselves.
Average ticket of negotiations being worked on
Every salesperson has not only the number of sales as a goal, but also the revenue generated for the company in which they work. Controlling the average ticket of your negotiations is essential to ensure that the salesperson “pays for themselves” and still brings in the profit that the company expects.
Overall efficiency (close ratio)
This metric is essential for the salesperson to understand their learning curve throughout their sales time.
The higher this rate, which must be calculated based on the negotiations already concluded in a given period, the better the seller's overall performance, i.e., the greater the probability of increasing their sales if they work with more negotiations.
It is important for the salesperson to monitor not only their overall efficiency, but also the stages. The first is calculated considering all stages of the sales process, checking the amount of losses and gains in a given period.
Measuring the efficiency of each specific stage of the sales process allows you to understand where the bottlenecks are in the process. This way, it is possible to outline which action plans will be necessary to increase