The health of your sales pipeline is one of the most important metrics to measure the current and future health of your business.
A recent survey cited 72% of sales managers lead sales pipeline review meetings at least several times a month with their sales reps. The problem, though, is that 63% of those sales managers responding stated that the businesses they work for are doing a bad job of managing their pipelines. These numbers show that there is room for major improvement when it comes to optimizing the pipeline.
In today’s digital and hyper-connected world sales and marketing teams are more data-driven than ever. It means that businesses have access to information like never before and it also means that we are more accountable to see things through.
Sales Pipeline
The sales pipeline snapshot can be visualized to show where leads and prospects are in the sales funnel. These same pipelines show the number of leads and sales that are expected to close in the next month, week, and year. Pipeline analysis is equally vital to pipeline snapshots. When analyzing the pipeline, we can see where improvements can be made and implemented. Having an efficiently run sales pipeline increases the likelihood of sales closing and helps to understand the number of sales that are expected to close.
A Healthy Sales Pipeline
When sales leads and prospective deals are overlooked or ignored – sales are lost. Missed opportunities are a sign of trouble and that changes need to happen.
A Few Tips of Sales Pipeline Recovery
A few tips when it comes to improving the pipeline and how it operates.
- Follow up on leads. Compared to years ago buyers now have more products and services to choose from than ever before. Years ago, it would take an average of three phone calls to land the sale. Now, it can take up to nine calls to make that same sale. A great sales rep is the one who continues to follow-up and helps to guide the customer throught he sales process.
- Pull the dead leads out of the funnel. Focus on higher-level leads to reap more benefits. Don’t waste time on the leads that are not moving or showing promise.
- Focus on leads that have potential. This is pretty much the same as above. It is important to concentrate on those leads that can be fruitful.
- Use a CRM system like Salesforce.com, Dynamics or Microsoft CRM to track sales stages, manage a sales funnel and track activities. Small businesses make use of CRM systems like Hubspot or Zendesk Sell so that sales data can be centralized.
- Incorporate the best tools to manage people and sales processes. Manually adding data into the CRM is time consuming and can lead to other problems. Sales reps hate to update the CRM with sales data. If sales contacts and leads are not updated – sales and leads will get lost in the sales pipeline.
Automated Data Entry
Automated data entry for the CRM system not only saves time – it keeps important information from falling through the cracks.
Salesdirector.ai’s Autoscribe is a tool that allows for 100% automated contact and activity capture. There are no client-side plugins, so it is simple to add.
Autoscribe provides the following:
- Automatically log calendar events and emails.
- Automatically creates contacts and keeps them up to date.
- Attaches contact to the right opportunities.
- Works with Office365/Exchange and GSuite.
Autoscribe catches all the information that may have not been entered or gotten lost in the data. Autoscribe also keeps the funnel flowing smoothly and requires no data input from the sales reps which leaves less room for error. Managers can follow their reps without holding many meetings. With all the information is kept current with Autoscribe while managers can coach their sales reps and send them ques at the appropriate times so that leads and sales are not lost.
The path to recovery with SalesDirector.ai is easy and affordable. Having the ability to stay on top of the game without losing time and sales is what Autoscribe offers. Knowing your sales funnel and how it is operating helps to produce effective managers and sales reps.