You used your best marketing strategies by running successful marketing campaigns and did whatever that is possible to load your sales pipeline with the maximum number of leads- but what next?
Are you deal converting or are they slipping out through the cracks?
On average, 65% of salespeople who adopt mobile CRM meet their sales quotas. Only 22% of salespeople who don’t leverage mobile CRM meet their quotas. Click To TweetNow, a sales pipeline is not just space where you collect golden opportunities for sales, but it is also the key to understanding the trends and patterns in your sales process.
In fact, this can be truer when we say that to increase conversions, businesses need to manage their sales pipeline efficiently, as according to research it has been found that businesses that are capable of mastering pipeline management skills see approximately 28% growth in their revenue.
Hence as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools, we are here to help you out, by sharing seven tried tips for effectively managing your sales pipeline so that you can close more deals quickly.
Target the right prospect
What we mean over here, is that businesses must focus on quality rather than quantity to move their opportunities through the pipeline quickly, since the only way to boost the velocity of any sales cycle can only be found by concentrating on the right deal.
Hence, plan ahead to determine the right company or prospects that you need for your business and also the decision-makers you need to approach for closing your deal.
For this reflect on the historical data stored in your easy to use CRM tool and identify the ideal customers for your business.
Find out which are channels are providing your business the best deals.
It is also advisable that you can check out the testimonials on your competitor’s websites and study their case studies to evaluate what kind of companies they are targeting for their sales growth.
Collect information about the deal
When you know what the prospects really want from your brand it becomes easier to move the deals through the various stages in the pipeline which are as follows:
Remember just contact information alone will never help to close a deal, and so you need to have an in-depth understanding of your prospects’ business challenges, pain-points, budget and goals.
Never dither from questioning your prospects for finding out their needs and always listen with attention to your prospect’s needs for collecting crucial business details.
Find out their budget, who are their decision-makers, and the timeline they are expecting for implementing the solution.
Manage your time efficiently
At times it becomes really difficult to focus on sales processes when businesses have too many things to solve on their platter.
As an easy to use CRM vendor we have seen that most sales reports and admin tasks consume the precious working hours of most people working in the sales teams.
Hence to maximize the efficiency of your sales process tries to eliminate such time-consuming tasks using a sales CRM for rapid business growth.
CRM is a business growth tool that can not only help to set workflow and automate most of the redundant tasks, but it even aids in creating customized sales reports seamlessly.
Additionally CRM also helps the sales teams to get notified about each activity to stay on the right track and so stop prospects from falling through the crack.
Focus on each deal
Do not ignore an opportunity in your sales pipeline so make sure you follow-up and reply to every prospect’s inquiries, on time.
Keep your deals organized to nurture and convert them quickly, Try to spot those of them that are more likely to close ad handle them at once.
Hence use the right tool to track the movement of every single deal, evaluate the sales pipeline regularly to spot the cold deals in the pipeline, and if need render your prospects immediate attention after determining the attributes of all your valuable deals.
Lessen the length of your sales cycle
The longer is the sales cycles the less likely are the chances of closing those deals. Hence businesses should set a timeline to close their deals and create a plan for finding a clear direction to ensure the necessary steps needed to win them within a specific period of time.
For this use a sales CRM to measure different stages of the pipeline and understand how much time your reps need to provide at each stage in the deal.
Now, you need to update these sales strategies periodically and explore new avenues to shorten the sales cycle as discussed even before.
In fact, if you are unable to close any deal within a stipulated time window, then try to find the reason which is stooping the deal to flow to the next step smoothly within the pipeline.
Flush the pipeline regularly
Your sales pipeline will always have a wide variety of deals, and for sure all of them are not going to convert into sales.
Hence quit wasting time on useless prospects that do not need your solution and keep your sales pipeline healthy and clean by weeding out low-quality leads in the pipeline on a regular basis.
Use your CRM tool to create categories “cold deal”, “hot deal” and “dead deal” to figure out which sales prospects need to be followed are the ones which need to be scraped out of the pipeline.
However, do not blindly abandon all the low-quality deals, since you always need to see if the prospect can be added to your future-call list for further nurturing of the leads.
Tips #7
Conduct pipeline review meetings
Sales pipeline review meetings are the best way to keep your deals in motion and also focus on opportunities that have a high possibility of closing shortly.
For this invest one-on-one meetings with the sales reps for evaluating their pipeline and make use of detailed rep[orts that can help to dig deeper into insights that are needed to find out what is working and where your sales process needs improvements.
As an easy to use CRM vendor, we suggest businesses must get an overview of the overall health of their sales pipelines and provide feedback at an early stage to their sales reps to shorten their sales cycles when needed by identifying risks on-time and thereafter addressing them immediately.
Take away
Creating and maintaining a healthy sales pipeline is crucial for meeting and exceeding your sales targets. Hence examine your sales pipeline regularly to understand how the deals are progressing and where your sales teams need to spend more time focusing on the right opportunities and pay due diligence to the pipeline management strategies to boost conversation rate easily.
