How To Find The Ideal Prospects In Your Sales Pipeline

Although a healthy sales pipeline helps your team to meet its targets, but are you getting an insane number of customers into your sales pipeline due to the success of your team.

Indeed, sales team requires healthy pipeline for its growth, but then again chasing anything that moves will surely cram your pipeline and make it fall sick. It has been often observed that having a large number of prospects those who do not fit your ideal customer profile prevents your team from reaching its optimal performance.

Here are some of the most important facts about customers to help you find a healthier and more manageable pipeline.

1. Your customers should be at the core of your sales related processes
2. Not all customers are equal
3. Contrary to popular belief, your customers are not always right
4. There are always many wrong types of customers for your business model
5. Only having more of the right type of customers makes your business profitable

Here is how these 5 points go together:

Primarily determine your ideal customer and then focus your company’s resources (time and talents) to nurture only those prospects who fit the profile.

This is what happens when you do that:

• Your team has a greater likelihood to close more deals and so your conversion rates improve
• Spending less time in closing deals leads to speeding up of sales velocity
• You have lower customer attrition rate which decreases sales funnel leakage over time

Who are your ideal prospects?

People may want or need your product, but that does not make them your instant customers. There are many teenagers who may feel that they need to buy a Ferrari, but the Italian car making company largely ignores all these prospects in favor of a highly niche market they can do business with.  On the other side, there are also many individuals and organizations those who are unaware of your products and services but may eventually turn out to be your long-term customers.

This is true, that globally successful businesses rarely sell their products and services to everyone. As the small business mentor, Ray Silverstein rightly quoted while warning entrepreneurs:

The bigger your market, the greater the likelihood you’re wasting your time with undesirable prospects.

Hence, to run a successful business you need to find, nourish, and engage the ideal and best type of customers for your business, by which you can channelize your precious talents and time where they can generate the most value for your organization.

So how can you determine your ideal prospects?

For ConvergeHub’s sales and marketing team, the idea customer is “the person with whom you can find the best strategic alliance across the table”. They are the one with whom your product meets the customer’s needs and your team’s sales cycle synchronizes with the customer’s purchasing behaviors.

Hence, to find out your ideal customers it is best to use a CRM for examining the customer’s historical data and review the metrics, which answers several key questions such as:

• What are the most common attributes of the types of customers who have the highest conversion rates?
• Which types of customers deliver the deals with highest monetary value?
• How long it takes an average customer to reach the final decision while purchasing your products and services.
• How the customers who buy your products and service process purchase decisions?

A fit pipeline is better than a fat one

So to conclude unless you are very confident in your ability to find a prospect that fits your ideal customer profile, perform counterintuitive measures and trim your sales pipeline. Based on your sales cycle, clean your database of less than ideal prospects or maintain three kinds of the pipeline (hot, lukewarm and cold).
Therefore, depending on how you close your prospects you can find who fits your company’s ideal customer profile.