You have created the top marketing strategies, sales discovery questions, and a sales pitch that sells to gather some leads for your campaign. The strategy is all and well, but still, something is missing to reach your goal. You’re getting leads, and you’re unable to convert them. What’s the problem, and where are you lacking behind?
A research report from Hubspot mentioned that about 72% of companies have less than 50% prospects to reach their goal.
A survey by the Sales Management Association and Vantage Point Performance stated that 44% of sales teams say that their organization is not handling their pipeline in business properly. It’s a hard truth, but it’s important to learn how to manage your pipeline in business effectively to reach your goals.
How to properly manage your sales pipeline to reach your sales target?
An analysis report published by Gartner mentioned that the biggest important thing for CEOs is to earn more revenue. One of the ways to achieve revenue growth is by properly managing the pipeline in business, which makes it more important to understand the basics of the pipeline in business.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can handle the pipeline in business properly.
Prospecting
Around 40% of sales reps think that the most demanding part of the sales funnel is prospecting. And if such a large percentage of sales reps think this, then prospecting is a vital part of the sales funnel.
Prospecting is the method of figuring out prospects that are likely to turn a long-term customer for your business. While figuring out the prospects, your stress should be on how good the leads are instead of the quantity. Finding good quality prospects ensures that you can complete the marketing funnel quickly and efficiently.
To identify good quality leads, you can:
- Do your research properly to figure out your ideal customer and what companies will be a good fit for your product.
- Analyze your competitors and see what organizations they are using.
- Try to get clients that bring repeat business.
Reach out to leads that have the highest probability
Using layman’s language theory, you can figure out which leads have the highest probability. The strategy will diversify fairly for different industries, but nearly it will be the same. The steps are as follows:
- Check around 10-20% to the leads who have stopped by your website.
- Give 30-40% to the leads who have completed the lead capture form or an inquiry form.
- Give 50-60% to the leads who have done a meeting with you.
- Assign 60-70% to the leads who have asked for quotes over email.
- Checkmark 70-80% to the leads who have started the discussion, and so on.
The above method is for the leads who have reached out to you through your company’s website. The percentage will vary if the leads are collected from different sources. The aim is to categorize leads into different classes to track the progress in the pipeline in business.
This qualifying step determines which leads fall under which category and requires your attention, effort, time, and follow-up. Regardless, the higher the probability of a deal, the more focus it needs.
The chances close to qualifying in the stage funnel are nurtured leads that need a little more effort to turn them into customers. The leads with the probability 20-40% need more time and effort that may or may not be converted. That’s why it’s important to focus on nurtured leads to get success.
Always stay up-to-date
To move the leads further in the sales funnel, it’s important to research them and see whether they are a good fit for your product or not. Your research should answer some of the qualifying questions like What’s their budget? Can your product meet their expectations? What’s the timeline? How responsive are they in answering your questions?
While doing your research, you might not be able to get all your questions answered. In this case, you should trust your intuition and understand their intent through their body language. With experience, you will be able to understand how serious they are in doing business with you.
Time management
Along with managing the sales funnel, you will also have to work on other administrative tasks, manage sales reports, expenses, etc.; with every added workload, it becomes difficult to track every lead for these sales teams must use the benefits of sales acceleration tools like salesken that do a great job in managing and accelerating sales. That’s where you should consider your time and management skills.
To help with your workload, you can use sales CRM software. The software should have:
- Save contact information of leads and prospects.
- Arrange leads into various stages of the sales funnel.
- Organize marketing campaigns.
- Create marketing reports for the campaigns as per the requirement.
- Get notification about every activity that’s happening at your and the lead’s end.
Follow-ups
About 60% of customers say yes to a deal after saying no four times. The stat shows the importance of regular follow-up with your prospects.
Around 30-50% of deals are closed by the sales reps who first answered the leads once they filled up the inquiry form. Hence, it’s necessary to follow up with leads from whatever source they reached out to you.
Remember that you have to follow up with your leads; you can set a notification in your CRM to get a notification every time.
Sometimes, due to various reasons, following up regularly with the prospects is not possible. In that case, you can:
- Send an email to your prospects summarizing the last call and thanking them for their time.
- Sending regular news about your marketing campaigns to your leads.
- You can set up a call with them to see if they are interested in the deal or when you can connect with them again.
Regularly sort out your leads.
Sometimes, the leads that you think are good turn out to be not-so-good ones. You can sort out these leads if they are unresponsive over some time.
To manage your pipeline properly, you will need to learn how to identify the bad leads from the good ones and regularly sort them out. Though you cannot neglect the current dead leads, you can analyze them carefully and keep some for future use.