15 Best Practices for Building a Strong B2B Sales Pipeline

How does one optimize their pipeline to make a successful sale?

In his whitepaper, 9 Tips to Leverage the Sales Funnel to Achieve Plans, Mark Sellers, CEO and founder of Breakthrough Sales Performance®LLC, a sales consulting firm, provides genuine pointers to get the most out of your sales funnel/pipeline. Begin by making sure that each person on the team understands and knows why the pipeline is so crucial for everything that salespersons do every day – from lead nurturing to key account strategies to forecasting and more.

What Is Sales Pipeline Management?

Sales pipeline management is the process of organizing and tracking goals and quotas – as well as knowing whether some deals need extra attention or not as compared to others.

Another key aspect of successful sales pipeline management is the integration of business planning platforms like Pigment, which enable seamless collaboration between marketing and sales teams. These platforms offer real-time data analysis features, helping businesses remain agile and responsive to market changes while ensuring that they track their progress effectively. By leveraging such technologies, companies can establish a structured approach to forecasting business outcomes, ultimately enhancing their growth strategies.

Efficient sales pipeline management lets salespeople keep track of the deals that they have by knowing the stage that the deal is in, and if there are enough deals to meet the goals and the quota.

Pipeline management involves the design of the sales pipeline, how it is measured, and how it is used to enable the performance of sales reps. It allows you to review the blockages in your sales funnel and devise measures to remove them. After you have identified the blockages that are choking your funnel, sales pipeline management becomes a cakewalk. Now, we will look at 15 best pipeline management best practices to help you build a robust B2B sales pipeline.

15 Proven Tips to Build B2B Sales Pipeline

1. Create a Standard Pipeline Management Process

What does a standard pipeline management process mean? To begin with, it means having specific milestones and clearly defined stages that are commonly understood by your sales team. Your sales reps should not have to be made to guess the stage a particular deal stands at or how do they manage the deals at every stage.

In addition to that, your process should be in resonance with how your prospects move through the buying stages. Your ideal target customers will have a lot of common characteristics. Their underlying reasons and needs for purchasing from you are largely similar – and it is this fact that you can use to your benefit to standardize your pipeline management process.

This is not to mention the fact that the best sales performers follow a standardized pipeline management process, which helps them scale and constantly get new business.

This is the reason why 33% of sales managers consider optimizing their sales process as a priority of the highest order.

You can begin by knowing all the stages in your pipeline. Size up what you are already doing – what works for you and where do the gaps lie? Gather with your sales team every now and then and quiz yourselves on:

• How to qualify leads?
• How to contact leads/prospects?
• What are the buying stages, and how does a prospective buyer move from one stage to the other?
• Should we be using CRM? How, and why?

The answers to these questions will help you define the different stages in your pipeline and build a process for moving buyers forward. Follow a shared vocabulary and train your sales reps in staying steadfast and true to your design.

Spend at least four hours per month on pipeline management. According to Salesforce, companies that spent at least four hours per month managing every sales rep’s pipeline saw a 14% greater revenue growth than those that spent fewer than four hours per month.

2. Sales Marketing Alignment

As per a study conducted by McKinsey, there will be six different interaction channels used throughout the buyer’s journey. Making the sale will now require sales and marketing teams to work in tandem to apprehend customer motivations.

This translates to having your marketing teams conduct customer research With the help of the insights and the expertise of those on the front lines, i.e., your sales reps.

The marketing teams can craft better content pieces, emails, and all-round communication that leads look forward to perusing.

It also means delivering better customer service on both the sales and marketing fronts.

3. Use the Right Sales Pipeline Stages

Having the right pipeline stages helps you guide your sales teams in the right direction to close deals more efficiently.

While the sales pipeline can vary from organization to organization, the seven basic stages of the B2B pipeline provided by Technology Advice present a great example of the right pipeline stages.

The stages are:

• Lead generation: This stage involves drawing and engaging prospects by event marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and many other campaigns.
• Lead nurturing: In this stage, you qualifying leads with the help of automated marketing messages and funnels that help you sieve the best leads for a follow-up from your sales teams.
• Sales accepted leads: You take the leads that were provided to you by marketing, and then you follow up with them.
• Sales qualified leads: You then qualify the leads further through repeated contact to specify the timeline, budget, and other miscellaneous needs before handing them over to an account manager.
• Closed deal: You convert an opportunity when a lead makes a purchase.
• Post-sale: You then continue to engage the customer after the sale is completed to increase loyalty that can then lead to repeat purchases.

4. Use a Clean Database of Leads

A lot of times, wrong or incorrect prospect information leads to botched sales endeavors. Sales reps can easily call a wrong number or make other easy mistakes. Such blunders have a negative effect on your sales pipeline’s health because reps won’t be able to contact as many leads as they could have with the right information.

Utilize the tools that are accessible in your CRM to preserve a clean database. You can use features like duplicate lead merging to keep your data clean. This will help reps avoid losing time to incorrect phone numbers when they have to call a lead.

5. Qualify Your Leads

Sales reps can also make use of the vast amount of data in their CRM to rear leads in the sales pipeline. Sales reps will know which content the prospect has consumed and which web pages have they visited.

With the help of that knowledge, they know which products and topics prospects are interested in so that they can base their lead conversations on those interests. This naturally results in higher lead conversions.

READ NOW: The Ultimate Guide to Qualify Sales Leads

6. Train Your Sales Team on Pipeline Management

As per a Forbes study, 61% of reps said that their sales managers were not well-trained in managing their pipeline. The same study also showed that sales teams with properly oriented managers earned 23% more revenue in comparison to those without.

Make sure that every team member knows of your sales process. Don’t leave each rep up to themselves to do it their way. Your team should know the action items at every stage of the sales process and be confident about adjusting based on industry, company size, and market.

7. Automate & Minimize Administrative Tasks

Sales reporting forms the spine of the sales process. However, spending a lot of time on repetitive, administrative work eats into your productivity. Many a time, salespersons are made to document long reports that are of hardly any use to the management.

The Industrial Performance Group conducted a study on North American salespersons and asked them what consumed a salesperson’s time the most. They found that, on average, salespersons spent only 36% of their time selling, while the rest of the time was spent dealing with problems, administration, emails, making reports, etc.

You can use sales automation tools to deal with most such administrative tasks that directly affect productivity. You can easily compose sales emails and create immediately available email templates that are professional. With sales forecasting, you can determine future revenue and close rates through the sales pipeline activity. After you have freed up your sales teams from administrative tasks, managing leads in the pipeline becomes easier.

8. Monitor the Right Sales Pipeline Metrics

Your sales pipeline is constantly undergoing steady changes all the time. That’s why it’s important to monitor key sales metrics produced by it, which include the following:

• Number of opportunities in the pipeline
• Average Deal Size – The average size of the deals in the pipeline
• Win Rate – The average percentage of deals that you close
• Sales Cycle Length – The average lifespan of a deal before it is closed

Sales is made up of numbers, and how well you manage your pipeline depends upon how well you understand its metrics. It is due to this fact that sales managers always try staying on top of these statistics. The right sales metrics to track depending upon your business could be lead definition, the number of new leads generated in a month, opportunity definition, the conversion rate of lead to opportunity, the opportunity to closed deal conversions, loss rate, win rate, and more.

Having the right data at the right stage matters. Any error in the data can have an impact on the overall efficiency. That’s why it is important to dispose of manual data entry and instead have a CRM in place so that salespersons can input quality data into the system. A careful analysis of your accurate historical data can also help you predict your future pipeline.

Ensure to set aside time every week to periodically review these metrics, and they will give you an overview of the health of the sales pipeline along with the business.

By tracking the results over a certain length of time, you will also get a strong indication of how any improvements or changes that you make to your sales process will contribute towards overall growth.

9. Use the Right Sales Pipeline Technology / CRM

When you have a sales pipeline that is full of leads – and if the leads are all in various stages of the sales process – you then have to make sure that you are managing it efficiently.

If you have a small team and a tight budget and are only closing a few sales every month, you can then use a simple Excel spreadsheet to monitor the details in your pipeline. However, as your business will grow, you will have to consider using a CRM system to track your sales activities.

As per a report by Nucleus Research, companies that used a CRM saw an average return of $8.71 on their technology investment for each dollar spent. The same report also revealed that 65% of salespeople who adopted mobile CRM met their sales quotas while other salespeople who didn’t leverage mobile CRM met only 22% of their quotas.

The 2019 Sales Tech landscape of various sales software available now includes 950 different products.

10. Update Your Sales Pipeline Data Regularly

It’s not new knowledge that sales pipelines are constantly changing.

Whenever new leads are added, the leads are made to move through from one stage to the other, and then deals are closed.

If you are not careful with it, your sales pipeline can start to feel a little discombobulated and chaotic – which can lower your productivity and lead to lost sales.

To prevent this from happening, you need to ensure that you are keeping every single lead’s details updated by feeding regular data and information for every stage of the sales process.

While this does mean that you have to spend more time on administrative tasks, it will help you remove dead leads and update outdated contact information.

11. Follow Up with Leads

In almost every industry today, purchasers have a greater number of options to choose to buy from than ever before.

This means that between your first meeting and the next, your prospects are going to be inundated with several requests from competitors with similar offerings.

So one way to keep them engaged and keep your offerings in the back of their mind is to follow up with them often.

Earlier, four calls were enough to close a sale.

However, it is recommended that salespersons make more than eight calls to convert an opportunity today.

But don’t just call to follow up always.

Set reminders to connect with leads and try sending them an email first. Move on to calling them later when emails don’t work and then use your best communication channel for other interactions going forward.

12. Clean Up Your Sales Pipeline

It’s important to maintain the hygiene of your pipeline by cleaning it out regularly.

This is why it is extremely important for management to be involved with leads early on in the sales reps’ pipeline.

This is when you help them chase hot leads and sift through the bad leads.

Bad leads are those leads that expressly tell you that they are not interested in your offerings after the first meeting and loads of other interactions to combat their objections.

Or you have met with these leads several times, and they always decline whenever you ask them to take the next steps.

Or even those leads that you have never been able to schedule a meeting with because they don’t answer your emails and calls.

If any of the above is the case, it is wise not to waste any more time behind them and instead focus your attention on the leads that are more likely to say yes.

The sooner you weed out bad leads that waste your time, the more time you can provide to leads that you can definitely convert.

13. Review Your Sales Pipeline Regularly

The end goal of managing a pipeline is to grow the number of qualified leads and deals won.

This means that you need to supervise the pipeline’s health as often as you can.

Sales managers usually spend their time and energies behind forecast meetings. While those are really important, they only take into consideration the deals that they are expected to close in a relatively short period.

By reviewing your sales pipeline regularly, you can analyze deals at the top and middle of the funnel and help your sales reps to:

• Examine the quality of new prospects entering the fray and then rank them accordingly.
• Aid salespeople in directing the result of any given opportunity in the starting stages better and help them avoid common mistakes.
• Offer a more expansive view of the whole pipeline for making the most amount of conversions possible.

Investigate the quality of every lead, ask questions about which decision-makers are involved, what are the next steps, and learn more about their own management processes and practices.

Always try to ensure that each of your sales reps has good sales pipeline hygiene so that they are not wasting any time, and they are always chasing the best leads.

14. Fix Bottlenecks in Your Pipeline

CRM is a wonderful tool, and it can help you keep track of where each lead is in the sales pipeline with the help of system tags. These system tags will update the status of every prospect in your system every time a lead progresses to the next stage in the pipeline.

You can also conduct checks to see the number of leads in each stage at a particular time of any day. If you see that leads are getting held up at a specific stage, you can ask yourself on which pain points to address for them in order to keep them moving from each stage to the other.

After you have recognized and singled out the bottlenecks in your pipeline and have considered different ways in which to clear them out, you can test and run sales experiments to try and enhance the efficiency of each part of the process.

15. Post-Sale Follow Through

A good post-sale follow-through strategy is a good way to improve revenues by selling more to your existing customers and also getting referrals to new prospects while you are at it.

In the honeymoon phase that immediately follows after making a sale, you have to ensure to maintain the level of excitement on the client side about the product. The company has just closed a deal when a prospect has become a customer. To ensure to keep them hooked to your offerings, use the following five ways to effectively follow up after a sale:

• Send a thank-you note: It doesn’t matter which method you adopt; it is important to thank your clients after successfully making a sale to make the entire buying experience satisfactory for them. You can also include messages like “We are here for anything you might need” in the thank you note. Also, it’s important to ensure that the thank you note contains the contact particulars of the person to be reached out to in the case of the client having an issue or a question.
• Remember to check in: Think up a schedule to follow up with the clients after a week or two of making the sale with the goal to find out if they need help with anything or not. However, remember not to overdo it. More importantly, don’t try to make a sale at this stage. Listen to the customer’s opinions and needs, and try to help them if they need any help.
• Keep communication lines open: Ask clients for their permission to correspond with them. Once you have their approval, send them helpful and relevant information that is advice-based for their various interests and needs. Try to focus on providing them with high-value content, such as articles, guides, webinars, etc.
• Set a base for the second sale: Continuing to talk to clients who have already purchased from you might seem like a waste of time, but it is a key factor integral to future sales. By regular contact, you can understand the needs of the clients, gain ideas about improvements, and set the basis to provide a complimentary product.
• Ask for referrals: When you have happy customers, they will refer you to other prospective buyers. More importantly, when a suggestion comes from someone who has actually used the product or service makes it extra credible and trustworthy.

Conclusion

Your sales pipeline is the lifeblood of your business. That is why you can never overestimate its importance.

This also means that not managing your pipeline properly can mean risking losing out on many new customers.

With almost 60% of sales managers of the opinion that their organization doesn’t do a good job at managing their sales pipeline, the chances are that you need to refine the way your sales pipeline works too.

The 15 best practices to build a robust sales pipeline mentioned above will help you keep organize your sales in a healthy manner, make your work more structured and organized, quicken up the speed of the sales cycles, and attain your sales quota sooner, all the while bringing higher revenue and growth to the business.