If you have a sales pipeline that consistently delivers on or above target levels of new customers, sales and profit please read no further – this blog will have nothing to help you.
If, however like many business owners I talk to, you would like your sales pipeline to deliver better results, then you might find something of interest here.
Typically a pipeline that needs improvement will have one or more of the 5 following issues
Insufficient prospects entering the pipeline
Poor quality prospects in the pipeline
Prospects not moving through the pipeline fast enough
Conversion rate too low
Cost of conversion is too high – poor return on investment
Typically, businesses experiencing some of these problems will focus heavily on sales – targets, rewards, training etc. but a better solution might lie within marketing rather than the sales team and their process.
A well designed marketing programme can identify, qualify and nurture potential customers, turning them into warm prospects for the sales team to convert. The sales team have more time to devote to each prospect and a greater chance of success, which fuels their confidence and that makes them even more successful.
You could even think of a marketing lead generation programme as a marketing pipeline to feed the sales pipeline.
If you can automate the marketing programme, it becomes both more cost effective and responsive, delivering better and better results. As the programme is refined it becomes more predictable and the flow of warm prospects can be turned up or down to match capacity in the rest of the organisation.
If you would like to review the performance of your sales and marketing pipeline, you can download the free self-grading tool from our website.
Chris.