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A sales pipeline is a visual representation of every stage in a sales process so that you can quickly identify where your qualified leads are in the buying journey. This helps the salesperson identify all the opportunities for the prospect to become an actual buyer. In addition, they enable to track and managing every step of the deal in the sales process. Optimizing each stage in the sales process can help you achieve more with less.
Sales representatives often use the sales pipelines to study the particular steps to move from leads to transactions and equate this with sales.
The process through which business owners and sales teams need to acquire large numbers of potential leads to establish a core group of reliable customer data is known as the sales pipeline.
A sales pipeline can help you visualize your sales process. It will show you where your deals are in the sales funnel, where deals are stalling and which sales activities bring in the most revenue. It adds a layer of accountability and makes goals more straightforward by breaking the sales process into small, trackable tasks.
Key Areas That Call For Automation
According to Vendasta,
• Needs assessment during client prospecting; using sales automation during needs assessment is vital because it helps you determine the client's needs, interests, and likes to deliver something in line with what they want.
• Managing clients’ orders; with sales automation, you may not need sales reps to track and approve those orders because sales automation automatically does that, thus quickening the process with the customers’ needs fulfilled.
• Tracking and administering/ keeping an eye on leads; sales automation follows up on leads automatically, tracks their actions or whatever they are doing on your website, how many times they have checked it, and all the other activities there.
• Marketing automation; this gives a solid foundation for your relationships, reduces manual work that has to be done by the marketing teams, and also saves much time that can be spent on other activities.
• Sales pipeline activity management helps deal with manual data entry, streamlines communication within a business organization and makes running other business functions smooth and efficient.
What is an automated sales pipeline?
Sales pipeline automation helps you convert leads more consistently by automating a seamless journey from lead to prospect to paying client. You can also create processes that help with client onboarding, fulfillment, and generating repeat sales, but for now, we’ll focus on the following:
Increasing conversions from lead to prospect
Increasing the number of new clients
How to set up your automated sales pipeline
The pipeline automation will be highly customized to your business, depending on your unique sales process. You’ll need to:
Identify your pipeline stages – Identify the steps a lead moves through in your sales process. The most common ones are New Lead, Qualifying, Quoted, Negotiating, Won, and Lost. Customize the stages of your business based on all the stages you need to get a complete, at-a-glance picture of where your deals are in your sales process at any given moment. Think about what action will trigger a lead to move into each stage.
Create your pipeline – Now that you’ve mapped out your pipeline stages, create them in your sales and marketing automation software. Keap’s pipeline feature allows you to set up a Kanban-style pipeline that’s visual and user-friendly.
Set up your stage automations – Set up automations to be triggered when moving a deal into or out of the stages of your sales. You can have automations that add or remove tags, create and assign tasks for you or other team members, send emails or texts to your contacts, or send notifications of the deal’s progress to internal stakeholders.
Set up reporting – Next, create reports showing the information you need about sales performance, where deals may get stuck, sales forecasting, etc.
With software like MonkeyPesa, you can have multiple pipelines for various purposes, such as:
Different sales processes for certain salespeople or service types
Client onboarding and fulfillment
Customer service tickets
Repeat client follow-up