A well-developed sales pipeline is one of the major lifelines sustaining your company. It provides an intuitive way to manage your sales process and gives a snapshot of the health of your business. It helps you spot bottlenecks and weak points and understand when certain clients need special attention. Moreover, it helps you track deals against monthly, quarterly, and annual goals to predict revenue.

However, the B2B purchase journey is rarely a straightforward affair. Prospects will move through your pipeline at different rates depending on their level of interest, the number of decision-makers involved, urgency, etc. A prospective account may skip stages in your pipeline, or even move back a step if their circumstances change.

Part of being an effective business development and sales manager is finding a way to track and organise all of these wayward opportunities. Ultimately, the more control you have of your sales pipeline, the more revenue you will bring in for your organisation.

Still, maintaining a smoothly functioning pipeline comes with many day-to-day challenges, including:

• Building comprehensive pipelines,

• Ensuring pipeline visibility,

• Improving pipeline velocity,

• Producing accurate sales forecasting,

• Reviewing team performance, pulling reports, and ensuring accountability,

• Driving revenue by optimising sales.

There are die-hard sales managers out there who will try and manage their pipeline via a spreadsheet system. However, we do not recommend this approach. It is poorly suited for addressing the complexity of the B2B purchase journey. You will find most of your time goes towards completing manual tasks, like data entry, instead of strategy and relationship building.

In this article, we want to examine how B2B sales automation can simplify pipeline management. To understand what tools are available to help you build a more rigorous sales process for better results.

(Full disclosure, SharpSpring is one of our technology partners. You should be able to get similar mileage out of any quality integrated sales and marketing platform).

Building a Comprehensive Pipeline

Building a successful pipeline starts with acknowledging that sales qualified leads do not spontaneously pop into existence. Rather, they emerge from your marketing audience. As such, you need to build pipelines that reflect your entire customer journey. 

Sales automation software makes building a comprehensive pipeline a relatively straightforward process. Input your parameters (such as expected stage length, probability of conversion, etc.) and the tool will generate the pipeline for you. The system will track marketing activity, qualify leads, and automatically shift opportunities to the head of the appropriate sales pipeline, and it can prompt you if opportunities appear to be going stale and not moving through stages quickly enough.

Ensuring Pipeline Visibility

Everyone involved in revenue operations at your company should be able to access pipeline data and insights. Not just your sales team but also marketing, customer service, product management, finance, etc. Pipeline visibility ensures everyone understands what needs to happen to drive predictable revenue. Lack of transparency will result in conflicting data and operational inefficiencies that impede growth.

Integrated platforms solve this problem of pipeline visibility. They link marketing performance to sales performance and create a full 360º view of each prospect. For instance, you can view the entire life of the lead, including content consumed, pages viewed, and other touchpoints like social media contact. You can also drill down from each opportunity to see details about the client, including the individual contacts for the account.

Furthermore, it helps you keep a clear record of all client/team interactions. Suppose a high-profile opportunity requests a meeting with finance to discuss a proposal. The finance team can review the account history and view notes made by the sales reps to understand how this lead has been cultivated. Doing so ensures they use the meeting to continue moving the relationship forward.

Improving Pipeline Velocity

Pipeline velocity is a key metric for determining pipeline health. It measures how long it takes, on average, to turn a qualified lead into a customer. The formula is: 

The number of deals in your pipeline X overall win rate percentage X average deal size (£) / number of days in your sales cycle.

As you might expect, the higher your sales velocity, the better. You also want to pay close attention to conversion rates between the different stages of your sales process. Doing so helps you identify leaks where prospects drop out of your pipeline.

For example, suppose only 30% of opportunities move on from the demo stage to request a proposal. While it is normal to have some attrition between steps, 70% is quite dramatic, indicating you need to investigate. You might find your criteria for what constitutes a sales qualified lead are slightly off, causing a cascading effect along your pipeline. Or perhaps your demonstration is too dry and fails to engage your audience and convince them to move forward with the relationship.

Sales automation can help you monitor your pipeline and accelerate sales velocity. The system will update the expected value and conversion percentage depending on where your opportunities are in the pipeline. It can help with lead scoring by automatically identifying hot prospects based on engagement, page tracking, fit and completeness of information. It can also help keep your pipeline clean by flagging prospects who have been in the pipeline longer than your average sales cycle. 

Producing Accurate Sales Forecasts

Pipeline management and sales forecasting work hand-in-hand. A healthy pipeline provides accurate data about your sales process when it is producing optimal results. You can then use this data to generate monthly, quarterly and annual sales forecasts. These forecasts give you achievable goals to help direct your team’s efforts, making it easier to meet more sales targets.

Sales automation allows you to gather the analytic data and business intelligence you need to power your business development. For instance, you can see a real time view of the opportunity value, conversion probability, and expected close date of every opportunity in your pipeline. As previously mentioned, the system can also flag pipeline outliers so that you can remove stale leads from your forecasting data. Keeping your pipeline clean is critical to ensuring that your sales expectations match reality.

Improving Team Performance

Ultimately, your sales representatives are what drives pipeline performance. Their interactions with opportunities are what will win or lose a client for your business. As such, you want them to have the tools and support they need to perform their jobs effectively – both individually and as a team.

The visual interface provided by sales automation platforms is particularly useful for helping sales reps keep on top of things. For instance, in Sharpspring, deal stages in the pipeline are displayed as columns while sales leads are individual cards in the columns. Sales reps can quickly drag-and-drop their opportunity cards around the pipeline to track where they are in the sales process. They can add icons that provide an at-a-glance view of important information/necessary actions needed for that prospect.

Sales reps can also click on a card to view the account’s full profile – which includes all the individual contacts associated with that opportunity. They can then add these contacts to email campaigns, schedule calls, book meetings, etc. – all from within the platform.

Another benefit of using a sales platform for pipeline management is the ability to set up automated workflows. These workflows trigger whenever an opportunity moves from one stage to another. The system prompts the internal team to action and kicks off relevant sales tasks (e.g. scheduling kick-off meetings for pitches or negotiations, or alerting finance to prepare contracts). If a contract is lost, the account manager is alerted to debrief the team and follow up with the client for lessons learned. This ‘second brain’ aspect ensures things don’t get forgotten and helps your sales teams be a better version of themselves.

Running Reports

Reports can be an absolute headache, particularly if you are trying to prepare them manually. All too often an important spreadsheet formula will get corrupted, or someone will try to compile data using the wrong filter. Even if you set up a template for everyone to use, it is amazing how many small discrepancies will accumulate over time. 

The reports feature available on quality sales and marketing platforms vastly simplifies the entire process. You can quickly pull a variety of sales reports, such as:

• Conversion analysis,

• Pipeline value,

• Sales performance,

• Won/lost reports,

• Pipeline activity.

You can also run reports that filter down activity by individual pipelines, sales rep, email address, or other custom tags. Furthermore, you schedule reports to run automatically and be sent to all relevant parties.

Optimising Sales Performance

Refining and standardising the sales process plays an important part in driving more revenue. Yes, each of your client accounts will have unique quirks that you will need to address – that is why you have sales reps. However, your target market shares a common set of pain points and buying drives which creates similar behavioural patterns. 

And where there is a pattern, there is an opportunity to optimise sales cycle management.

As we have seen, sales automation tools improve the efficiency of your sales team by handling routine administrative tasks. Furthermore, an integrated sales platform provides checkpoints, data tracking, and reporting tools that help ensure quality and accountability. The result is a standardised pipeline that takes a great deal of the guesswork out of your sales process. It will help you understand what content, techniques, and activities to use to effectively build relationships, increase win rates, and tighten up your sales cycle.

Please reach out to us if you would like to learn more about how you can elevate your pipeline performance. Our experienced B2B consultants will help you build the right sales strategy and automation solutions for your needs.