Has your marketing and sales pipeline process been struggling?
Your marketing and sales pipeline process should be mapped out with a key sales conversation ratio at each stage. You have to measure this if you want to improve.
The good news is that most of it can be designed as a workflow to help guide sales reps and marketers.
It works in an innovative supply chain and Six-sigma; now, we can do the same for the revenue process. This is music to the board and CEO running organizations.
Generating leads from your marketing channels will require you to research each buyer’s journey, create content for each stage, set metrics, analyze, and adjust your internal sales process.
You can automate this, which saves loads of time.
There are marketing leads, and there are sales leads. Two distinct parameters for each. Let’s explore the differences.
What is a sales pipeline?
The sales pipeline is the same as a sales funnel. While the sales forecast can be developed from the sales funnel based on conversion rates.
What is a Sales Pipeline? A sales pipeline is an organized, visual way of tracking multiple potential buyers as they progress through different stages in the purchasing process.
This information can help you identify which leads to focus on the first, second, or third. The data can also illustrate which prospects are interested in your company’s products or services and how likely they will buy.
The sales pipeline can be visualized as a funnel with specific stages that move from top to bottom. This is helpful for sales teams since it quantifies and tracks progress toward reaching your revenue goals.
As an alternative to the sales pipeline, some organizations use a waterfall approach in which sales leads are assigned to different salespeople and departments.
The sales process is often long and complicated.
This complexity makes it so important for sales managers to use a sales pipeline.
A sales pipeline will help keep track of the entire process from start to finish, including which prospects are in what stage and how likely they will move forward. It’s also helpful for ensuring that your company spends its time and resources on the right prospects.
Here is a sales pipeline example.
A sales pipeline can have many stages, but the most common include: – Lead -> Qualified lead -> Active Sales Opportunity = Proposal (or Agreement) -> Closed Sale or Lost Sale.
Sales pipeline examples help sales managers and salespeople track their sales team’s performance.
The Stages in Sales Pipeline
The stages of your sales pipeline depend on how your buyers buy from you. Skip a step, and you may lose sales.
Some businesses have several sales pipelines depending on products and other factors. What are yours?
The process begins with generating leads, which may be transformed into prospects depending on how you set your standards for qualification (i.e., whether a lead has already been qualified).
Leads are generated through various marketing activities and sales pipeline examples. Your sales team can follow up on the leads and convert them into prospects.
An effective sales pipeline example will state how much time should be spent on each stage of this process, from when a lead is generated until it becomes a prospect. You need to clearly define a qualified opportunity for your business as part of creating a sales pipeline example.
The sales pipeline example should include the following information:
- Relevant definitions and standards for each stage of the sales process;
- Metrics to be used in assessing potential sales opportunities. The metrics can combine financial and non-financial indicators, depending on your business’s most important metrics.
Sales Pipeline Example Template
A good template for the sales pipeline example can be as simple as a table with four columns. This kind of sales pipeline example will include information on the following:
- source of leads and its qualification process;
- number and qualification time for each stage (i.e., how many days from the moment a lead is generated until it becomes qualified or in the prospect stage);
- The number of sales opportunities plotted on the graph, including how each stage can be further broken down (e.g., by month).
Our sales pipeline example assumes that you have a corporate website and need to track generated leads.
The breakdown for sales opportunity generation will include such data as the prospect’s industry, type of business (i.e., B2B or B2C), whether the prospect is a new or returning visitor to your website, etc.
The sales pipeline example template might look like this.
Sales Pipeline Example in Action
You may have heard about the story of one of our clients, an e-learning corporation producing specialized courses for the construction industry.
They had a sales pipeline example of a simple spreadsheet that gave them insight into the effectiveness of their marketing efforts for lead generation.
However, after we created a custom-made template for them, they could get a more detailed analysis and make informed decisions about improving their lead generation process.
A Sales-Ready Leads Defined: The Marketing to Sales Hand-off
The marketing pipeline feeds your sales pipeline.
It is marketing’s role to create awareness and marketing qualified leads (MCL)before they are turned over as sales-ready leads to the sales organization.
How many lists must you weed out to get a qualified lead? How many people must you connect with to qualify for a need? How many qualified opportunities must you develop to write a proposal? How many proposals must you write to close a sale?
This is the science of sales! And along with its integration with the marketing process, it’s important to understand the health of your pipeline.
Many things contribute to the success of sales and marketing. Still, sales pipeline management is arguably one of the most important principles, especially in a tight, competitive market environment.
I will explore the marketing and sales process and explain how important a sales-qualified lead (SQL) is to the sales team.
- Do sales follow up on marketing leads? According to a study for Harvard Business Review, 71% of qualified leads are never followed up.
- And leads that are followed up are only touched an average of 1.3 times. This represents a huge opportunity cost not only in revenue but also in the customer/prospect experience.
The sales manager’s job is to ensure that each step of your sales process unfolds promptly. You must know which step of the process you are in with any prospect.
The core of any process is that it is predictable and yields a certain result. The result changes when any step of your sales process is skipped or not completed on time. To establish the right plan and then follow it. By doing so, you’ll maintain control.
It’s important to remember that sales is a matchmaking process, and your marketing team’s role is to nurture prospects before handing them over to sales as a sales-qualified lead.
You only want your sales reps selling to sales-qualified leads. That’s why defining what a sales-qualified lead (SQL) is for your company is important.
Sales and marketing success only comes when each side works toward shared goals. And the first step is to determine what the rules are.
What are the 5 Lead Stages of the Sales Cycle?
The stages of the sales cycle are segmented into five parts.
First, you should know each sales cycle stage and how they relate to your leads.
The sales cycle follows your leads through the buying decision process.
The diagram below shows a typical sales cycle for a business, which is for a high-tech consulting startup.
The lead stages typically follow this flow in the sales funnel:
- Prospecting [Attract] – Your lead has a problem; they search for a solution on the web but aren’t sure what they’re looking for yet. Your business comes up in the prospects search and has shown some interest.
- Top of the Funnel (TOFU) – Leads who visit your website and through TOFU content marketing (like white papers or industry reports) have found a potential solution to their problem. These leads are called marketing captured leads (MCL) and need to be qualified by the marketing to become qualified leads (MQL) before they are turned over to sales.
- Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) – Now that your lead knows what they need, they struggle with which company best fits their needs. You can encourage your lead to pick you up through MOFU offers. At this stage, some of the MQLs move to the next sales funnel stage, called sales qualified leads (SQL), and the sales rep starts working on these.
- Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) – Your lead has decided you’re the best fit but needs to know why they should buy from you today. You can answer this question with BOFU marketing offers.
Delight – Your lead converted into a paying customer! Now you have to keep them engaged with special offers, social media shares, and great customer service, so when it’s time to renew, it’s obvious they should.
What is the sales pipeline?
A sales pipeline visually represents sales prospects and where they are in the purchasing process. A sales pipeline represents prospects and where they are in the pipeline stages.
The sales pipeline also provides an overview of a sales rep’s account forecast and how close he/she is to making quota and meeting the sales forecast.
You might use outdated tactics if your sales pipeline process has struggled to fulfill quotas. Your sales pipeline process should be audited to find performance gaps.
What is a Sales Lead?
Wikipedia defines a lead or sales-ready lead as ‘the identification of a person or entity with the interest and authority to buy a product or service.’
Nowadays, leads referred to are mainly online leads generated by filling in a form online. However, they could equally result from a phone call or a business card from an interesting person at a networking event.
A lead typically constitutes the contact details of a person – either a consumer or representing a company – interested in learning more about a product or service to purchase it.
What is a sales qualified lead in sales? [SQL]
A sales-ready lead moves to a qualified lead and is more than just a contact on a list you may have just purchased or someone who recently filled out a form from a landing page on your website.
It includes further information on the person or the company they represent, which qualifies them for a certain product.
At Matrix Marketing Group, we’ve adopted the BANT approach. I’m familiar with it from my IBM days, and it works.
Typical qualifying questions relate to the BANT approach:
- Budget: Do they have enough money to buy the product/service?
- Authority: Can they make a purchase decision?
- Do they need that the product or service in question can meet?
- Timescale: do they have a specific time when they wish to purchase?
By gathering answers to the above questions at the lead stage. These are then considered ‘sales qualified leads.’
Let’s dive into the BANT system more.
The BANT System
The definition of an SQL may vary based on what you’re selling and whom you’re selling to, but many companies use the BANT system (designed by IBM) when qualifying leads.
Here’s a breakdown of how to qualify leads using the BANT system:
Budget: Does a Prospect Have the Budget to Buy?
Effective selling requires that the sales reps (or SDRs) determine whether a prospect can afford your solution. It doesn’t matter how much a prospect likes your solution. They aren’t a viable customer if they can’t afford it.
Authority: Does a Prospect Have the Authority to Buy?
Good sales rep knows to call high, but key executives have elaborate defense mechanisms to keep salespeople out. A personal introduction is the only reliable way to get past these defenses.
Delegate this problem to the organization until someone knows someone who can pave the way. Before getting the introduction, meeting with lower-ranking people to gather intelligence is fine, but the sales cycle does not formally begin until this meeting.
Typically, B2B sales take an average of 5.4 people to make a buying decision, so it’s important to recognize a committee-based buying authority situation.
Need: Does a Prospect Require Your Solution?
Identify what you expect will be a major concern of the executive and present a thought-provoking point of view. Your goal is to engage an executive who does not know you in a serious dialog and evoke some anxiety in them to solve the specific problem you are there to discuss.
You cannot afford to play safe as this will look like you are wasting their time; after all, when the executive agreed to the meeting, they did so to get some special insight into how to address their problem.
Matrix Marketing Group might not require our services if an organization hits all its sales targets. On the other hand, they may be looking to reduce costs and overhead. This is where our services help a potential client as well.
The sales reps want sales-ready leads, often called sales accepted leads (SAL).
Timeline: When is a Prospect Looking to Make a Decision?
Timing is everything, but sometimes, it’s not the right time for the deal to close. And there are countless reasons. A potential lead was maybe waiting for funding. Sales reps must discover a prospect’s timeline before handing that prospect over to the sales rep.
Let’s look at a real-world example from one of Matrix Marketing Group’s clients. They needed help fixing their sales-to-funnel leaks and improving their sales and marketing alignment.
One specific area of focus was the marketing-to-sales lead hand-off. Before we started, there was no specific marketing-qualified lead to sales-qualified lead hand-off. If you are in sales, you know what I mean.
An inexperienced marketing team may hand over anyone and all leads from a trade show, complete a form, or call in for more information. These are not leads and should be qualified before spending sales resources on them.
Their MQL to SQL ratio included the following:
- B: Software budget is > $50,000
- A: Meeting with CIO, CEO, or CFO
- N: Need is identified in the manufacturing space and problem with the supply chain
- T: Timing is < 180 days