Creating A Sales Pipeline: Do You Need One?

11 July of 2014

The basic idea of a product sales pipeline is to estimate the long run product sales you’re trying to close.  Gradually, this information becomes your product sales forecast.  Every season of market, organizations need to prepare well planned worksheet after spreadsheet  to estimate product sales for every month, one fourth and year  even as far as ten years into their company’s future.  This type of forecasting can give you crucial planning information, particularly for source allowance.  Some organizations gather information depending on gut instinct, assumptions  and the best idea of their product sales personnel. Sometimes they do get fortunate and hit upon accurate numbers.

A product sales pipeline is an organization’s individual strategy to how it wants to run its  sales in all seasons successfully. It’s a step-by-step process that informs everything from contact with a solid client all the way to creating a profitable sale.

Discover Your Prospects

Before we can discuss managing your pipeline, you need a direction to start with. Where  you will find your leads? There are different roots producing leads. That’s a whole other post, or book for that matter. Examine the 30 biggest prospecting tips, techniques, and concepts if you need some motivation. In Base, we have a few resources that will supports you increase your product sales pipeline. First is the lead Capture type. A  lead capture type provides you the capability to catch information from prospects who visit your web page and want  more information on your web page. The base gives you the capability to create and embed lead capture types to show on your web page and Facebook page. Lead capture types can be strong silver for your company.

Identify The Real Potential

To start, acquire information from the probability such as prospective complete product sales dollars and quantity for a particular period of time (week, per month, year, etc.).  Remember, there’s no room for estimation here!  There is no question that a current customer or a prospect has, the more precise information about how much product/service it may buy. Collect every bit of information that can affect whether a customer can or will buy from you. Don’t forget to confirm your gut either.

 Understand Decision Makers

In some cases, your contact with may be your choice maker.  But many times, buying choices may be made by key professionals depending on price, quantity, unpredictable market conditions or other reasons particular to their market.  Asking your contact about key decision maker(s) can be an uncomfortable conversation that may not help you in the end.  Try softening your approach: let the consumer know that this purchase would represent an important expense for your company, where it would need professional acceptance.

Sales pipeline research can expose several threats, like optimistic close  schedules and CRM data quality problems, according to Oriol, but the most obvious and serious risk is stagnation in product sales opportunities.