🤔 Looking to improve your sales pipeline and turn more prospects into loyal customers? You’re in the right place. ✅
🤯 We know that pipeline management can sometimes be a real headache, but: with a good understanding of the principle, the right strategies and a few practical tips…
You’ll be able to improve your sales pipeline, by optimizing every step, boosting your results, identifying hidden opportunities and maximizing your chances of success! 🚀
🤩 Get ready to transform your approach and see your numbers soar! On the program ⬇️ :
- Sales pipeline Definition.
- Getting a sales pipeline off to a good start.
- 6 steps to building a successful sales pipeline.
- 5 tips to make your sales pipeline even more effective.
Are you ready? Let’s get started. 😎
Sales Pipeline Meaning
🛠️ A sales pipeline is a strategic tool used by sales teams to manage and track prospects through various stages of the sales process. 🤑
👀 It’s a structured visual representation that shows how leads progress (based on their levels of engagement and maturity) through the key stages of the buying process, from first interaction to closing the sale.📍
By following each prospect through the different phases, it’s possible to better understand where potential blockages lie, and identify the solutions needed to move prospects forward to the next stage. 🕹️
👉🏼 Finally, the sales pipeline provides valuable performance indicators to help sales team ensure they don’t miss out on any opportunities. ⚡️
💡 But, its usefulness goes far beyond its commercial goals… 🎯 Let’s talk about the other benefits of a sales pipe that starts well!
Why & How To Get A Sales Pipeline Off To A Good Start?
A good sales pipeline offers several advantages ✨ :
- 📍 Clearly visualize where your leads stand, which can help identify problems and correct them later.
- 🛟 Help sales teams organize and prioritize their efforts on the most promising commercial opportunities.
- 🤑 Estimate and have more precise details of future revenues by analyzing the number and value of opportunities by stages (visibility on forecast sales and revenue targets).
- 📊 Help identify bottlenecks, optimize the sales process, reduce costs and maximize your results (especially through marketing automation).
- 🤝 Facilitate collaboration within your sales team, while improving customer relations by providing a framework for communication and interaction.
But, to reap all these benefits, the sales pipeline must first be good, and therefore have been well launched. 🚨
👀 So, before you get started, here are 7 things you need to do for a successful implementation 👇🏼 :
In short, to be truly effective, pipeline must remain living, useful tools; they must not be regarded as mere “management documents”.
⏰ Now, as promised, it’s time to look in detail at the sales pipeline template with indispensable steps. 🤩
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How To Build A Strong Sales Pipeline In 7 Stages
We’ll cover each of the sales pipeline stages in detail first, when that’s done, we’ll give you an example of a sales pipeline managed with Waalaxy. 👽
Generate Opportunities
🚨 Before you get started, you absolutely must generate opportunities to include in your sales pipeline. 🤑 That is, identify and attract potential prospects who could become customers.
📲 Among, all possible strategies to achieve this (social networks, webinars, events, content marketing, prospecting campaigns and targeted advertising, partnerships…).
We recommend LinkedIn to generate unlimited business opportunities. 👤 And, your search will be even more effective if you combine it with automation and/or scraping software. 🤖
👽 Thanks to Waalaxy, we show you how to generate a constant/regular flow of opportunities that will feed your sales pipeline and make it dynamic ✨ :
- Start by opening the Waalaxy Chrome extension.
- Open your LinkedIn application or LinkedIn Sales Navigator (on a computer).
- Type your keyword in the search bar.
- Remember to select the “people” search and the level of contacts.
- Import your contacts into Waalaxy: simply indicate the number of contacts to be imported and click on confirm. ✅
If the flow of sales opportunities isn’t constant, the sales pipeline dries up, limiting the chances of conversion and sales growth, and ultimately endangering the business’s stability. ❌
We’ll show you, right away, how to qualify your prospect lists, before starting your Waalaxy campaign. 🚀
Qualifying Opportunities
So, you’ve just imported your contacts into Waalaxy. 🤗 But this list is not qualified. 😱
And, how can you launch a prospecting campaign without having a file of qualified prospects? 🤔 Impossible, or in any case, it will be an assured failure.
🏆 So, to help you succeed in your sales pipeline, we’re going to show you how to clean and qualify your files! 💎 Let’s pick up where we left off:
- Check that your contacts have been imported, go to Waalaxy then to “Prospects” and select the list you’ve created.
- Clean up your list on Waalaxy: lists imported from LinkedIn may contain a proportion of «false positives», the aim is to reduce this proportion as much as possible.
- We will therefore sort and exclude profiles that we identify as not corresponding to our marketing targeting.❌
- Either by blacklisting them in a specific list so they can’t be used again.
- Or simply by deleting the contact from the list.
If required, use Waalaxy’s enrichment features with 🦾 :
👉🏼 AI Prospect Finder (automatic search and addition of similar prospects to your lists).
👉🏼 Email Finder (automatic retrieval of your leads’ professional emails).
Campaign Preparation
Now that you’ve got a file of qualified prospects, it’s time to prepare your prospecting campaign, linked to your sales pipeline! 🎉
- At the top of the home page, click on “Create a campaign” (LinkedIn, Email, or multichannel) and name it.
- 🤖 Then, you’ll have to choose from the automated sequences available in the template library, to communicate with your target (invitation, message(s), Email Finder).
- Then select “From my lists” and the prospect list you’ve created containing the desired contacts. 👤
Pause! 🙌🏼 Your campaign is almost ready, we’ve reached the halfway point in your sales pipeline. 📍
Personalizing & Optimizing Interactions
⏰ It’s time to optimize and personalize interactions for conversion, thanks to the information collected about your leads and Waalaxy’s features. 😈
- ⚙️ Write and optimize your message(s) and emails for conversion, thanks to various elements to include in the text:
- ℹ️ Subject line (for emails).
- 🧲 Catchphrase.
- *️⃣ Variables (first name, last name and company).
- 💎 Value proposition/solution.
- 🕹️ Call-to-Action (CTA)
- 📸 Visual(s).
- 🔗 Attachment.
- ➡️ Other: GIFs, emojis, voice notes, links to external resources…
- 🛟 To help you with your project :
Personalizing interactions is essential, as it increases the chances of conversion, the level of engagement and strengthens the customer relationship.
- Next, you’ll need to indicate the delay time between your mailings (from 0 to 28 days) if there are several of them. 📆
- Finally, you can validate, to access the summary of the prospecting campaign. All that’s left to do is launch it. 🚀
Negotiation And/Or Closing
That’s it, you’ve got answers and converted prospects into leads! 🤩 Now you’re one step closer to converting your sales and acquiring as many customers as possible. ✌🏼
🤑 But first, you need to “close the sale” (which includes managing objections, the proposal and the business negotiation, depending on the nature of the offer and the type of customer).
Closer? 🤔 Closing is when a final agreement is reached and formalized, often by signing a contract, issuing a purchase order, or completing a purchase. ✅
👉🏼 For example, at Waalaxy, our customer support team provides assistance throughout the entire sales process. This means that our support-heroes are sometimes involved in closing, guiding customers towards the most appropriate solution.
📍 It’s at this decisive stage that your entire sales pipeline is at stake! You’ll need to be able to finalize all the details to ensure a successful transaction, or start from scratch. 😱
🤷🏻♀️ Here, Waalaxy, won’t help you. 🫵🏼 It’s up to you or your team to bring your soft skills in sales, negotiation and customer experience/relations to bear 🎨… or other, depending on your activities!
Monitoring & Managing Sales Pipeline
Sales pipeline tracking and management must be effective to ensure a smooth sales process, maximize conversions and optimize sales strategies. 🤑
🔍 It involves (pro)actively monitoring the progress of leads through the various stages of the sales pipeline, and not just waiting for prospects to return/complete.
🛠️ Of course, this step must almost necessarily be carried out using a CRM or automation tool, to centralize information and facilitate management. 📊 Like the Waalaxy dashboard. 👽
👉🏼 Here’s how to carry out rigorous monitoring and ensure that every opportunity has the best chance of converting into a sale 💸 :
- Use KPIs like step-by-step progress rate and average time spent per step, which will roughly indicate how long it will take for your leads to convert into customers. ✅
- Set up cueing and ranking systems to quickly identify the status of each contact. For this, use tags on Waalaxy. 👇🏼
🏷️ Use tags on Waalaxy to revisit prospects who are inactive, lost or stagnating at a stage in the pipeline to find out if their needs or circumstances have changed.
👉🏼 For example, with regular renewal/relaunch reminders, status updates, personalized follow-up, etc.
- Analyze regularly to :
- 💎 Maintain the quality of your prospecting databases: accurate, up-to-date information, avoid duplication and obsolescence, effectively segment targeted marketing actions…
- ❌ Identify trends, bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement based on metrics gained.
- 🤝 Help your teams forecast next steps, identify the most interesting sales opportunities, estimate the average conversion rate etc…
Integrate Sales Pipeline Into A CRM Tool
🤖 When your customer data has been properly separated from that of your prospects, and your automation software has performed all the actions in the sales pipeline…
It’s likely that you’ll need to integrate the stages of your sales pipeline, as well as their information, into a third-party CRM tool, specialized in data management. 📉
⚙️ Of course, Waalaxy gives you the option of integrating it with various platforms: Hubspot, NoCRM, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho, etc.
👉🏼 Centralizing the sales pipeline through automation software AND a complementary CRM tool enables :
- A clear, organized overview.
- Improve sales forecasts.
- Optimize sales opportunity management.
- And facilitate collaboration within the sales team.
As a reminder, you can use Waalaxy without any additional third-party tools thanks to its automation and CRM features directly integrated into the platform: lists, tags, dashboard, inbox, etc.
That’s it, the sales pipeline stages are over! 📍By following them, you’re well on your way to creating a high-performance sales pipeline that will support your business’ growth. 🌱
Sales Pipeline Example
🎁 Finally, to help you even further, here’s an example of a sales pipeline created with Waalaxy by one of our customers. 🦾
NB: There are 5 types of sales pipeline: direct, BtoB, BtoC, subscription, inbound and outbound. 💡
5 Tips To Improve Your Sales Pipeline
🛟 To help you improve your sales pipeline and maximize your chances of success, we’re going to give you a few final tips exclusively 😉
- ⚡︎Use lead scoring to assign scores to leads based on their behavior and engagement. This will help you prioritize those most likely to convert.
- 🔭 Integrate sales pipeline software to get a clear, interactive overview of your pipeline. This allows you to quickly spot trends and friction points.
- 💭 Keep in touch and remain present in the prospect‘s mind (sales action and/or marketing strategy to be selected accordingly).
- 🤖 Automate repetitive tasks and create personalized sequences with CRM tools to free up time and focus on higher value-added tasks.
- ✅ Set up SLAs (Service-Level Agreements) between teams to ensure that leads are processed quickly and efficiently.
By applying these tips, you can improve the efficiency of your sales pipeline, increase your conversion rate and boost your (or your customers’) bottom line/sales. 🤑
Conclusion: Is Waalaxy The Best Tool To Use To Manage Your Sales Pipeline?
💡 To recap, Waalaxy lets you automate your sales pipeline and run multichannel campaigns, from lead generation to customer conversion. 💥
You can ✅ :
- Generate leads, then target and segment/group them into lists.
- Enrich your lists and extract emails thanks to AI for sales prospecting.
- Choose from a multitude of multichannel sequence templates (LinkedIn and Email).
- Optimize and personalize your content for interaction.
- Analyze lead behavior and track the customer journey.
- Prioritize, manage and make (or re-make) contact at different stages of the process.
- Track performance indicators and deepen results by integrating a third-party tool.
Unlike other software on the market, it’s accessible to beginners as well as more advanced profiles. 😇
✨ Waalaxy also offers top-quality support thanks to multiple resources and a team of kick-ass support-heroes.
🤑 There’s no reason not to adopt it! 🔥
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What’s The Difference Between Sales Pipeline VS Sales Tunnel?
Sales pipeline and sales funnel are often confused. 🤷🏻♀️ However, they have clear distinctions: the sales pipeline is an internal process, while the sales tunnel is more of an external process. 👇🏼
➡️ The sales pipeline is a visual and strategic representation of the stages a prospect goes through before becoming a customer, focusing on the actions and follow-up of the sales team.
➡️ The sales tunnel, on the other hand, focuses on the customer journey, and is centered on the experience and behavior of potential customers.
How To Calculate Sales Pipeline Velocity?
💨 Sales pipeline velocity measures how quickly prospects progress in the pipeline. 🤩 It is calculated by multiplying four key variables:
- Number of total opportunities in the pipeline.
- Average financial value of opportunities.
- Conversion rate: Percentage of opportunities that turn into sales.
- Average sales cycle time: Average time to convert an opportunity into a sale.
The formula for calculating pipeline velocity is as follows:
(Number of opportunities × Average value × Conversion rate) / Average sales cycle time
🤑 This metric helps forecast revenue and identify improvements needed to accelerate the sales process. ✨
What Is The Difference Between Sales Pipeline VS Sales Forecast?
You already know that the sales pipeline represents all sales opportunities in progress, and that it gives an overall view of the volume and progression of leads in the sales cycle. 💁🏻♀️
💡 In contrast, a sales forecast estimates the future revenue based on the current deals in the pipeline, considering factors like :
- deal size,
- probability of closure,
- and expected closing dates.
👉🏼 In summary, while the pipeline focuses on managing active leads, the forecast projects future sales performance, aiding in planning and decision-making. 🏆
Now you know all about the sales pipeline and how to improve yours! See you soon! 👽
