Are you looking for more pipeline generation strategies to increase closed deals? You're in luck. Here are six tried-and-true methods that business professionals like you have found success with. Implement one or all of them into your sales process and watch your conversion rates go up!
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How much pipeline does your sales team need to close the deals they want?
It's a question many sales leaders ask themselves and one that is difficult to answer.
Pipeline generation has never been easier these days, which means you can spend more time talking to qualified prospects and converting them into pipeline faster.
The following pipeline generation strategies will help you maximize prospecting opportunities and deliver more qualified leads for your business!
Strategy #01: Prospect Early and Often
The best pipeline generation strategy is to prospect early and often.
This means that your sales reps should be reaching out to potential customers as soon as they identify a need.
Don't wait until the last minute when you're struggling to hit your goals. By then, it's usually too late.
Strategy #02: Qualify Leads Quickly
You can't generate pipeline if you're wasting time on unqualified leads. That's why it's important to qualify leads quickly.
Use a qualifying questionnaire or scoring system to help you determine whether a lead is worth pursuing. If they're not, move on.
Strategy #03: Finish Your Engagement Sequence ASAP
If you want to generate pipeline, make sure your sales reps are finishing the engagement sequence as soon as possible.
This includes all email and phone conversations. The more time they spend engaging with a prospect for an extended period of time, the better their chances are of converting them into pipeline.
Strategy #04: Use Social Selling to Qualify Leads
Social selling is a great way to qualify leads.
By using social media platforms like LinkedIn, your sales reps can identify potential customers and determine whether they're worth pursuing.
This allows you to focus on the best leads and generate more pipeline in the process.
Strategy #05: Nurture Leads into Opportunities
Not all pipeline comes from new leads—some of it can come from nurturing existing ones.
By creating a lead nurturing program, your sales reps will be able to identify qualified buyers and convert them into pipeline opportunities quickly.
Plus, this strategy is a great way to enhance the pipeline from existing leads.
Strategy #06: Keep a Clean Pipeline at All Times
The best pipeline generation strategy is to maintain a clean pipeline—this ensures that your reps are focusing on qualified opportunities and closing deals faster.
Make sure you're constantly following up with prospects, nurturing them through the funnel, and confirming pipeline opportunities.
As we enter the third quarter of the year, every player must have a solid pipeline strategy in place.
For any organisation to excel, succeed, and stay on top, a strong sales funnel is critical. According to Vantage Point data, 72 percent of sales managers meet with their sales associates at least once a month to assess their pipeline.
Despite this, 63% of respondents believe their organisations do a poor job of managing their sales pipelines, indicating that there is a lot of potential for improvement!
While the world has become digitally connected as all organisations are now handled remotely, sales and marketing teams are speaking the language of business, which is data. They are today, more than ever, data-driven.
The value of a sales pipeline to a company is that it allows you to track where your prospects are in the sales cycle.
It shows how many deals salespeople will close in a given week, month, or year, as well as their chances of meeting their sales quota.
Improve your sales funnel to move more prospects from one stage to the next. 'Revenue Growth' is the most significant benefit of a better pipeline.
According to a Harvard Business Review research, organisations that followed and specified a formal sales process grew revenue 18 percent faster than those that didn't.
Companies that mastered three specific pipeline strategies also witnessed a 28% increase in income!
Improved sales pipelines for B2B companies allow you to:
Maintain your follow-up calendar: According to research, closing a sales contract takes more than eight calls. Buyers have more options than ever before, given the available medium and technology.
As a result, keep consumers up to date on your product's features and benefits. Make a calendar containing a list of prospects, along with the dates of their initial calls and subsequent follow-ups.
After receiving passive responses on the first two calls, most salespeople give up. Following up isn't simple, to say the least.
It is the third most difficult task for your sales team. Maintaining a calendar will serve as a constant reminder to follow up with a specific client.
You'll be able to be more strict on this section if you automate the procedure.
Concentrate on high-value leads: Know how much a lead is worth before approaching it.
Concentrate your efforts on the most sales-ready, high-value prospects, and stay away from anything that won't help you or your company succeed.
Remove any leads that are no longer active from your list: When a lead expresses a definite disinterest in your items, it is considered dead. It's difficult to let go, especially when you've put so much effort and time into something.
Never mind; keep in mind that these leads will not go to the next stage of your sales process or contribute to your revenue in any way.
Learn how to recognise and assess leads. This way, you won't waste time on leads that aren't worth following up on.
Keep an eye on your pipeline metrics: The sales pipeline is a highly turbulent environment. It's always changing.
As a result, keeping an eye on the sales indicators is critical.
Make sure you're reviewing your sales pipeline weekly with these indicators.
Improve and refresh your sales pipeline: Don't let your sales pipeline become a jumbled mess. To avoid this, you must keep your pipeline up to date with every lead detail.
Continue to add new leads and eliminate the ones that are no longer active. At each level of the process, keep the status of the lead updated.
Use data insights to reduce your sales cycle: For B2B companies, the sales cycle is a never-ending process. According to CSO insights, a protracted sales cycle is one of the hurdles to sales effectiveness for 27% of sales reps.
True, because the longer your sales cycle is, the more likely your prospect is to change their mind and look for a different solution that addresses their pain points.
To shorten the sales cycle, you may combine tech intelligence with high-value intent signals to obtain the right pulse on your prospects and provide them with exactly what they want. It also strengthens your sales funnel.
Account-based marketing: For all of the prospects in your pipeline, you can't use the same dull strategy. It can be a real pain.
As a result, tailor your approach to the intent, inclination, technology, and knowledge of your prospects.
This will assist you in completing the transaction as quickly as possible. Account-Based Marketing can help you maintain leads moving through your pipelines.
To summarise, the sales pipeline is critical to any company's success. Its successful management might help you avoid losing new and high-value accounts. The tips above will help you keep your sales funnel healthy and generate a lot of revenue.
1. To narrow the scope, create specialised SDR roles.
Specialization in the architecture of the SDR job improves overall productivity by allowing for flexible resource allocation to help deploy SDRs against a specific audience to address pipeline coverage gaps proactively.
SDRs build greater expertise on the subject by focusing on a narrower area of sales motion, industry vertical, or account type, resulting in more successful prospecting.
SDRs are guided to prioritise groups of prospect accounts with larger deal sizes, a higher likelihood of closing, faster sales cycles, or prospect targets that are strategically important for the company but difficult to connect with using a tiered-coverage model based on the organization's ideal customer profile (ICP).
SDRs should be classified into one of three sorts based on how leads are generated and how accounts are targeted within a specific market segment: inbound, market development, or target account.
Market factors such as market maturity, size of the target account list (TAL), average sales price (ASP), length of sales cycles, and buyer profile complexity all influence the charter of each action.
If a business receives enough inbound demand, it can specialise by motion; for example, around 300 leads per month can sustain one full-time inbound SDR.
2. Assign Data Responsibilities to Roles That Are More Cost-Effective
Using SDRs to undertake huge amounts of human data entry is a waste of time and money.
By allocating demand generation or operations resources to streamline the data management process for SDRs, you may redirect SDRs' time to high-impact sales engagement duties.
This necessitates resources to calculate data coverage needs on a regular basis, obtain new data from third parties, and then load the data into the CRM.
Existing CRM data necessitates ongoing depth and quality evaluations, data intelligence appending/enrichment, and, if necessary, orchestrating low-cost personnel to scrub and append the CRM with updated data.
CSOs that want to boost their sales development team's productivity right away should solicit the aid of their operations and/or marketing partners.
3. Create a sales engagement playbook that is prescriptive and aligned with workflows.
With today's sales interaction technologies, sales development is practically ubiquitous.
93 percent of sales development teams indicated this technology had a high or very high influence on their business, according to a 2020 Gartner poll of sales engagement technology buyers.
SDR ramp times are shortened and productivity is increased with an effective sales interaction playbook.
The playbook is intended to assist SDRs in executing touch patterns, which are a series of messages delivered over many channels over a period of time.
With prospecting process direction on which touch patterns to employ and how to execute messaging, the playbook makes SDR decision-making easier.
Regardless of channel, messaging guidance is available at every stage of the touch pattern. SDR teams of the highest calibre adjust touch patterns to the prospect's lead source and purchase stage.
Buyer sentiment, call outcomes, and conversion rates are all factors that advanced teams consider while optimising their touch patterns.
4. Use Conversation Intelligence to Increase Manager Impact
While the first three levers assist SDRs in initiating more conversations, conversation intelligence ensures that those discussions are successfully converted into opportunities and allows managers to maximise the effectiveness of call coaching.
SDRs require four to six hours of one-on-one coaching every month. Conversation intelligence technology, which identifies which behaviours to coach based on outcomes (rather than manager hunch), then uses artificial intelligence to help choose which calls to prioritise, can help managers scale their effect.
As a result, coaching discussions are centred on high-impact behaviours. SDRs can get personalised coaching based on what their supervisors hear on the phone and what the data reveals are the most important issues.
After adopting conversation intelligence, a team of 50 SDRs divided among five managers raised SDR appointment booking rates by five times, making SDRs one of the organization's most cost-effective pipeline generation channels, according to a Gartner case study.
