The Ultimate Guide to a BIG FAT Sales Pipeline

As a sales leader, your team’s sales pipeline is everything. Without a robust pipeline, your sales team cannot make their sales targets/quota and your job is ultimately at risk. The sales pipeline affects important decisions, such as evaluating and training your salespeople, securing funding, and determining your individual success.

At Vengreso, our fundamental commitment is to provide sellers with the tools and knowledge they need to effectively expand their sales pipeline. We do this by leveraging sales prospecting tools like FlyMSG and through sales prospecting training called FlyLearning. The goal? To help sales teams create more sales conversations or book more hellos, building trust with prospects, which leads to building a healthier sales pipeline and closing deals.

For that reason, we’re devoting this post to this all-important topic of building a sales pipeline. We’ll begin by explaining what a sales pipeline is, the stages of a sales pipeline, how to manage a sales pipeline, how to attract potential customers and finally how to teach your sales reps to develop a consistent pipeline building cadence that hits your revenue targets.

What Is a Sales Pipeline?

In simple terms, pipeline means viable opportunities with qualified prospects. And one of your responsibilities is to coach your sellers how to do proper lead qualification to always build a solid pipeline that helps your reps hit revenue targets. Having a repeatable sales strategy and a prospecting program is what can help you keep a strong sales pipeline filled at all times.

The sales pipeline describes a series of steps in the sales process, from a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) to customer and what actions sales reps must take at each step. Here’s an important consideration: the sales pipeline starts with an SQL, not before.

How did the sales lead become an SQL? Perhaps he or she visited your website multiple times, downloaded an eBook, guide, registered for a webinar or requested a demo. To be clear, qualifying leads is a marketing function. So, whatever the sales leads needed to do as defined by your B2B marketing lead scoring system is not your job to manage. Marketing must focus on driving enough engagement with valuable content to drive potential buyers to earn them enough points in order to be deemed a potential sales qualified lead. It’s at this point that it should be turned over to sales.

The SQL is someone who is actively on their buying journey. Unfortunately, not many marketing leads make it this far. According to Technology Advice, only 27% of B2B leads become sales-ready.

What are the Different Sales Pipeline Stages?

The names and number of stages in a sales pipeline may vary from company to company and by leader to leader. How they decide to set it up in their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to track the buyer’s journey through the sales funnel is negotiable.

You can segment your sales pipeline and plan your sales activities in a variety of ways. Although it can be confusing at times, the following is a list of some common sales pipeline stages. The goal with this is to standardize your sales process as much as possible to be able to create a set of stages for the sales pipeline that your entire sales team can follow.

It’s also important to note, if you have multiple buyer personas, you’ll want to create a unique approach for each of your sales pipelines. The sales pipeline should focus both on the process from the business’s and marketer’s point of view, and is concerned with the buyer’s journey. Meaning what action must your sales prospects take to indicate they are qualified at each pipeline stage.

Sellers should strive to keep sales cycles short, moving prospects through the sales stages as quickly as possible, and utilizing sales pipeline software to streamline and track this process.

1. Discovery and Qualifying leads

During this first stage, the sales rep contacts the new lead and determines if the product or service fits their needs. They then create a timeline for when they would buy and validate their budget. Each team has a particular set of qualifying questions, but the most common are the BANT questions.

• Budget: Do they have a budget to spend on this solution?
• Authority: Are the sellers talking to the right person at the company?
• Need: Do they need our product or service? What are the pain points?
• Timeline: Do they have a definite timeline in mind to purchase?

Even if your sellers receive a “no” from an SQL in any of those qualifying questions, that doesn’t mean the sales leads are dead. Perhaps they’re not ready to purchase in the near term or ready to divulge all the cards to your seller. In those, cases, the seller can stay in touch with the prospect for a future sales opportunity.

Now, if the prospect responds positively to all the qualifying questions, they can be moved to the next stage: Pursue.

Remember, your goal here is to help the seller build an unbeatable sales pipeline and a sales forecast that achieves the sales goals.

2. Pursue

Now the seller will meet with the prospect to better understand their needs and go over any details regarding the solution. Often times this may be the stage they perform a demo.

This sales pipeline stage typically has rules before a sales person can move the sales leade to the next stage of the pipeline. For example, after a discovery call the deal may be a long term deal that still requires lead nurturing. On the other hand, if the prospect told the salesperson on the discovery call they have an immediate need with budget and intent to buy, that first call could result in moving the stage directly to “contract” based on those circumstances.

As the sales activity progresses, the rep changes the status in the pipeline according to the criteria in their sales methodology.

The sales pipeline focuses much more on what is said by a buyer vs. what actions they take on your website to become a sales qualified lead.

3. Propose

The seller drafts a business proposal letter and sends it to the prospect, describing the benefits of the solution, the investment and the expected ROI. The rep may also share some customer testimonials to build credibility. At this stage it’s worth investing in a business proposal maker that can really catch decision-makers’ attention and get them to actually look at the product after the discovery call.

During this stage, sellers prepare a Forecasted to Close report, so sales leaders can identify if sellers will meet quota, and what the sources of expected revenue are.

To complete this report, sellers must ask their point of contact another series of questions regarding the buying committee (the decision-makers or buying influences at the company).

Increasingly, corporate buying committees are growing with more people that are difficult to reach. Part of the seller’s job is identifying and reaching buying committee influencers. On average there are 6.8 decision-makers in any B2B buying decision.

For instance, these are some questions your sellers could ask:

• Who is driving this initiative?
• Who else do you need to speak to for final sign off on this deal?
• Who will be most impacted by this solution?
• Who are you going to take this information to next?
• Who has to sign off on the deal?
• Who holds the power to veto the deal?
• Are you projecting we’ll have this signed and contracted in the next 30 days?

With this information, the seller can forecast when the deal is going to close.

4. Contract

Now that the seller understands the decision process, the difference between proposal vs contract, and the prospect has received the proposal, they enter into the contract negotiation and closing stage.

There are often two parts to closing a B2B sale:

a. Reaching a decision with the ultimate decision-maker on the business terms of the purchase.

b. Getting the contract in order through the customer’s legal and procurement departments.

Sometimes this process is easy and happens in a day or two, but it can often take weeks or even months.

The two possible outcomes of this stage are closed-won or closed-lost. If the seller wins the deal, he can then pass on the client’s information to Customer Success for implementation. If he loses the deal, the seller must consider whether the prospect bought from a competitor, thus eliminating future possibilities; or whether simply no decision was made, which means there may be an opportunity to revisit the deal in the future.

As part of this stage in the pipeline, sellers should identify in the CRM the sales software they used to close the deal, whether won or lost. This will allow sales leaders to calculate the ROI or their sales tools and make informed decisions about which tools to renew and which to cancel.

Directly below, you’ll find our Vengreso stages of the sales pipeline. It’s taken directly out of our CRM to give you an idea of how we guide our sellers of when and how to move a deal through the sales pipeline.

Sales Pipeline vs. Sales Funnel: What’s the Difference?

Although sometimes people confuse a sales pipeline with a sales funnel, they are not the same. While the sales pipeline describes the actions the seller takes to convert an SQL into a client, the sales funnel is a visual representation of average conversion rates as prospects and qualified leads go through the sales cycle.

The sales funnel provides sales leaders with concrete numbers of how many leads are converting. In some organizations, the sales funnel includes both the marketing and the sales processes, from lead generation to sales prospecting to closing.

How to Manage a Sales Pipeline

Sales leaders must have a methodology that minimizes subjective assignment (guessing) of the pipeline stages. The absence of a methodology can result in sales reps labeling a company as an opportunity too soon, before they’ve been qualified, without intent to buy or a budget. Leaders must coach reps to the methodology.

To effectively manage a sales pipeline, it is crucial to first build a sales pipeline by identifying buyers, defining pipeline stages, and setting revenue targets. In fact, companies that master pipeline management see a 28% higher revenue.

However, do not spend too much time on administrative tasks. Instead, implement automation processes for every non-sales activity and make sure your reps are focusing on selling, not paperwork (albeit digital paperwork). This is where efficient sales pipeline management comes into play, leveraging tools to automate sales activities (such as PSA software), track team performance, and identify areas needing intervention in the sales pipeline.

Create Your Ideal Customer Profile

When it comes to prospecting, you need to concentrate on those who are most likely to generate revenues. It is important to create your own Ideal Customers Profile, or ICP, for products and services to target and fill your market. They differ from the people that sell to buyers because ICP is business that you’d sell to, while buyer personas are business you’d sell to. For creating the ICP the first step must be to gather common customer parameters. Does this group have specific niche segments? Does everything have the same shape?

And let’s not forget to measure. The more you measure and track, the greater your chances of success. Let’s look at the metrics you should be tracking.

What Metrics Should you Track in Sales Pipeline Management?

A sales manager must have in place to track the effectiveness of the pipeline. Sales managers play a crucial role in predicting which opportunities will likely close, helping deals move efficiently through the sales process, conducting efficient sales pipeline review meetings, and enabling sales reps and sales managers to forecast the number and dollar amounts of deals that will close in a time period. Here are some sales pipeline metrics to track:

• Deal volume.
• Sales velocity (time from the first call to close).
• Number of people in buying activity.
• Stages where reps struggle the most.
• Conversion of sales conversation to pipeline worthy deals.

Sales pipeline management will help you identify the best lead sources, the most successful sales techniques and which reps are achieving sales quickly versus those who are low performing.

For example, tracking deal volume will tell you which sellers are not creating enough sales conversations or not converting their opportunities. These reps are less likely to meet or exceed quota and may need coaching or up leveling their skills through virtual sales training.

You want to consider if you’re consistently hitting your sales target? If not, then it’s time to evaluate either what funnel stage may need more support or where your sales team may be falling behind. It’s important to monitor your metrics so that you can conduct a thorough sales pipeline analysis to pinpoint any gaps that may exist and identify areas where more training or support may be needed.

Best Practices to Manage your Sales Pipeline

One of the most important elements of a healthy sales pipeline is a documented methodology or a set of rules. Without them, sales reps randomly assign deals to the pipeline often with overconfidence or to avoid the scrutiny of not having enough deals in the pipeline.

Adhere to a particular sales methodology and ensure your sales tech stack supports every activity. Reinforce the criteria of the methodology with reps until it’s clear they understand it.

There are many sales methodologies that work like a formula for sellers to follow and obtain consistent results. If you don’t have a formula that specifically helps your reps to build their sales pipeline, you should learn a simple but powerful 3-step formula we developed called the PVC Sales Methodology TM – which stands for: Personalization, Value, and Call-to-action.

How to Maintain a Sales Pipeline

Other best practices to maintain your sales pipeline include:

• Conducting weekly sales coaching with your reps to review sales activity and the conversion rate into sales pipeline and closed-won/lost deals.
• Training sales reps on how to make the most out of their CRM (i.e. sales pipeline software), or sales pipeline management solution (and don’t forget to track the usage and ROI of each of those tools).
• Making decisions based on data and not instincts. Measure and take action on the results.

Listen to a sales leader in the trenches give his advice on sales pipeline best practices on this episode of The Modern Selling podcast:

Finally, make sure your sellers are staying in touch with their clients and cultivating the relationship. Remember that it costs 5x more to gain a new customer than to retain one. This is the foundation for customer success.

Continuously Add Leads to your Pipeline

Developing an effective marketing process can be difficult. Many reps have yet to experience prospecting, so you can easily create a dry sales pipeline once your business is built. As sales teams focus more on completing sales contracts, many forget to prospect for the upcoming month, taking them back to their scheduled date the following month.

Ideally, a sales pipeline has many more opportunities in prospecting than the sales closing phase. The number of potential clients decreases gradually, and the chance of closing increases gradually.

Define Sales Activities for Different Stages of the Pipeline

Throughout the entire sales process, each stage in an upcoming sale is a workflow process which will turn prospects into buyers. For example, conducting research prospecting emails, calling, personalizing LinkedIn posts or handling skepticism or a complaint.

Most companies will have similar sales funnel stages but the tasks executed by the organization make for the best strategy for success. Make sure you have a thorough understanding of each step of the sales pipeline and how it will work for you. Can we use the ‘first contact’ information as an example?

Teaching Your Reps How to Build Their Pipeline

Sales leaders have the responsibility to train their sales reps how to build a sales pipeline. Building a sales pipeline involves steps like identifying buyers, setting revenue targets, and managing the sales pipeline stages. Here are four things you can do to get them started.

Teach them how to:

1. Build Relationships Through Social Media

B2B sales reps must leverage LinkedIn tools to build relationships with modern buyers. Using LinkedIn®‘s advanced search feature they can find people who fit their buyer persona and begin engaging with them in various ways.

For instance, in our FlyMSG Sales Pro for individuals program, we teach sellers how to find, engage and connect with prospects using proven techniques that build trust. Sellers should never pitch their product or service without building a relationship and earning trust first.

2. Develop Thought Leadership

Sharing valuable high-quality content through LinkedIn®, email and other channels is a great way to build thought leadership and gain followers on social media.

Sales reps must learn how to share relevant content (articles, videos, events, etc.) that is attractive to their target buyers. Thus, prospects will see them as trusted sources in their industry, increasing their chances of starting a sales conversation. You may consider the use of a LinkedIn post generator to help you share though leadership daily, such as our own FlyPosts AI. With it, you will be able to create content in seconds using AI to generate thought leadership and unique social media posts bolstering your brand.

Listen to this conversation between Vengreso’s former CCO and a co-founder, Bernie Borges, and Vengreso’s CEO, Mario Martinez Jr. to learn how to leverage content to fill your sales pipeline.

3. Ask for Referrals

According to HubSpot, 73% of executives prefer to work with salespeople referred by someone they know.

Referrals are a great way for sellers to fill their sales pipelines. If they have built relationships with people on LinkedIn®, they probably have connections that would be happy to introduce them to prospective buyers who may be second or third-degree connections.

Before starting, have your sales team pull out their list of existing clients and past clients who have had good sales experiences.

Then, have your sales reps choose which prospects they want to focus their energy on. Send them to the prospects’ profile and view the mutual connections section on LinkedIn or shared connections on LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

At Vengreso we teach a two-step digital referral process:

Step #1: Ask for an Introduction

At this point, your reps should choose three to five people with whom they share a mutual or shared connection with their targeted prospect. Their goal is to find which of these mutual connections have the strongest relationship with the prospect. Whoever has the best relationship, that’s the one your rep should ask for a referral from.

Then, your seller should write a personalized message to the connection asking them if they are willing to introduce them to the prospect. This message should reference their business relationship and any other personal details, such as how they met.

Don’t forget to allow a few days for a response. Once all three to five mutual connections have responded, choose the connection with the best relationship for Step #2.

If during the first round of contacting three people your sellers don’t get a positive response, they can try again, reaching out to three more mutual connections.

Step #2: Send the Prepared Message to Your Connection

Next, your rep should write an introduction letter the mutual connection can send to the prospect. This should be brief and to the point. When your rep sends this to the connection, they should also include the option that they can, of course, write their own introduction message. The purpose of providing them with a template or a drafted letter is so you wouldn’t need to steal precious time from their busy schedules. You may consider using third party tools to help you streamline this part of the process. Tools such as our own sales productivity assistant: FlyMSG the auto text expander, that provides you with top sales templates for you and your team.

The prewritten message should also include a phrase such as, “I’ll let you two take it from here.” That way, once your connection has made the introduction, they can be removed from subsequent emails.

Either way, always ask them to CC you. That way, you’re already included in the message and you know your referral actually introduced you.

Watch the following video to see this referral process in action:

4. Leverage personalized video messages to build rapport

Second only to being face-to-face with a person, sales video is the best way to humanize communication in the sales process and should be within your sales plan. Through sales videos, prospects can see facial expressions, hand gestures, and personality. These are key elements of nonverbal communication that are lost when sellers only communicate through voice calls or text messages.

That’s why we developed the FlyMSG Sales Pro for Teams virtual training course, where we teach sales teams the skills they need to create and send video messages that help them stand out from the crowd and create more sales conversations.

How Can You Increase the Efficiency of Your Sales Pipeline?

To master how to efficiently keep your sales pipeline filled, it’s important to review where your existing customers come from. This will enable you to pinpoint those channels that may be worth pursuing as you prospect to find more leads, and to find them faster. As sales professionals, knowing how to attract leads, engage with prospects, and close deals is core to the success of your sales organization.

The key is to implement processes to track your sales team’s effectiveness whether it is through a sales pipeline CRM software. That way you can monitor if your sales team is reaching their established sales targets and where they may need further support, should they fall short of the sales forecast. It’s important to also consider that if you have multiple pipelines what you can do to optimize each so that you have a steady flow of leads to pursue.

Analyzing key metrics such as sales performance (via tracking revenue goals or using a sales tracking scorecard), sales cycle length, and number of new leads added to your sales CRM per quarter can give you incredible insight into how well your sales team is performing. Should they consistently miss quota, exploring ways to have the sales team partner with your marketing team to generate more and better quality leads is a great next step to explore.

How to Calculate Sales Pipeline Velocity

Could you tell me the possibilities of 50 sales pipelines? Your winnings average 40%, and your average deals are $10,000 or more. It usually takes around 70 days to complete an initial consultation to sign the agreement. Your pipeline speed = 50×000 / 70 or $2587.14. This means approximately $2587.34 moves in your sales pipeline each day. The faster you get, the easier it gets. What are some ways to improve pipeline speed? The four key cylinders are synchronized to be unsurprisingly related in the four equations.

Using LinkedIn® to Build your Sales Pipeline

Have your sellers mastered social selling to build their sales pipelines? Times have changed and modern B2B buyers are more digitally savvy, preferring to conduct independent research before talking to a sales rep. The modern buyer requires sellers who are a resource, a guide, a helper in their buying journey.

Now that everyone is working from home, modern sellers need the skills to find, engage and connect with prospective buyers digitally. Our FlyMSG Sales Pro for Individuals and FlyMSG Sales Pro for teams virtual training programs are designed to teach sellers those skills and help them build their sales pipeline digitally.

Before completely giving up on a prospect, send them a sales breakup email (sales process)

Within the sales pipeline, there are various stages through which potential leads progress, and managing these stages effectively is crucial for maximizing conversions. When engaging with prospects, there could be three distinct outcomes: they express disinterest, they do not respond, or they may fall into a category where further nurturing is required before progressing.

When a Prospect Expresses Disinterest?

In the first scenario, if prospects explicitly express their interest, they must respect their decision and gracefully exit them from the sales pipeline. This maintains professionalism and frees up valuable resources to focus on more promising leads.

What if the Prospect does not Respond?

The second scenario, where prospects do not respond, presents a different challenge. Following up strategically is essential, as well as using various communication channels and timing strategies to reignite their interest. However, if, despite multiple attempts, there is still no response, it may be an indication that the prospect needs to be actively engaged or may not be a viable lead at the moment. In such cases, we should pause further outreach and revisit the prospect later, perhaps with a re-engagement campaign to help them.

What if the Prospect Needs Further Nurturing?

Lastly, in situations where a prospect requires further nurturing before progressing in the sales pipeline, they can be categorized accordingly, perhaps as “Contact in a year” or similar designations within the CRM system. These prospects are preserved but earmarked for future engagement, allowing for ongoing relationship-building efforts.