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Many B2B companies will fall prey to dismal sales conversion rates. This is because they fail to create an efficient sales process, especially in their growth phases.
As a result, while many B2B organizations struggle to get leads, many have a tough time converting leads.
Many B2B brands put their entire focus solely on conversion. And they fail to understand there’s more to managing a sales pipeline than making customers pull the sales trigger.
Enters sales pipeline visualization
Sales pipeline visualization aligns your pipeline goals and metrics. It turbocharges your sales pipeline at every stage of the funnel. So, let’s take an in-depth look at it.
Sales Pipeline Visualization: A Quick Brief
A sales pipeline will help you visually represent where your sales prospects stand in their buying journey. Visualizing this data is crucial to driving accurate sales forecasts. Unfortunately, many businesses often do not use sales pipeline visualization because they are not well-versed with its potential benefits.
Importance of sales pipeline visualization
A visual sales pipeline helps you understand complex sales data and helps you visualize your sales process. It helps you figure out where your deals are in the sales funnel and where are the deals stalling. It helps you plan your future sales and marketing campaigns accordingly. Let’s quickly look at other benefits of sales pipeline visualization:
- It will help you understand your sales process and prospects better.
- It will help you understand where your prospective customers are in the buyer’s journey.
- You can create an effective sales strategy using sales pipeline visualization.
- Enhances your marketing campaigns and makes them more niche and personalized to the buying journey.
How do you visualize a sales pipeline
The four fundamental sales funnel stages—Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action, remain the same for most industries. Visualizing a sales funnel specific to your industry will help you attract (and maintain) a qualified customer base. Let’s see how:
Step 1: Understand Your Prospective Buyers
Segment all the necessary information of potential customers/leads and create a buyer persona around the data. Again, a CRM system is the most efficient tool to do so.
Step 2: Set up Sales Pipeline Stages
Break down large quarterly or annual numbers into daily targets. Then, frame the daily tasks and activities of your reps and focus on these daily activities. Divide these daily activities into the following pipeline stages:
- Prospecting
- Qualifying leads
- Contacting the prospects
- Building relationships with the prospects
- Closing the deal (close-won or close-lost)
- Following up with cold deals
Step 3: Refine Your Stages On The Go
Once you implement your sales pipeline, you will notice a few regular occurrences and issues between prospects and your reps. Hence, you’ll need to tweak your stages accordingly. You might end up removing some steps and discovering others you need.
Step 4: Keep Your Pipeline Up To Date
Make sure your pipeline stays updated. Think of your pipeline stages as to-do lists. Each stage correlates with an activity. Once your reps complete the said activity, they can move the deal to the next step. Your sales reps will get clarity on what they’ve done, what they need to do, and where in the pipeline each deal is.
It is time to find out if you are reaping benefits from it or not. So, how do you analyze a sales pipeline?
How do you do a sales pipeline analysis
The idea behind conducting a sales pipeline analysis is to evaluate why a particular contact succeeded or failed before closing the deal. Therefore, you’ll need to analyze these top four metrics with an effective CRM tool at your disposal.
1. New Qualified Leads per Week
A robust sales pipeline will help ensure that your leads and opportunities are well-recorded and tracked. By tracking this metric regularly, you find out:
- If your sales activities and initiatives are worth
- If your lead volume is sufficient to fulfil revenue goals
- If your sales reps are getting qualitative leads or just quantity
2. Conversion Rate per Stage
This metric will show you how each stage of your sales funnel performs and what stage needs more attention.
3. Sales Pipeline Velocity
Pipeline velocity shows the revenue passing through your sales funnels in a particular period. It depends on how fast the leads convert and how effective your sales pipeline visualization is.
You can also find the leads that take a long time to convert and work to fasten that process.
4. Overall Pipeline Value per Stage
This metric will give you overall visibility of each step of your sales pipeline. You only need to add up the total value of each deal in a particular stage.
Final Thoughts
The most crucial benefit of sales pipeline visualization is that it helps users view complex quantitative data graphically. It also helps build cross-team collaboration between sales and marketing teams and reduces expenditure associated with closing deals.
Yet, most businesses still overlook the importance of a visual sales pipeline. So don’t be like one of them! Instead, start with sales pipeline visualization for your business today!
