7 Easy Steps To Build a Results-Driven Sales Pipeline

The sales pipeline shows how prospects move from being leads to customers. Optimizing it speeds up conversion, removes buying barriers, and retains customers.

This article shares how fractional sales management services build a results-driven pipeline in seven steps:

• Define the sales process.
• Identify the target audience and qualify leads.
• Implement effective lead-generation tactics.
• Streamline lead management.
• Focus on lead nurturing.
• Monitor and analyze pipeline performance.
• Regularly revise and optimize the sales process.

Read below and follow these strategies for streamlining your pipeline and boosting sales. Let’s go!

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1. Define the Sales Process

The sales process consists of steps from lead generation to conversion. A clear, detailed structure informs the team of the activities that help close a deal. It also illustrates the customer’s journey, from awareness to education, negotiation, and sale.

Each industry has a slightly different picture of the sales process: it is usually short for ecommerce and longer for business-to-business (B2B) markets. A generalized sales process involves the following stages:

• Lead generation: Lead generation is the initial stage of the entire sales process. The goal is to find consumers interested in your business. 
• Lead qualification: The next step involves evaluating and qualifying those who move down the sales funnel. It also assigns scores to prospects based on their brand interactions.
• Sales outreach: This stage entails reaching out to a few worthy prospects or sales-qualified leads (SQLs). The most popular strategies for this are email marketing and cold calling.
• Sales presentation: This step requires pitching sales to qualified leads and highlighting your brand and unique value proposition (UVP).
• Negotiation: This step entails reaching a mutual agreement with buyers about the terms and conditions of their purchase. 
• Sales closing: The sales process aims to convert leads into sales. This happens when your prospects finally buy your products or hire your services.

2. Identify the Target Audience and Qualify Leads

Identify your target market early for a more streamlined sales process. This helps to develop a more accurate lead generation list. Study the industry, determine your ideal customers, and create a buyer persona to represent your target audience and capture your leads.

Lead qualification follows after identifying the target market. It considers the following criteria:

• Personal demographics: Segment your leads according to their age, gender, location, and work or business. Then select those who fit your customer persona based on their demographics. 
• Psychographic factors: Consider your prospects’ values, interests, and lifestyles. See who aligns with your business philosophies and needs your products and services.
• Consumer behaviors: Examine your prospects’ behaviors, such as content interactions, website activities, and social media engagement. This reveals who is likely to do business with you in the future.
• Financial capabilities: Determine your leads’ income and their business or employment sources. Money is crucial in their buying decisions. 
• Consumer needs: Deeply understand customer needs to finalize the SQLs. Know their pain points, real challenges, personal preferences, buying goals, and motivations.

3. Implement Effective Lead-Generation Tactics

Many companies invest in lead generation solutions because it is instrumental in sales success and the market is only expanding: reports show that the global market could grow to $15.52 billion by 2031. But what does lead generation entail?

Lead generation involves researching the market and narrowing down leads by qualifying and scoring them. The objective is to allocate resources, prioritize high-converting prospects, and nurture the others until they become customers.

Fractional sales management services provide effective lead-generation tactics to start the sales process right. Typically, sales and marketing acquire and manage leads in different ways.

The sales team performs the following:

• Targeted prospecting: attracting specific industries, businesses, or individuals that match your customer persona.
• Cold or warm calling: contacting random people (cold) or those who have shown interest or slightly engaged with your business (warm).
• Email outreach: sending emails to see who responds and shows interest in your brand.
• Social media selling: promoting your brand and products or services via social media channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, or X.
• Customer referrals: asking regular customers to recommend your business and getting a list of prospects from them.
• Networking: connecting with other professionals, businesses, or individuals through LinkedIn, online forums, and other social media platforms.
• Business events: holding activities, such as webinars, conferences, and exhibits, to build your network and acquire potential customers.
• Competitor analysis: analyzing your competitors, identifying their customers, and applying their winning strategies to your pipeline.

On the other hand, the marketing or advertising team performs the following:

• Search engine optimization: optimizing your website, creating relevant content, and building links to improve your search rankings.
• Pay-per-click advertising (PPC): displaying ads on the search engine results pages and paying for successful clicks.
• Email marketing campaigns: sending promotional content to subscribers to convert or nurture leads.
• Content marketing: producing articles, images, or videos to promote your brand and engage with potential customers.
• Social media management: publishing content and interacting with people on the platform to reveal a goldmine of potential leads. 

Both of these methods are necessary to maximize your potential leads.

4. Streamline Lead Management

Lead management involves acquiring, tracking, and nurturing prospects throughout their journey. Streamlining it speeds up conversion and automates routine tasks to let the sales team focus on high-impact activities. 

Properly manage leads through the sales pipeline with these ideas:

• Lead capture: Create a list of prospects through lead prospecting. Optimize this process by leveraging multichannel solutions such as a website, blog, social media channels, and other online platforms.
• Lead segmentation: Categorize your prospects based on their demographics, behaviors, and communication channels. Use customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and automation tools to streamline the process and make it more efficient.
• Lead scoring: Score your leads according to their levels of business interactions. This process makes it easier and faster for you to evaluate and qualify leads.
• Lead qualification: Assess your leads to filter potential customers from the others. Complement this with lead scoring.  
• Lead nurturing: Find effective ways to establish good relationships with your prospects. 

5. Focus on Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is critical to building and maintaining relationships with potential customers over time. The goal is to guide them in their customer journey. 

Fractional sales management services help you provide prospects with relevant information at every stage. They assist in addressing customer needs and keeping leads engaged throughout the process. They keep the customers’ best interests in mind, demonstrate real expertise, and help build trust.

Nurture leads properly with these strategies:

• Engage with prospects regularly. Respond to social media comments, follow up on your emails, and deliver personalized content.
• Follow up with leads promptly. What better way to nurture leads than to respond to prospects quickly?
• Provide personalized content. Customize your messages with hyper-personalization.
• Leverage multichannel solutions. Connect with leads via emails, social media channels, and text messages. Engage with them through your website, blog, and other digital platforms.
• Align marketing with sales. Match the marketing tactics on lead targets, sales goals, customer needs, and budget. 
• Employ a retargeting campaign. Persuade previous customers and leads who interacted with the brand to buy again or complete a transaction. 
• Use lead-scoring strategies. Assign scores to your list of prospects to qualify leads easily.
• Offer surveys for the feedback loop. Use valuable insights to optimize your sales process and improve your products or services.

6. Monitor and Analyze Pipeline Performance

Sales performance monitoring involves tracking, measuring, and analyzing the team’s efforts. Meanwhile, sales pipeline analysis examines and evaluates the various funnel stages. 

Both tests help identify areas for improvement to maximize revenue. They also require setting key performance indicators (KPIs) such as the following:

• Number of leads: This refers to the total number of leads generated monthly, which translates to sales opportunities.
• Number of SQLs: This counts the total number of sales-qualified leads after performing lead scoring and qualification.
• Levels of engagement: This measures the audience’s interaction with the brand during lead nurturing. Metrics include the number of times they visit the website, respond to emails, and like, share, and comment on the social media content.
• Average sales cycle: This measures how long it takes to convert a lead from the first contact to a closed sale. 
• Win rate or sales conversion: This rate represents the number of leads converted into sales or prospects turned into customers. Over 21% is the average win rate in sales.
• Average deal value: This KPI is calculated based on your sales units against your revenue target.
• Sales pipeline velocity: Compute the metric by multiplying the number of leads, win rate, and average deal value and dividing their product by the current sales cycle. 
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): This metric determines a customer’s value to the business throughout the relationship.

7. Regularly Revise and Optimize the Pipeline

Streamline the sales pipeline, attract prospects, and retain customers by consistently revising and improving your efforts. Optimize it with these strategies, or hire fractional sales management services to optimize it for you:

• Set realistic sales targets. Focus on specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. Help the sales team align their work strategies with these objectives. 
• Regularly update the sales pipeline. Regularly refine every sales funnel stage by attracting more prospects, updating the SQLs, and moving leads to sales.
• Continuously employ lead scoring. Consistently score and rank prospects to qualify leads more seamlessly.
• Constantly monitor your performance. Track and measure your individual and team performance based on the KPIs above.
• Provide regular sales training. This enhances your sales team’s knowledge and skills in generating leads and pitching sales.
• Establish communication protocols. Open lines of communication to get sales pipeline updates, voice challenges, and improve the entire sales process.
• Offer clear sales playbooks. Outline the standard workflows that help the team achieve sales success.
• Leverage CRM and automation tools. Harness the power of technology to unify data management and automate sales processes for efficiency and productivity.
• Employ multichannel solutions. Engage with prospects and customers in different communication channels via phone, email, social media, or SMS.

Summing Up

These seven actionable steps contribute to your overall success, converting leads to revenue by moving them through the sales pipeline easily and quickly. Work with an expert fractional sales management team to streamline the funnel stages further. 

Digital Authority Partners (DAP) is an award-winning digital marketing agency with years of experience innovating and optimizing pipelines. Contact us today for a free consultation.