Building An Effective Sales Pipeline

Mohan G Joshi, International Business Coach and Former President, SCHOTT Glass India outlines the importance of measuring the effectiveness of your pipeline to help understand sales graph, assess the gaps, fill them up and move ahead to a sterling performance

Apipeline is undoubtedlya revealing tool in thesales process. What construes your pipeline, how you read it and how you make the most of it, speaks volumes about your sales effectiveness. Pipeline as a term is core to sales; however, it has been used quite randomly without much thought. It pays for every sales person to invest time in understanding how you can build a pipeline in the new age and how you can make it work for you.

What is a pipeline and what it is not?

A pipeline is a specific set of actions in a sequence taken by the seller to move the prospect to the next stage – from the entry to conversion. It has specifics about every prospect, shows the value of every deal at every stage. Sales pipelines help sales persons understand how their sales are looking, whether they have enough leads and deals, how these are distributed across each stage and whether this will help them achieve their sales targets for that period.

A sales pipeline and a sales funnel are often considered as synonyms; but one would be wrong in doing so. A sales funnel gives a quick conversion report; it deals with an overview of figures and shows the conversions at every stage. A sales funnel looks like a funnel, broad at the top and narrow at the bottom, showing the dropouts at every stage. A sales pipeline is more detailed and helps in a qualitative analysis of your prospect movement across the buying journey. Together, a sales funnel and a sales pipeline can help in predictive analysis and can help formulate a sales strategy that results in successful selling.

The classic pipeline and its stages

A pipeline has typically four to five stages, through which your prospect will move.

1) Making the initial contact (buyer-seller or seller-buyer)

2) Qualifying the contact

3) Meeting