Chapter 27: What is a Sales Pipeline?

As a successful business manager or owner, you already understand the basic definition of a sales pipeline:

Sales Pipeline (n) A systematic and visual approach to selling a product or service.

Further, a sales pipeline is useful because it;

• Organizes steps in a sales process to ease training and systematize sales team response
• Help identify where potential leads become lost leads
• Shows where money is spent, made and lost during the sales process

This has been true for as long as professional sales have existed. In the second half of the 20th century, businesses organized analog sales pipelines to reap those benefits. Like so much else in this book, conceptually nothing has changed. Marketing in the Digital Millennium has only made it easier, more robust and substantially more important.

21st Century Sales Pipelines

• The flow is the thing
• Qualifying based on their actions
• Accuracy, on point, real time
• Track people accurately
• Can set up triggers

How Not to Screw Yours Up

Some aspects of the Perfect Digital Sales Pipeline (™) are still being developed, but a lot of smart people have made a lot of good money using what we’ve figured out so far. Here, then are the top ten ways we’ve discovered to not screw up your sales pipeline, and reap the benefits of a systematized, automated approach.

• Set it Up Correctly
• Use the Big Four Metrics, and Review Them Daily
• Incorporate Your CRM
• Analyze Your Losses
• Analyze Your Wins
• Spend Only as Much Management Time As You Need
• Differentiate Customers
• Use “Weighted Metrics”
• Adjust Constantly

Nuanced Media is a premier Phoenix marketing agency, and our experts are always willing to answer your sales pipeline questions.