Getting more from your sales pipeline is as simple as prioritizing your sales activities. Simple? It should be, but most sales organizations are losing deals because of an absence of lead management.
Unfortunately, when we manage sales we seem to throw our brain and these laws of success out the door.
Try these 5 steps to a more profitable sales pipeline:
1. Start managing the pipeline: First, and foremost start managing your leads. So often I enter a sales organization and see nothing even resembling sales management. Whether you are managing debt leads or enterprise software leads there should be a defined process. Sales agents should be following a consistent sales process. Otherwise, measuring and analyzing results to improve sales output is going to be impossible.
Managing your pipeline will begin highlight categories of marketing sources and sales processes that are most effective. These top performers should get top priority.
2. Discrete dispositions on every opportunity: Common mistake number two, bad data. Define your lead dispositions and then annotate (consistently) every lead, every time it is touched. This will immediately assist your lead management program. This gives you insight into every sale, the path it took, and why it closed or died.
Prioritization starts with sales status. The classic sale funnel is still one of the best prioritization mechanisms, but you have to annotate the status.
3. Analyze contact rates: There is no clearer gateway to sales success than contacting a prospect. If you don't get the opportunity to talk to someone you certainly won't close a deal. So, track and analyze contact rates. If you can increase conversations you will increase sales. If you improve your sales to contact rate you will have the top sales team. However, you have to start by tracking and measuring contact rates.
Contact rates can help you to focus on the most responsive marketing channels first, speeding overall sales velocity and increasing sale motivation.
4. Analyze velocity: Time is the number one killer of sales. If you let an opportunity age or wander you will lose. Capture and track the time between lead follow-ups and look for the right timing. Metrics, such as these, can help you measure sales velocity.
Sales velocity is critical to pushing more revenue through your sales organization. Tracking and prioritizing the fastest converting lead types can help apply sale pressure to the right places in your pipeline.
5. Analyze revenue concentration: This is probably the most logical of the 5 steps, but least applied. Sales activity should be concentrated on the top revenue producing lead sources or marketing channels. Whether this is sorted by opportunity attributes, product type, or marketing channel identify the top correlations between category and revenue. Then work them in that order.
Prioritization is the key to effectively getting more out of any limited resource or investment. Increasing revenue is easier to control if you have the mechanisms in place to measure and prioritize sales and marketing processes.
