The Sales Pipeline

Maintaining a healthy sales pipeline is the key to consistent and predictable sales performance. Everybody feels better when there are enough qualified opportunities "in the works" to forecast strong sales in the future. The best way to ensure an increase in future revenue is to focus on building your sales pipeline today.

Sales Pipeline Management is the key to successful sales forecasting, eliminating the "peaks and valleys" of the sales cycle, and reaching your sales goals on a consistent basis.
Sales Pipeline Management begins with the process of generating leads. In order for sales to emerge from the back end of the sales "funnel" on a consistent basis, prospects must be continuously added to the front end.
Understanding the principles of the Sales Pipeline Management process and knowing your sales professionals’ individual "numbers" is critical to managing the sales process. Sales Pipeline Management is a process, one that can be broken down into a series of steps that will guarantee your sales team will achieve their quotas.
“You can't manage sales, but you can manage activities”
 Develop a sales plan designed to achieve the desired results
 Build a Sales Pipeline Management strategy based on the sales plan
 Identify the activity levels required to meet your sales goals, and implement an action plan based on those levels.
 Provide measurement tools that both the sales and management teams can use for accurate assessment of the value of the Pipeline at any time in the sales cycle.
The value of the Sales Pipeline lies in four areas:
1. Management knows which leads are truly qualified, so you can prioritize where to allocate valuable resources. The goal is to get the right resources behind the best opportunities.

2. The disciplined use of the pipeline creates an accurate forecasting process that gets continually refined. You start to understand where sales get stalled.

3. The pipeline will help you determine where you need to focus your activities to achieve target.

4. It gets the sales management and the sales team involved and accountable for sales.


The Sales Pipeline - To learn more about this author, visit Colly Graham's Website.

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