Managing your sales pipeline is critical to your businesses success. Your sales pipeline maps sales movements across every stage of your sales process. The clearer your sales pipeline picture, the more easily, and quickly you can react to any situation.

Problems with traditional sales pipelines

Individual sales move at different speeds. Some close quickly, while others crawl at a snail’s pace, blocking up your sales pipeline.

With traditional sales pipelines it is difficult to interpret a clear view of all the pipeline’s stages, and map its progress. From a lead, contact, deal, and accounts management perspective, identifying bottlenecks can be difficult. When problems are identified, the traditional pipeline offers little assistance to providing solutions.

Another problem associated with the traditional sales pipeline is the overburdening of salespeople with time-wasting tasks, along with the labour-intensive compilation of sales reports and projections.

Also, traditionally, it took personal knowledge of each individual lead, and the associated interactions, to get an accurate picture of where sales opportunities were causing blockages.

How sales pipeline movement solves these issues

Having a clear, instantly interpretable view of each sales opportunity in the pipeline is imperative to productivity. Additionally, the ability to instantly create a pipeline movement sales report removes once labour-intensive tasks, and frees up time.  

Using an intelligent sales CRM, sales managers can minutely analyse each stage of the sales pipeline. With this holistic view, the sales stage management process has become simplified and clearly illustrates the entire engagement process. Communications, meetings, follow-ups, etc. can all be monitored instantly, and the identification of blockages simplified.

Sales managers, with an overall sales view, have the ability to identify where sales reps are becoming grounded. By analysing sales pipeline movement reports, generated in the sales CRM, the problem is more easily resolved, and the pipeline freed.

Sales pipeline movement reports also offer managers the ability to identify the performance of individual salespersons, and fully understand their strengths, their weaknesses, and also to interpret if goals have been set too high, or too low. The information gathered automatically by your sales software can be visualised instantly, using colour-coded charts and illustrations, it gives you a clear view of each and every stage of the sales pipeline. This visualisation allows sales teams to react quickly, and resolve urgent situations.

The bane of the traditional salesperson’s life was the constant creation of sales reports and attendance at daily, weekly, or monthly progress meetings. While the meetings are still a necessary part of sales, the task has become simplified by your sales CRM. Sales reports are instantly available. All activities are automatically tracked and recorded, building an accurate, up to the minute account of the entire sales pipeline.

What’s the value of clean pipeline movement?

The real values of a clean and fluid sales pipeline are:

• It provides the ability to drastically improve all aspects of sales performance. With a holistic view of the pipeline and the automatic generation of intelligent sales reports, fewer blockages occur.
• Through analysis of past sales cycles, sales managers can design and structure optimum timeframes for each stage of the pipeline. This can shorten the stages and allow salespeople to close deals faster.
• The ability of colleagues to collaborate on multiple sales projects, interacting instantly on matters such as; next-step planning; communications management; meeting scheduling; etc, allows salespeople to cooperate, ultimately saving valuable time.
• Nothing can be left to guesswork when a sales manager is presented with a constant clear picture of the complete sales pipeline. Your CRM software offers such a sales pipeline overview; of every prospect; every lead; every deal; and the progress of each team member in relation to each project.
• Gone are the days when salespeople were chained to their desks writing time-draining sales reports. An intuitive sales CRM now handles this task for everyone, leading to clear, concise, and understandable graphs, illustrations and reports, illustrating every stage of the sales pipeline, and every person involved.