Lead pipeline management for purchasing

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What's up, random team of sales managers? Got too many deals? Sales process getting you down? Don’t know where you’re up to in your customer journeys? Leads falling through the cracks? Been there. That spreadsheet is starting to look a little bit tired my friends. You need a sales tools to help you keep on top of your deals. An automatic one. By the end of this video, you’re going to know what a sales pipeline is, what it looks like, and exactly how to build one. So, stay tuned! NetHunt here, your expert sales software learning hub, Gmail CRM, and pipeline pro’s! Let’s get growing! You might be sitting there wondering, what is a sales pipeline? A sales pipeline is just a set of stages that a prospect moves through, as they progress from a new lead to closed deal. It’s essentially a visual representation of the sales process and everybody in it, including prospects, leads, existing clients. Why? Well centralised, visualised sales pipelines are essential for improved communication between teams, a personalised customer experience where sales teams can focus on leads that most need focussing on, and creation of reports that help gauge the health of a business. If you want to know more about sales pipeline reporting, hit the link on screen now where you'll find a detailed analysis for creating a monthly sales report with templates! Generally, sales pipeline stages look something like this… Fist one - First contact. Leads have been contacted to see if they’re interested in your product. After that we move straight into appointment. Leads need a more in-depth discussion around your product, by meeting, video call, or phone call. This is the part of the journey where you unearth any problems a customer has that your product might fix. If you’re successful at that, we move into the Proposal stage. Leads receive an offer to have their problems fixed. Then a Follow-up. Sometimes, the lead doesn’t answer you straight away. So it’s always good practice to pick the right time and fire off a follow-up making sure everything is still on track. And at the end of the day we have the Closing the deal stage. Leads get the goods. That looks good, but how do you build a sales pipeline like that? First, you’re gonna have to think some things through before you build it… Things to consider when building your pipeline a checklist. Your customer profile. What is your ideal customer interested in? What are they looking for, and how can you meet their requirements? Your target market. Your sales pipeline metrics, such as the number of deals in your pipeline and the average deal size vary depending on the industry you’d like to target. Can your pipeline operations be scaled as your business grows? Target companies and clients. There’s no point in having a pipeline with no leads in there. Have you got targeted lead acquisition channels that match your business? What happens at each stage of the pipeline? Are there separate reach out activities? Segmentation. How can you segment your different types of customers? Have you got a system in place to do it? Do you need multiple pipelines for your different types of customers? Pipeline centralisation. How are you going to give everybody access to your sales pipeline? Now you can actually build a pipeline to get deals moving through. With NetHunt, it’s easy. Automatic even. Open your Deals folder and group them by Stage field. Wow, got yourself a beautiful card view there. Here you can see all the deals in all stages you have. That’s your pipeline. But like I said, your pipeline differs depending on the industry you’re in, the product you’re selling and all that jazz. NetHunt pipelines are fully customisable. To change the name of the fields in your pipeline, it’s simple. Hit the "Settings" button in the context menu. Now click on the “Stage” field and start editing its values. You can rename them or change their order by dragging the required field. After renaming the value in the "Stage" field, be aware that the ones you rename will remain the same and newly created ones will be added as extra. Like this… Say you want to rename two fields: "Presentation" and "Negotiating" into "Demo" and "Contacted" respectively. The "Presentation" and "Negotiating" remain in the card view when you group all your records by Stage, whereas the newly created "Demo" and "Contacted" are blank. In order to migrate the records from the "Presentation" and "Negotiating" stages into "Demo" and "Contacted", simply drag them. The old values will then disappear. Sales pipeline management is not hard, yet it requires dedication and precision. All your team members have to fill out the pipeline in time and update it regularly. Otherwise, what’s the point in making a pipeline, right? Put a plus sign in the comments below, if you would like to book a demo with our customer success team, and they will show you how to build a sales pipeline in NetHunt for your business. For more information about pipeline management - check out our video. The link’s on the screen now! Like Comment Subscribe. Watch our next video about how a Gmail CRM can help your business grow. NetHunt over and out.