Streamline Your Business with airSlate SignNow: Managing Your Sales Pipeline Made Simple

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hi everyone and welcome to this bite size session on uh business to business sales pipelines if you're selling business to business and we'd like to understand more about sales pipelines we're going to be covering off the concepts the activity the stages and the pipeline speed and all those good things for you in this session here so uh first thing i would just like to manage expectations please don't get hung up on the actual words in the different sections of your pipeline uh you may well call it a sales funnel not a pipeline again don't get hung up on the words i can almost guarantee uh the names here that we use you will have different names and that's perfectly okay i'm just trying to get over the concepts at the moment of uh how the pipelines work how they interact and why this is really important from a sales perspective before i move on uh if you don't have any information on this and you're looking for some quick start guides and templates jump on over to closers.com k l o zed or a z if you're uh dialing in from the states at klozers.com and you can download that playbook which has got all of our templates and guides and it's a hundred percent free so uh sales funnel with the sales pipeline most of you will be familiar with some form of sales pipeline and most of you will be familiar with some form of marketing funnel at the top uh you may call it a sales funnel again don't get hung up on the semantics so typically what happens is that buyers uh 80 of purchases are made to solve some form of business pain so typically what happens is that the buyer will become aware of the business pain the first thing they're going to do is ask if they can solve this internally when they cancel it internally they will see if anybody knows anybody and that's called a referral i'm sure you're aware of that and when they can't get a referral or they just want to go to the wider market they're going to jump on the internet and start doing uh searches and they're in what we would describe as the awareness mode uh and and they're aware of the problem and they're starting to research possible solutions and moving down from that you know they're looking for information that's going to educate them on the different options that are available and this potential suppliers and then lastly they're going to do some form of evaluation of those options and suppliers now in a in a b2c market typically what's going to happen is that this is going to move into a shopping cart and they will buy online and and there's you know little or or no interaction with any form of sales people uh and there may be exceptions to that in terms of live chat i accept but for the most part they're going to come through a marketing funnel and they're going to drive them to a shopping cart business to business however is slightly different and what's going to happen is that they're going to come on the website and once they've done gone through that evaluation phase they've potentially picked three a short list of three suppliers and they're going to start to reach out and they'll do that via your contact us page and maybe again your live chat maybe via the telephone number on your your website whatever but they're going to reach out and at this point here as a salesperson you're going to be receiving some form of lead and then as you know you know it's our job in sales to prosecute those leads and move them through the sales pipeline and and turn that into a purchase order so typically you know the the sort of analytics and the data that we could have from the marketing side was provided by some form of marketing automation software and the crm the sales pipelines they were built inside uh crm software now you know the world has moved on again and nearly every marketing automation company has now integrated some form of sales pipeline into the software and equally every crm software supplier has integrated some functionality in terms of marketing automation and that actually makes sense because the more information we can have as a salesperson from what pages and what posts on your website the buyer has been actually investigating and looking at it's easier to start that conversation it's easier to understand what's their primary pain point and it's easy to understand or easier i should say to understand how we can move them forward through the sales process so uh just i'm just trying to explain the concept here uh business to consumer you're going to go through this marketing funnel here and they're typically going to go to a shopping cart business to business is going to go to a sales lead uh i totally accept that there will be some b2b where you will be driving them to uh in terms of sas you were driving them to your shopping cart i totally get that it's just easier to explain uh for people to think about things like amazon and ebay where they're doing that uh and driving people to a shopping cart so a little bit more about the the marketing funnel at the at the very top because this is what feeds our sales pipeline this is important things that feeds our sales pipeline this is what marketing do to help us and and support our sales people so uh top of funnel tofu right typically they're going to be providing some form of how-to guides posts explainer videos etc mofu is the middle of funnel again this is where we're educating them and you're going to be doing that through white papers i i think for me that's a little bit old hat but you're going to be putting up maybe uh uh user examples presentations uh you may be offering them trials or demonstrations uh and bottom of funnel uh remember this is where they're selecting their final three they typically are going to select three companies so that they can uh they can prove to their colleagues that they've completed what we would call due diligence it's very unlikely they're just going to go out to the market to one supplier it's not impossible but it's unlikely they will typically go to three different suppliers so they can get a sense check on pricing so they can get a sense check on terms and uh the sort of user experience and and the different solutions that are available so at this point here you know it's obviously more important of things like testimonials reviews and case studies uh case studies that are aligned with their particular industry uh if possible uh so sas software as a service uh it may well be that you have a very simple pipeline uh off the top of my head something simple would be uh if you're linkedin here's a really simple example linkedin uh they do have sales people but for the majority of the market individual users they're driving traffic to the site they've got them on the site and and most business people are on that site but they're attracting the graduates uh and and they're helping them with uh solutions in terms of finding their first jobs but they're so they're signing them up they've given them that in this case it's not a free trial but a free account and they're then upselling them but it's a self-close there's nobody ringing at linkedin ringing up all these different graduates individually trying to sell them uh a 40 50 solution on on linkedin i act absolutely accept though that they do have sales people who are ringing up businesses to sell them business solutions uh so they will have more than one pipeline and and that in itself is as uh worth noting it may be that your business if you have different products or services that you may require more than one pipeline and the pipeline could be dramatically different i would i would venture to suggest that the pipeline for a standard and simple linkedin sign up will be very different to the pipelines that they use for selling something like their learning solutions into enterprise organizations on the left here we've got an example of a complex pipeline again please don't get hung up on the actual words but typically what's happening is in sas you're driving traffic there's some form of a lead magnet uh at the very least you've got you they're going to capture your email address if not your browsing history and they're going to then somehow nurture you through potentially through some form of email a campaign and they're trying to engage you and then once they've engaged they're going to try and develop you and you'd have what i would describe potentially as an assisted close so there's maybe going to be some sales people involved there's maybe going to be a a more complex demonstration involved and again nearly every business can have a different sales pipeline depending on the sales methodology that you're using depending on your business processes don't get hung up on the words it's the concepts i'm trying to explain here so other people other examples in terms of driving traffic i should say whether you're on the complex or simple pipeline uh you might be doing some things like pay-per-click you may be doing things like content marketing you may have your sales team doing uh outreach campaigns uh cold email linkedin social selling all those different things are going to be the things that you will need to do to fill that yellow stage the very top of the funnel regardless of what industry you're in everybody needs to fill the top of their funnel and that that i would describe is probably the biggest challenge for every business especially through the lockdown business has been completely disrupted many businesses have gone online buyers are now more difficult to contact directly by a telephone an email than ever before so uh that lead generation that filling of the top pipeline is really really important for for all of us next up uh weighted sales pipeline so once we've got a sales pipeline and we've got deals moving through that pipeline here are just a few basics that i would suggest that you look at in terms of uh developing that pipeline and and getting it into a place where it's going to be a really good management tool and help you with forecasting so some of the questions that you should be asking uh what qualifies a prospect to move to the next stage uh that that's a common one that most companies don't seem to really think about and discuss uh from a sales perspective what questions do i need to ask before i'm going to move a prospect to the next stage and you know from a management perspective what are the comm skills or the soft skills of the team that we need to develop so that they can maintain rapport as they're moving the deals through the pipeline uh you can see here we've got just got some examples i'm not suggesting that you in any way copy this i would love to think that you've got a beautiful pipeline dashboard on your crm system if you've not got a crm i would strongly urge you to invest in a crm i'm not going to advocate any crm there's lots of great crm systems out there i would just strongly recommend that you start and get yourself a crm and you maybe don't need the uh full-blown complex systems that are out there you can maybe start on something more simple and maybe move yourself up to that those uh what would describe is maybe rolls royce solutions so uh when you've got these management dashboards they will be much uh much better than this but typically what you're looking at is how many deals have i got at each stage what's the average value of those deals and these are the sort of stages that you're going through this could be a sales qualifying lead this is where you're doing requirements gathering this is where it would be defined as a genuine opportunity and once it's defined you're going to have to develop it propose and negotiate i would accept it mrs this is probably more geared up to what we would describe as a complex sale if you're selling into enterprise organizations if you can simplify this if you can strip any of the complexity out of this in your business i would urge you to do so these are only guides uh i would never suggest that you copy these exactly on the right hand side once you've got these deals and you're running them through the pipeline you can start to work out what is the percentage chance of these closing so and this percentage chance should increase by the time you get to the end if you've got a deal where you've gone through you know right to the end right and issued proposals and they're in that negotiating stage if it's still a five percent chance of closing there's something way wrong in the system there so do as it goes through the pipeline the chances of it closing are supposed to increase and when it gets to you if you could see you know we've got quite a large jump there that's because we would advocate that you're qualifying hard all the way through to this stage here qualifying too hard and at this point here if the deal's got to the stage the chances of it moving forward into an order are much more likely so these are great things to help you forecast uh you will find that there'll be variances but even between different sales people the way that they actually qualify deals you can find that some people will naturally qualify harder than others and you could even break it down into individual sales people that qualifying but it's important that you've got that qualifying there so uh i hope that's been a benefit to you uh i hope that's going to be of some advantage if you're watching this on youtube please subscribe please hit the thumbs up uh if you feel you've benefited please share it as well with any of your colleagues and your work staff and lastly if you get a chance jump on over to closers and get yourself a copy of the free sales playbook and we look forward to keeping in touch with you thank you