In the B2B sales landscape, this couldn’t be more accurate. In the past decade the process of enterprise buying has changed considerably. Buying committees are larger, and procurement processes are more complex. Different team members and buyers do their own online research before reaching out to a sales representative.
In today’s modern B2B buying environment, having a visualized, maintained pipeline of sales opportunities sets the foundation for growth. A well-maintained pipeline enables your sales managers to project revenues, identify bottlenecks, anticipate the right sales opportunities and plan the time of the sellers in the most promising accounts. But how do you create a great pipeline that your sales managers will actually use? In essence, the sales pipeline goes well beyond the mere listing of contacts in your database. It includes an in-depth clear profile, stage, sales record keeping, follow-up rules, and performance. Here are the B2B sales tips for developing a stronger sales pipeline.
What Is a Sales Pipeline?
Step-by-step overview of the status of active prospects and open opportunities within a company’s sales process. Sales funnel and sales pipeline are used interchangeably, but they have their differences. Sales funnel brings to the fore the buyer’s journey and emphasizes the customer journey from their initial awareness to purchasing, conversion rates, and leakages.
The sales pipeline describes the sales team’s process and shows at which stage a certain opportunity is at any time before they are marked as either a closed-won or closed-lost opportunity. Sales pipelines are clearly identified which provide you visibility into what’s happening with a deal, sales velocity, revenue forecast, and strategic next steps. Sales managers can track sales team performance and identify bottlenecks in their sales pipelines. Representatives can determine deal progress and action focus.
Key Components Required to Build a Sales Pipeline
Set Up These 3 Parts Of Your Business Operations Before Designing Your Pipeline:
1. An Identified Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Pipeline quantity is only as good as its prospects. Identify the relevant ICP criteria industry, company size, revenue, technology, location, business needs, or other characteristics of the ideal customers you want to generate. This will ensure your sales team is targeting companies within your ICP and not cold calling every company within reach.
2. A Consistent Sales Process
A formalized, written sales process provides consistency when guiding opportunities through the pipeline; the process should specify the necessary activities and what the sales qualifications and flags are before moving from one stage to the next.
With a common sales process, pipeline management will be more uniform and transparent.
3. Aligned Revenue Goals
Revenue goals should be proportionally translated into opportunity counts and values, instead of a static pipeline coverage number. Use win rates, average deal size, sales cycle times, and conversion rates to determine how much pipeline you need to hit your revenue goals.
The Strategic Benefits of an Optimized Pipeline
A well-managed sales pipeline can provide several benefits:
- Historical conversion rates and pipeline analysis create more reliable revenue forecasts: Predictable revenue forecasting is achieved by using historical conversion rates and pipeline data.
- Better Deal Velocity: When buyers’ deals stall out they can be identified sooner and sales managers can address deal killers that slow down deals.
- More resources allocated to the accounts and opportunities with greatest potential: Resources can be targeted on the accounts and opportunities with the most potential.
- More Collaboration: Teams will understand when to hand off a lead or opportunity to the next person or team in the process, and what success looks like.
Improved pipeline visibility: Team members can obtain a quick overview of the quantity, value, and progress of the pipelines they have.
How To Build and Optimize B2B Sales Pipeline: 10 Strategic Steps
1. Create a '3 P's' formula: Product, Persona and Pitch.
All successful sales pipelines begin with commercial readiness. The representatives should be knowledgeable about:
- Product: What it does, why it is helpful, why, how, and what might happen.
- Persona: Customer’s goals, responsibilities, pain points, and objectives
- Pitch: Cut to the chase and advance to messages that speak to the specific needs of each buyer as the solution to each of their problems.
When representatives have these at their fingertips, they can speak to individual pain points.
2. Define Granular, Milestone-Driven Pipeline Stages
Don’t accept generic terminology such as “In Discussion” and “Follow-Up”. Clarify each stage according to behaviour and confirmed buyer movement.
For example a B2B sales pipeline can include:
- Stage 1: Discovery and Qualification
The buying needs, relevant stakeholders, timeline and other qualification factors are identified
- Stage 2: Technical Validation
Business needs are tested with regards to the solution’s capabilities
- Stage 3: Business case
 Review of commercial benefits and involvement of relevant stakeholders
- Stage 4: Contract Review
Pricing, procurement, legal, security etc issues are addressed
- Stage 5: Closed-Won/Closed-Lost
The opportunity results in a sale or is formally closed with the corresponding reason
For the stages the exact entries and exits need to be customized for your sales cycle. What’s important is to set clear expectations at each phase.
3. Segment and Prioritize Accounts With Multi-Dimensional Criteria
To prioritize your prospects, use multiple data points to segment accounts and identify those closest to your ICP as well as those with a higher need.
Useful segmentation variables include:
- Firmographic Data
Industry, number of employees, annual revenue, location
- Technographic Data
Current software platforms, cloud infrastructure, technology stack and integrations
- Behavioral & Intent Data
Content engagement, website activity, product research, hiring plans, RFPs, etc
Combining these variables gives your sales team a full picture of an account’s fit and may help guide the outreach effort accordingly.
4. Deploy Rigorous Lead Scoring
Avoid trying to sell everything to all prospects. Your sales team needs an objective scoring system to benchmark leads by rank, engagement and buying potential.
A lead scoring framework can consider:
- Explicit Fit
- How much the prospect fits the ideal customer profile (ICP)
- Engagement
- Website visits, webinar participation, content downloads, email opens and responses, etc
- IIntent: Signals of active research and buying interest
Organisations are wise to evaluate and monitor their lead scores against conversion results. Make adjustments to the scoring model based on accumulating data to confirm your sales group’s people are spending more time on these leads with every information.
5. Standardize a Multi-Touch Follow-up Cadence
Enterprise B2B potential customers usually desire numerous touches before responding or even having the deal. Set up the sequences that can include customized e-mails, calls, LinkedIn interactions and other channels that you could think about.
Each action ought to add value like sharing powerful information or revealing and so on the relevant business problem. Always keep in mind the action on appeal will not necessarily indicate the end of possibilities; instead, the set-up between the potential customer and seller could keep in touch without any risk of bothering.
6. Develop a Strategic Lead Nurturing Plan
Not most eligible potential customers are prepared for investing in at once; most of them have to do some other research, gain approval and save the money for the case. Set a technique that can keep them participating in a series of comments until they get involved.
Don’t be demanding, to get a great and better result, give the assistance that a potential buyer requires and share with him or her. When the prospect becomes sales-ready, an established relationship can make it easier to restart the conversation.
7. Leverage LinkedIn for Account Mapping and Prospecting
LinkedIn can be a powerful source of B2B research, account mapping and relationship building. Each sales representative can leverage company data, job titles, industry information, geography and professional activity to identify the right decision-makers. Account mapping can also illustrate the different people involved at each stage of the buying process, such as technical evaluators, department heads, potential champions and economic deciders.
A rep who has gathered the relevant professional activity and business context for each account can begin to tailor their outreach, as opposed to blindly throwing out marketing messages. They can also utilize LinkedIn to interact with content that is pertinent and present helpful views that can create a feeling of believability before the sales discussion.
8. Align outbound efforts around Account Based Marketing (ABM)
Having a large volume of pipeline doesn’t always mean you’re generating high quality opportunities. Sales teams can get bogged down chasing too many accounts without clear prioritization; sales and marketing can often be competing for resources. Account-Based Marketing is an alternative to this. It is an approach that aligns sales and marketing to a clear account segmentation. It’s made up of high-value target accounts that teams focus on; researching the account and key stakeholders, understanding business and department priorities, and creating relevant messaging and content around needs.
ABM works well when businesses offer complex products and buying decisions are made by multiple stakeholders within a business. Concentrate your resources on a few accounts that are the closest match to your ideal client rather than over targeting too many accounts.
9. Optimize the Customer Journey for Cross-Functional Buying Teams
In today’s complex B2B purchase, a company rarely has a single decision-maker. Instead, the purchasing process may involve people in IT, finance, operations, procurement, legal, security, compliance and other functions. Salespeople need to develop relationships with multiple influential people in an account, including technical users and evaluators, current or potential internal champions and the economic buyer.
Multi-threading relationships with multiple stakeholders within an account can preserve momentum if a single stakeholder leaves a role engaging in the purchase. It can also enable a salesperson to gain a more holistic understanding of the customer and the vendor’s involvement in the account.
10. Continuously Track Core Sales Velocity Metrics
A healthy pipeline requires regular measurement. Key metrics to look for Sales leaders should look at critical metrics to keep an eye on how opportunities are progressing and where they may be slowing down in the sales process. One of the ratios used to measure the effectiveness of a sales pipeline is the sales velocity formula.
This formula measures how many dollars are being generated per day in the pipeline and is as follows:
Sales Velocity = (Qualified Opportunities x Win Rate x Average Deal Size) / Sales Cycle Length. For instance, you will earn 20% of the 50 qualified leads if you can locate them and have a 20% conversion rate. Your sales cycle lasts 50 days, and your average deal value is $10,000. This indicates that your daily sales velocity is $2,000.
Other important metrics that you need to be keeping track of are:
- Stage-to-stage conversion rates
- Average sales cycle length
- Average deal size
- Win rate
- Pipeline value
- Pipeline coverage
- Opportunity age
- Number of closed-won and closed-lost opportunities
- Revenue generated
These numbers can be tracked to identify leakage, boost forecasting accuracy and identify action points for sales leaders.
How to Drive Ongoing Growth of Your B2B Sales Pipeline
Pipeline development is continuous, building a sales pipeline is an iterative process that evolves along with markets, customer needs, buying preferences and business goals. To optimize your sales pipeline: Analyze the performance of your existing pipeline and look for commonalities in closed-won vs. closed-lost opportunities, forecasted vs. aging opportunities, and why opportunities are or aren’t making it through the pipeline. Assess your prospect data and ensure your contacts are up-to-date, your accounts are properly qualified and your firmographic data is clean.
Establish sales and marketing alignment, including shared definition of target accounts, messaging, qualification process and hand-offs, as this reduces friction from marketing-generated leads to sales opportunities. And continually optimize your approach using data, as you test new messaging, channels, touch points and qualification parameters, and then analyze what moves opportunities through the pipeline toward revenue.
Conclusion
The B2B sales pipeline is more than just contacts and open deals; it’s a precision machine that guides your reps to the most valuable accounts and contacts, provides laser focus on the most important opportunities, and pushes those opportunities across the finish line. Cultivating that machine requires discipline at every stage: Defining a clearly aligned ICP and set of pipeline stages, segmenting accounts and applying lead scoring, following up systematically and breathing life into targets all make for a healthier flow of deals. The same goes for adapting to the modern B2B buying process including LinkedIn prospecting, ABM and multi-threaded engagement.
Pipeline management isn’t one-and-done, either. Reps and revenue leaders should be continually evaluating conversion rates, sales velocity and stage length, deal quality and dormant opportunities to expose any bottlenecks, then iterate accordingly. A more effective sales pipeline is about constantly focusing on putting the right prospects, processes, data and sales activities into play. When the stars align, sales teams can expect a stronger sales forecast, better sales efficiency, a wider range of qualified opportunities and increased revenue.