Sales stages and pipelines – review your statistics
As your prospects mature and become new clients, they are progressing through your sales stages or sales pipeline. Reviewing the related statistics can provide a wealth of information and help you enhance your sales efforts:
- Determine bottlenecks. Are prospects stopping or slowing at a specific stage? What can you do to increase the flow? Set up a schedule of sales events. This might be:
- Prospects. Overall, how many prospects are in your pipeline and how does that compare with prior year numbers? Why are your numbers significantly different from last year or last month? Can you attribute successes or failures to specific actions?
- Projections. Based upon your sales pipeline, what are your sales projecting for the future? If you are expecting an increase in business, are you prepared for the additional business? If your numbers indicate that you will experience a slow down, what can you do to minimize that slow down or what measures can you take prepare for the decrease in sales?
- Step 1. Initial contact
- Step 2. Send information and follow-up within 2 business days
- Step 3. Proceed based on result of Step 2
- Step 4. Move forward based on prior results. This might be moving follow-up to 2 weeks out. Our program allows us never to discontinue reaching out to a prospect unless they tell they have no interest.
As you can see, measuring your sales pipeline can provide a wealth of information that benefits the business as a whole – not just the sales department. Put a program in place to harvest this information and your business will certainly benefit.
