How can you keep your sales pipeline flowing?

1 Define your sales stages

The first step to keeping your sales pipeline flowing is to define your sales stages clearly and consistently. Sales stages are the milestones that indicate how close a prospect is to becoming a customer. They can vary depending on your industry, product, and sales cycle, but they usually include some version of lead generation, qualification, presentation, negotiation, and closing. By defining your sales stages, you can align your sales process, measure your progress, and identify the best actions to move prospects forward.

3 Nurture your prospects

The third step to keeping your sales pipeline flowing is to nurture your prospects throughout the sales cycle. Nurturing prospects means providing them with relevant and valuable information, education, and guidance that helps them move closer to a purchase decision. It helps you build trust, credibility, and rapport with your prospects, overcome their objections, and influence their preferences. You can use various tools and channels to nurture your prospects, such as email, social media, webinars, case studies, or testimonials.

4 Follow up regularly

The fourth step to keeping your sales pipeline flowing is to follow up regularly with your prospects. Following up means contacting your prospects after an initial interaction, presentation, or proposal to keep the conversation going, answer their questions, and address their concerns. It helps you maintain engagement, interest, and momentum with your prospects, prevent them from going cold or choosing a competitor, and move them to the next stage. You can use various strategies and techniques to follow up effectively, such as setting a clear agenda, using a CRM system, sending personalized messages, or creating a sense of urgency.

5 Review and optimize your pipeline

The fifth step to keeping your sales pipeline flowing is to review and optimize your pipeline periodically. Reviewing your pipeline means analyzing your data, metrics, and performance to evaluate your sales process, identify gaps, and spot trends. It helps you measure your effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity, as well as your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Optimizing your pipeline means making adjustments, improvements, and changes to your sales process, strategy, and tactics to increase your results. You can use various methods and tools to review and optimize your pipeline, such as pipeline reports, dashboards, KPIs, or feedback.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?