Almost every sales professional uses the phrase “sales pipeline” at least several times a week. But if you ask a room full of professionals to define “sales pipeline,” you’re likely to get a roomful of different answers.
This is one of those topics I wish I could just put to bed and ignore–yet it keeps rearing it’s ugly head. We continue to get forecasting wrong, at least for complex B2B sales.
Pause for a moment. Look at your qualified pipeline. Start at the bottom. Can you identify the problem the customer is trying to solve? Or the opportunity they are trying to address?
Big ones, little ones, sharp ones and stubborn ones. I was pulling weeds from the garden when it became crystal clear to me. The various weeds were like the many types of opportunities in most sales pipelines.
One of the most common reasons why apparently promising B2B sales opportunities get derailed - often at a late stage in our sales cycle - is that we have failed to identify all the key stakeholders or to understand how to get them all to support our approach.
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