Sales pipeline integrity

The funnel/pipeline is a key tool for sales people and managers to assess performance.  It provides so many insights beyond knowing whether you will make your sales goals.

Should B2B sales people prospect?

Historically, sales people have been responsible for both generating new opportunities (prospecting) and closing deals in the pipeline (opportunity management). However, this stance is being challenged. Spurred on by the trend towards inbound sales teams, and the importance of adding more value during the sales process, the sales space is a buzzing with ideas on how organizations can manage their sales efforts more effectively.

Stop clogging your revenue artery

How your pipeline is managed and staged can be the difference between a decent year or career, or a consistently great one. To use a sport analogy, your pipeline is your core. No matter what sport you play, a well exercised and maintained core adds to athletic performance and turns one competitor into a champion, while a comparably talented athlete with a less conditioned core falls behind.

Succeeding with pipeline management in complex B2B sales

All sales organizations are looking for an edge to outperform the competition. Every year, $20 billion is spent on sales training in the US alone* – however, without proper reinforcement 87% of what was learned is forgotten within a month. Regardless of what you are looking to achieve, implementation and reinforcement will be key for long term success.

Why you need to do more than name + define your sales pipeline stages

The state of the sales pipeline reflects the health of any sales process - and in anything other than the simplest of sales transactions, that process goes through multiple stages.

Stalled deals

We all have them, we know what they look like. They’re stuck. We look at aging reports and see them staying in the same stage of the pipeline, not moving forward, getting older, moldier as time passes. Sometimes, I see entire pipeline’s clogged up with stalled deals–I feel like calling “Roto Rooter.” The longer a deal is stalled, the less likely it’s going to happen.

There are a lot of things that cause deals to stall, let me review a few that seem to be the biggest–with some ideas about how to free them up.