http://www.elecomtech.com/pipe-line/
Consumer Lifestyle Surveys Feeding Your Sales Pipe-Line : Where to begin?
The success of any business depends on acquiring, growing, and retaining profitable relationships with customers. The heart of the process is the sales pipeline – where sales opportunities are managed from qualification to closed sale.
Put simply a sales pipeline is any list of qualified prospects that aren’t ready to buy right now.
A good analogy is fruit on a fruit tree that hasn’t ripened. You may have qualified these suspects as good prospects for customers. However, you must be around when these prospects are ready to buy. If you don’t build a contact pipeline to them, these prospect opportunities will wither away. Worse yet, someone else will be around when the prospect ripens and you miss out on new business.
If a client tells you they will be ready in about 6 months, you should have an action plan that will contact them regularly during the time period they ask.
A Sales Pipeline is a useful concept used by Sales Managers – individual sales staff and the owners of small businesses to quantify the demand for their products and services. Regardless of what you’re selling, by effectively managing your sales pipeline, you can smooth out customer demand and create a more stable sales cycle with more reliable results.
A sales pipeline works by placing cohorts of leads or prospects at the different stages of the sales process/sales cycle, and then measuring their progress through the pipeline, from unqualified lead to satisfied repeat customer.
One way to keep control of your sales pipeline is through the concept of The Sales Funnel where the general idea and metaphor of the tunnel is to feed enough in at the top to get the number you need at the end.
At the top of the funnel you have “unqualified prospects” – the very many people who you think might need your product or service, but to whom you’ve never spoken. At the bottom of the funnel, many sales and delivery steps later, you have people who have received delivery of your product or service and have paid for it.
The metaphor of the funnel is used because people drop away at each stage of a long sales process: For example, many of your unqualified prospects may have existing suppliers with whom they’re very satisfied. Others may have needs which other competitors are better-placed to satisfy. Still others may love your products, but not have the budget to buy them.
Why Use the Tool?
By using the sales funnel, and by quantifying the number of prospects at each stage of the process, you can predict the number of prospects who will, in time, become customers.
More than this, by looking at the way in which these numbers change over time, you can spot problems in the sales pipeline and take corrective action early.
Use of the Sales Funnel shows roadblocks and times of standstill, or if there are an insufficient number of leads at any stage. This knowledge allows you to determine where sales people should focus attention and efforts to keep sales at the desired level and to meet sales targets.
The funnel can also point out where improvements need to be made within the sales process. These may be as simple as implementing additional sales training or ensuring that sales representatives put sufficient focus on all steps of the sales process.
There are several benefits to managing your sales pipeline effectively:
- By focusing on the entire pipeline instead of taking a short-term focus on closing sales, or getting a single high-value contract over the line, demand for your services will be smoother and your cash flow more reliable.
- Making incremental improvements of as little as 1-2% in your conversion rates can increase your sales by much more
- An in-depth analysis of when and why your leads and prospects leak from the pipeline will pinpoint specific areas for improvement and help you get far more value for your training dollar.
- If you keep track of which prospects leak from your sales pipeline and which prospects don’t, you can construct a profile of prospects who are more likely to buy and prospects who are less likely to buy. This knowledge will help you to focus your marketing material and allow you to more accurately qualify your leads, leading to a more streamlined, more efficient and less costly sales process.
- Once you have established an accurate sales pipeline, you can use it to plan for new product launches.
Many businesses struggle, though, with myriad sales pipeline management challenges such as
- determining which accounts should be of highest priority,
- what actions will best spur the sales process,
- and whether and how to reapportion pipeline opportunities to maintain a healthy distri- bution across the sales force.
The results of failing to address these challenges include
- lengthen- ing sales cycles,
- stalled opportunities,
- and results versus forecast that bring unpleasant surprises.
The difference then for the most successful sales organizations is identifying and taking the intelligent steps needed to achieve measurable improvements in sales pipeline management and performance.
Addressing The Challenge
In order to address the challenge, clear steps can be taken to enhance sales pipeline performance:
- Define Your Sales Pipeline Process
- On demand vısıbılıty ınto opportunıtıes
- Create a Process to Monitor Performance
- Combine Analytics and Action
- Business Intelligence.
A sales pipeline is a very important concept in selling because it is the recognition of the origin and result of each sale. Each sale starts as a lead — which is a phone number, a name, an email addres obtained through telemarketing or online — they are leads. From there, you qualify the lead, which means, you make sure this person is capible of becoming a customer.
Buying consumer lifestyle data is one of the best way to generate leads. It is the way forward; an accurate and efficient way to target your potential customers. Naturally this is much more cost effective. As well as that when you know your pool of consumers well, you know exactly what to offer to get them interested.
Consumer lifestyle data provide a carefully selected target customer base along with one-on-one contactability, the results of which outstrip traditional advertising.
These services typically involve matching your data against other compiled data to gather additional information, such as executive contact names, job functions, company size, nature of businesses, industry sector, postal area codes, etc.
Simply through appropriate questioning, you recieve an ongoing high volume stream of leads from the consumer lifestyle data to contact, through your preferred medium of telephone, mail or email.
With the use of Consumer lifestyle data you get the right customers and prospects, it’s possible to run a highly effective campaign. Targeting the right customer base is the most critical part of every direct marketing campaign.
Make sure the “unqualified prospects” you feed into the opening of the funnel are real customers for you by making use of consumer lifestyle data.
About the Author
Demet Dayanch is the senior marketing manager for Seawave Media Limited, the UK’s number one provider of consumer lifestyle survey data and lifestyle survey leads. Demet was born in London, UK where she spent most of her life. She currently lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey. A student of psychology and lover of people she understands the human mind and heart – what motivates and inspires humanity in life as well as in the world of consumerism. Before her role as senior marketing manager for Seawave Media Limited she worked as a freelance copywriter for an international advertising agency where she utilized her creative writing talent to come up with catchy headlines and text for advertising campaigns. Her writing style is informative, personal and entertaining.To find out more about Seawave Media please visit our website www.seawavemedia.com or call Tulip, senior sales manager, on 0845 056 3593, or 07053 544966 or email tulip@seawavemedia.com
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