Starting a business is always risky. It's challenging to transform a mere idea into a thriving company. There's the potential for product failure, poor market fit, burnout, and even growing too fast! However, without risk, there's no reward. This is why startups can be worthwhile investments.
To ensure your business's future success, you need to establish a strong sales pipeline right from the start.
To help you achieve this, we've created this guide on securing a sales pipeline in the digital age.
Let's take a look!
What Is a Sales Pipeline?
The term "sales pipeline" is often used in discussions within sales teams, but it can be confusing. Let's clarify what it means. A sales pipeline is a tool that gives you a complete overview of your business's sales. This is particularly useful for startups, where even a single failed sale can have a significant impact.
Visualizing your sales with a sales pipeline can be a game-changer. It provides essential data for each sale, including which representative is handling it, the deal's stage, the likelihood of success or failure, potential profit, and the efficiency of your sales representatives. Now that you understand what a sales pipeline is let's explore its benefits and how it can be useful for startups.
Benefits of a Sales Pipeline
The main purpose of a sales pipeline is to forecast income based on potential or current sales. This information is valuable for making informed decisions about specific sales.
Here's a summary of the advantages of using a sales pipeline:
- Sales progress monitoring: It's vital for any company to be able to track the activity of every sale, especially for startups.
- Forecasting: Having accurate sales metrics can be helpful for forecasting and predicting revenue.
- Productivity boost: With a clear overview of sales representatives and their sales handling, you can offer valuable advice to close deals, ultimately boosting productivity.
- Increased revenue: Naturally, all these benefits will lead to a clear increase in company revenue.
Now that you understand the advantages of why a sales pipeline can be a better option compared to other sales tools, let's discuss how to establish a secure pipeline for your startup.
Building And Securing a Sales Pipeline For Your Startup
The first step to building a sales pipeline is to understand your audience. The better you understand them, the more data you will have to optimize your products, services, support, and sales processes.
Find Your Target Audience
To understand your customers, you will need to collect various data on their age, education, occupation and income, gender, and other information that can be used to accurately promote your business to the right people.
For example, if you’re a retailer of luxury and exotic watches, you’re most likely targeting a predominantly male audience with a higher income around the 30-50 age mark.
Customer behavior can further help you narrow down your target market. You can do that through customer feedback, analytics, community forums, and social media platforms.
CRM Systems Implementation
Once you have insight into your target audience, a Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM system) can be a game-changer for your startup, as many modern sales pipelines rely on these systems.
These systems can help you manage your sales and customer interactions. Paired with automation and AI-driven analytics, they can easily increase your revenue.
Data Security Is Essential
With every other big company nowadays leaking valuable customer or company data to the public, you can understand just how valuable modern data security practices are.
A single data leak can destroy your startup's reputation. It is crucial to encrypt the data on your virtual private servers and closely monitor who can access it and when. For added security, consider using VPS hosting services that provide firewalls or DDoS protection is worth considering.
Encrypting your data and tracking access will significantly lower the risk of a data breach.
Sales Pipeline Stages
With a target audience in mind and a CRM system, it’s time to set up the sales pipeline stages. These stages will help you monitor the progress of individual sales. Stages often used in the sales pipeline are prospecting, lead qualification, proposal, negotiation, closing, and retention.
However, these are customizable, so add or remove stages based on how your startup handles the customer journey.
Create An Agenda For Each Stage
Each stage of the sale should have an agenda—a set of things/activities you (or others) need to follow to increase the chances of lead conversion. For example, during the proposal stage, your next step should be to set an appointment with the client to take the sale to the next stage. If you’re still in the lead qualification stage, the next step is data analytics to determine if the lead is worth pursuing.
Keep A Close Eye On Sales Pipeline Metrics
Now that you have set up a sales pipeline, it’s time to see if it can really be useful for your business. Track all metrics closely to determine how you can improve it. The more you follow performance, the more you can update and refine your sales pipeline.
With every new addition to your sales pipeline, you will also notice improved customer satisfaction, lead retention, conversion, and revenue.
