Slow Sales? Scrub Your Pipeline Clean for Better Productivity
By Kim Honjo
Everything can use a good cleaning now and again. Closets, refrigerators, your office desk and even your sales and marketing pipeline. Without routine decluttering, things start piling up, they get outdated, and sometimes gets lost. Small businesses that run lean, streamlined operations can’t afford to have a messy, poorly managed pipeline with their future revenue at stake. Not only does a slow pipeline drag down productivity, it takes the focus off of promising leads and worse, lets them slip through the cracks!
According to our State of Sales report, 80% of sales teams say that acquiring new customers is a top sales objective. Reaching this objective is made much simpler when you have a well-organized pipeline, stocked with fresh opportunities and a more productive sales team ready to go. By making the effort to clean up your sales and marketing pipeline, you’re able to focus on the right deals and create a repeatable cycle of success. Here are a few things you can do immediately to better manage your pipeline. For more guidance, read our new e-book, 5 Quick Ways to Clean Up Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline.
Tidy up existing leads
Your existing leads are a good place to begin. Have you ever had a contact go dark or an invoice go unpaid since that person was no longer with the company? Small lapses in your data can turn into costly and time-consuming problems to rectify. Take steps to verify and clean your data so that your CRM is operating at peak performance to drive revenue. Having confidence in your data leads to better productivity by arming your sales team with a complete, accurate picture of leads.
Send messages with a point of view
Customers are looking for personalized, tailored solutions that can solve their problems. If your messages are not relevant to them, they’ll be more likely to ignore you or move on to a competitor, so it’s important that you’re targeting prospects who are high-scoring and will advance steadily through the sales cycle. By sending messages that resonate with specific marketing segments, you’re less likely to wind up with sluggish leads.
Plan for low-scoring leads
Your sales team probably has a plan of action for handling high-scoring leads, but what about the leads that needs a little hand holding? Low-scoring leads don’t need to languish, stuck in the pipeline. Create purposeful nurture tracks for these leads, using automated emails to build journeys that are designed to educate them and trigger responses. Through nurture, these relationships with leads build gradually over time and are great for smaller teams with limited resources.
Ready to roll your sleeves up and get started? Check out our free e-book for 5 Quick Ways to Clean Up Your Sales and Marketing Pipeline.
