What is the sales pipeline and why your business needs one right now.

Sales Pipeline is the framework used to organize and manage the contacts and opportunities. You don’t have to be a corporation to build a Sales Pipeline and use it to efficiently build your relationships with other entrepreneurs.

Sales Pipelines are helpful when running a B2B service where you have to keep track of multiple accounts as well as active and closed opportunities.

Note: this article is part of the ‘You gotta do business, dude’ series that I run on Steemit. Make sure you also check other pieces of the series:
👌🏻 Starting your business on the right foot

📬 How to craft an effective b2b email that doesn’t feel cold

✌🏼 How to reach the media resources and bloggers for your ICO or crowdfunding campaign

In this article, I would like to present you some of the core knowledge needed to start building your first Sales Pipeline or improve the existing one. Theory only, I’ll get into the practical side of things in the following articles.

Note: you can build the sales pipeline on paper, in the spreadsheets or a professional CRM software like Salesforce (expensive) and Hubspot (free). Think of the sales pipeline as a progress journal on every lead, company, deal, and opportunity. I’ll place a link to a step-by-step guide on how to build the Sales Pipeline in the Hubspot CRM here once I have the article written out.

The roles

Let's start by defining the roles in this game.

On the client’s side we have:

Contacts – people and companies that you or your organization knows. This is your initial Networking Capital.
Leads – contacts that are part of the active or potential deal.

Leads could have 5 statuses:

1. Cold – meaning they don’t know you and there was no or minimal contact with them.
2. Warm – those who are interested potentially in making business with you.
3. Hot – leads that are ready to do business together right now.
4. Won – those with whom you've closed the deal.
5. Lost – those who have declined your offer for various reasons.

On the company’s side we have:

If you have the resources, you can hire individuals for every single position to expand your volume of deals. But you can also wear all of those hats by yourself. Just make sure that you're conscious of every single one of them. Dividing the massive process into smaller chunks is the way to do it.

Data miners – those are the seekers. The team members are specializing in searching for the qualified leads, inserting them into the CRM, filling out the contact and contextual information on them.

Lead generators – the team members specializing in the initial outreach to the leads. They establish the grounds for future relationships to take place.

Sales manager– the team members who are talking to the leads after the communication is established. The goal of the sales manager is to see if there any opportunities for business and execute on them.

Pipeline supervisor– the team managers who control the quality of the communication and make sure that no leads or contacts are forgotten or mistreated.

The deals

Lastly, the deals are simply the opportunities for business in which both parties have to win (or at least this is what we believe in Kich Media). The more kindness you put into your business, the more multi-level winning scenarios you'll be able to produce. Start with the win-win approach, and you’ll find yourself thinking about win-win-win-win scenarios couple of weeks in 😅👌🏻

With that being said, now that we have the glossary covered let’s take a look at the Sales Pipeline architecture.

Sales Pipeline modules

Together with Kich Media, we prefer to break down the sales process into 8 modules.

• Networking Database
• Initial Outreach
• Dialogue
• Proposal
• Invoice
• Order Processing
• Order Delivery
• The Loop

Let’s discuss those modules in details:

Networking Database

If you don’t know who you’re writing to and your text has no context consider it to be a disrespectful email that deserves to go to the spam.

When building your Networking Database make sure you research and include the following information for every contact you have:

• Name
• Email (or any preferred/available form of contact)
• Social Media accounts
• Company
• Latest company news or updates
• Most recent social media updates (tweets, blog posts)

This way during your next step you (or the lead generators in your team) will be able to craft compelling contextual emails to open the dialogue.

Stage goal: to provide as much useful info on the contact to the lead generators as possible.

Pro tip: whether the contact is your friend or a new person in your life, whether you’re the only person in the company or have a team –– make sure you don’t hold the data in your head. Otherwise, you risk losing it. It's always a good idea to note the info!

Initial Outreach

At this stage, lead generators are sending out the first introductory emails using the contextual information provided by the data miners.

Stage Goal: to receive as many answers as possible. The rate of answered emails is an example of a conversion that we can call the response rate.

Pro tip: Conversion is the essential principle in sales. It doesn’t matter how many times they reject your offer. Always focus only on the total amount of email responses during the Initial Outreach stage.

Dialogue

At this stage, the sales manager is communicating with the leads who have responded positively to the initial email.

Stage Goals: (1) to build the relationships with the client and learn as much information about their company as possible (2) to evaluate if there is an opportunity to do business together.

Proposal

At this stage, the sales manager studies the information gathered and comes up with the ideal proposal to the lead if there is an opportunity to do business. The proposal should cover the descriptions of services provided, the terms and deadlines for them, as well as the budget estimate.

Stage Goal: to send and negotiate on the proposal with the lead.

Focus on the conversion rate: Just like with the Initial Outreach you should not be focused on closing the deal as much as on the contributing to the conversion rate. Whether the leads proceed or decline the deal, it’s a result.

Invoice

At this stage, the sales manager or the accountant is issuing the invoice to be paid.

Goal: make sure the invoice is paid before starting the service.

Pro tip: it’s always a good idea to ask for the advance payment at least in the 50/50 form. This way the lead feels more involved in the process and values the work more. Working for free is disappointing and is never adequately appreciated.

Order Processing

Now, it's time to deliver the best products and services to the clients.

Stage Goal: prepare the best quality product or service for the client on time and following the plan, deadlines, and terms outlined in the proposal.

Order Delivery

Make sure you treat this step responsibly as the delivery accounts for at least 25% of the satisfaction level of the client. If it's a service, attach the review of your work so they can appreciate its full value from your perspective.

Stage Goal: provide a satisfactory experience for the client and help them value your work as much as you do.

The Loop

Once you’ve delivered the product or service to the client, it doesn’t mean that your relationships are over. Keep in touch with them at least once a month. Make sure you send them congratulations on reaching certain milestones or support them when their business takes a hit.

Stage Goal: to build more personalized relationships with the clients leading to more business opportunities and referrals in the future.

Note: Referral marketing is one of the most potent forms of marketing available to this day. Make sure you build the referral producing and mutually benefiting close relationships with your clients.

##Some productivity tips:

1. Make sure you document your journey along the way. Keeping notes on every contact and deal will help you quickly come back to them at any time or quickly pass the info to other sales managers if needed.
2. Make sure you always follow up after a meeting within the first 24 hours. You should also follow up with your contacts if there were no reply to your email within 2/4/7 days. Just drop a quick line asking if the email was received, for instance.
3. Always reply to the email as fast as possible. Even if you're too busy atm, notify the contacts on the other end that you have received their information and will get back to them once available.
4. Make sure you talk to the lost leads to learn more about why they’ve declined the deal with you if no such information was provided.

Remember sales are not bad if you have the genuine intent to help people and you’re offering win-win deals with high-quality value.

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