Pipeline management tools

To make them effective, sales leaders must possess a combination of real-world experience, detailed design, and willingness to change and adapt. We also include practical tools like a sales pipeline performance metric checklist, and multiple templates to help you reach the ultimate goal: more sales. A sales pipeline is a visual representation of the sales process divided into stages. An effective sales pipeline will help sales reps and teams manage the often complex processes necessary to close deals.

Smartsheet is a cloud-based platform that allows sales teams to effectively manage pipelines by creating one location to track and manage efforts, surface open and at-risk opportunities, and provide real-time visibility to improve forecasting. See Smartsheet in action. Watch a free demo. The bottom line on sales pipelines actually is the bottom line: effective management of them increases revenue.

Even more interestingly, companies that mastered three specific pipeline practices saw 28 percent higher revenue growth. A well-managed sales pipeline is about continuously improving the process itself, and honing the skills of your salespeople. Identifying sales stages is nothing new. In , John H. He used his Primer that divided every sale into four stages: approach, proposition, demonstration, and close.

Sellers notes that today, a sales pipeline flips this process. Most sales efforts are too focused on the selling process and not enough on the customer's buying process," he says.

Together, the funnel and the pipeline consist of eight stages. Using a sales pipeline helps turn an abstraction into a visual format. But how many stages should you have? That said, the model needs to be customized for your specific set of buyers and your organization.

At that point, the customer is not yet in your funnel. Quality lead generation pre-funnel needs to be separated from the traditional sales process. Based on these metrics, and in light of other revenue-based and activity-based goals, you can identify and set desired goals for future performance, but how to get this information? To set up this Sales Analytics Overview Dashboard , follow these 3 simple steps:.

It is full-featured helping you prioritize the most important deals, tracking performance, and predicting revenue. Read more on 11 best Pipedrive CRM features according to sales pros. Making sure we follow up with sales opportunities is essential to our revenue stream. You send a proposal or a quote and simply wait for the prospect to respond.

Pipedrive as a sales tool encourages you to focus on your sales activity i. For example, it allowed us to see our sales pipeline was lagging in the early retention stage, and we created an email drip campaign to help fix that in response. It almost holds my hand through the cycle and keeps me on track and moving forward in the whirlwind that sales and prospecting often is.

Robust analytics: Data is at the heart of understanding how your sales are performing. It notifies me when my prospects open my emails, click on my content links, and visit my website. This allows me to focus my sales efforts on prospects who are already demonstrating an interest in learning about our solutions. The HubSpot CRM also gives you insights into the number of activities you have performed within a given time period, the number of deals you are involved in, a feed of all the communication you have had with your prospects, and your schedule.

Zoho CRM is a part of the Zoho suite for businesses and helps sales teams manage their pipeline efficiently and close more deals. It also gives us real-time notifications when those customers interact with our business. We are creating optimized workflows reducing manual data entry and eliminating redundancies, tracking the current stage of the deal, and closing more of them in less time.

We use the analytics and reporting to see what is happening across all accounts and how each rep is performing against our KPIs.

LeadFuze promises to put your list building on autopilot by screening all your leads before they get into your pipeline. What else does it offer? The program can help your sales, marketing, and HR teams find qualified leads with less effort.

This allows your employees to focus on what matters — converting the leads into customers or employees. Over 40, customers trust Freshsales for their pipeline management needs. Are they a good fit for you?

The software offers up a wide range of features for businesses, including:. Freshsales also uses Artificial Intelligence to h elp you better predict outcomes, so you can prioritize deals with the best chance of providing a return. The software will allow you to analyze your sales process by syncing deal activity and engagement levels. This is an invaluable coaching tool as it shows you where opportunities for sales improvement lie.

InsightSquared also promises to help make your sales team more effective at handling leads in the pipeline by offering virtual coaching. And on top of that, i t will also help you become more effective at managing your pipeline by offering up detailed analysis of all your leads — which allows you to make better sales forecasts.

InsightSquared features:. Want to learn how to recognize risk and act on opportunity? Clari basically captures all your contact data from emails, calls, meetings, and your calendar , then uses Artificial Intelligence to make sense of it all. The journey of a raw idea to a finished project incorporates several important stages. While there can be many stages depending on the nature of a project, we have compiled 5 that can together act as your standard project pipeline.

This is the brainstorming stage in which new ideas are generated. Ideation is important for capturing project proposals needed for creating high-quality projects. Ask every single team member to share their unique inputs- you never know when a simple idea might turn out to be your best project. The ideas that are good enough, reach this stage and are presented to key stakeholders for their approval.

Once you have settled on an idea and your team is ready to work on it, you create a formal presentation to pitch to your clients or other stakeholders. Factors such as the scope of the project, the budget, and desired outcomes are discussed. You cannot possibly start with a project just because you feel good about it.

For instance, if you wish to launch a new product line, you will need approval from investors, business partners, market experts, and in some cases important clients. In case there are any changes requested by the stakeholders, you can work on gaps and share follow-up proposals at the earliest. Planning helps you break your project into multiple tasks, assign them to key team members, and create a plan for monitoring their progress closely.

You need to be extra careful during this stage and ensure that no single member or team is assigned more tasks than they can achieve. Once, the plan is ready, share it with all team members to build clarity. All team members must be well aware of their roles and responsibilities, and what the business expects from them. This is the execution stage in which your team members put their hearts and souls into the project. Out of all the stages that compose a project pipeline, this stage consumes the most time and effort.

You have to constantly deal with clients, other managers, as well as different team members. Projects reach this final stage when they are completed and delivered to the client.