Key Takeaways:
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Effective sales pipeline management can help you organize your sales process efficiently and make better business decisions
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A sales pipeline represents the complete journey of a buyer – from coming in as a lead to becoming a customer
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Sales pipeline software helps track each stage of your pipeline, monitor the process, and helps in understanding the next steps
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Sales pipeline CRMs offer customizable pipelines that help manage leads, opportunities, and customer relationships throughout the sales process
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A CRM tool helps you understand if a lead is responsive and if they’re interested in your product or service
In today’s competitive marketing world, businesses need innovative sales strategies to attract leads. And the sales process plays a vital role in attracting those leads and converting them into customers quickly.
From generating leads and building a contact repo to following up and closing the deal, your sales process requires systematic planning to help the team close the deals faster.
However, managing it manually can be time-consuming and tedious. To help manage things efficiently, you can empower your team with effective sales pipeline tools.
This blog will cover everything you need to know about sales pipelines and the top tools to manage them.
What is a Sales Pipeline?
A sales pipeline includes several stages, and the leads are moved from one stage to the next as they move through the process. The stages include lead generation, lead nurturing, marketing qualified leads, sales accepted leads, sales qualified leads, closed transactions, and after-sales.
Today, organizations employ technology to move, monitor, or evaluate prospects through the phases of a deal, and this technology is called sales pipeline software. It enables businesses to keep track of their prospects and clients and know where they are in the sales funnel.
With a sales pipeline enabled in your work process, you will know how many deals your salespeople need to close in a given time.
The importance of maintaining your sales pipeline is straightforward – to stay ahead of the game and manage your salespeople. It also helps to improve your sales operations process, get a picture of your targets, and better revenue forecasting.
Are you looking to be more successful in your business? Identify the changes that can be made within your sales pipeline, so your prospects move from one stage to the next faster.
How to Build an Effective Sales Pipeline?
We’ve listed down the steps to help you build a successful sales pipeline:
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Understanding your target audience is the first step to building an effective sales pipeline.
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Next, set up your sales cadences for the best accounts by identifying and targeting them from your database.
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Group those accounts based on product interest, location, and previous interaction with your brand.
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Finally, set up a successful sales pipeline with the right tools and software.
Read on to explore the best sales pipeline management tools that can help you set up an efficient sales pipeline.
Sales Pipeline Tools
Sales pipeline management tools help you organize your entire selling process.
It gives you a clear view of your pipeline by tracking every stage, streamlining the complete process, enabling your team to function better, and helping in understanding business growth.
These tools can also accurately evaluate your leads, predict sales, and track key metrics. Stay informed of your prospects, enable your sales team to follow up with them, and make better decisions with an effective sales pipeline.
How a Sales Pipeline Tool Can Help Your Business
By using a sales pipeline tool, you can organize all the processes in your pipeline efficiently.
You can understand where your leads are coming from and where they are in the pipeline and automate scheduling meetings, sending emails, and more.
Apart from minimizing human errors and saving time in repetitive tasks, it helps your business with the following:
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Understanding customer behavior: Sales pipeline tools can track conversations and metrics, which helps in understanding your customers and their pain points better.
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Making better decisions: The tool offers insights regarding leads, conversions, and processes, helping you make better decisions and understand where your business is headed.
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Generating more revenue: It helps you understand which leads are cold/potential, and how interested they are in your product/service while translating into more conversions and revenue generation.
The 4 Essential Tools to Manage Your Sales Pipeline
Let’s look at the top sales pipeline management tools, their features & benefits, and why customers prefer using them for managing their sales processes.
1. Salesforce
Salesforce is one of the top CRM software providers as it redefines the way businesses connect with their customers.
It is designed for marketing, sales, and customer service ops to create meaningful customer relationships by understanding their requirements.
This CRM helps in creating an effective sales funnel to nurture customers. It provides excellent automated features and customer service tools to help manage good relationships with your leads/customers.
According to Salesforce customer success, companies that switch over to Salesforce see an average of 25 percent increase in revenue.
Benefits:
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Salesforce helps communicate with customers/leads using automation tools
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Gives a 360-degree view of your customers and engages with them accordingly
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Removes the burden of using various applications by syncing data from them all
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Positively impacts online customer support by providing chat assistance
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It helps your brand have a unified approach with an omnichannel feature
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Collects insights to understand your customers and business better
2. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a fully functional, cloud-based CRM tool for managing sales effectively throughout the pipeline. It helps you stay focused on hot deals, track leads, and predict business revenue.
Pipedrive offers custom web forms and chatbots to automate repetitive tasks. It helps you get the most important deals fed into your pipeline and track calls/emails/contact history for each deal. Control your sales pipeline through a mobile device and boost your work by integrating Pipedrive with your business tools.
Benefits:
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Pipedrive is easy-to-use and customize
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Can track the number of active deals and give detailed information for each open deal
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Guides you with the deals that need prioritization
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Adaptable and cost-effective plans
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Offers machine learning-powered sales assistant for all plans
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Workflow automation for most plans
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Pipedrive doesn’t have all the features that Salesforce does, but it is perfect for small businesses with smaller budgets.
3. HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM is a cloud-based tool that supports sales, marketing, customer service, and content management with better resources and strategies. You can avoid your sales falling through the cracks and easily manage your deals.
HubSpot CRM helps you to design attractive brand profiles and organize all the important communication details with your leads/customers. It allows you to add new deals directly from the CRM with up-to-date details.
Whether you already have an established sales process or are just starting, HubSpot CRM eases your work by creating an ideal process. With HubSpot, you don’t need the help of a technical team to edit, delete, and add deal properties and stages.
Benefits:
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It allows you to create visual dashboards and design a sales funnel the way you want it.
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It can be connected to your social media handles.
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The website integration feature will notify you when a lead visits your website.
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The features of HubSpot CRM are not as complex as other CRMs’
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It also offers a clear view of all the tasks/activities of the team in a single dashboard
4. Lusha
Lusha is a data enrichment tool that enables you to retrieve phone numbers, email addresses, and other contact information quickly and easily. It helps you to access your leads’ contact details and B2B company info within seconds.
Marketing and sales professionals can use Lusha to drive business growth, boost campaigns, and improve revenue.
Benefits:
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It helps gather accurate B2B contact information
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It allows data enrichment at scale
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One-click CRM integrations
Bottom Line
The goal of any company is to increase revenue and generate leads. However, most leads are lost in the pipeline due to irregular/negligent follow-ups.
An effective sales pipeline management system can help convert your leads into customers. If you haven’t implemented sales pipeline management for your business, it is high time you do it immediately with expert help.
That’s where You need MarketStar as your sales and revenue accelerator. MarketStar is a pioneer in the sales outsourcing industry. With over 50+ world-class clients served, we create growth and drive results for companies of all stages and sizes using tailored solutions to help you hit your specific business goals.
