Can technology solve your toughest problems? — Filling the sales pipeline

Filling your sales funnel with leads is the first step to increasing your revenue. But you need to make sure your marketing and sales teams are working together to get the best results. Otherwise, you run the risk of creating an isolated organization, where everyone does their own thing. There are many ways to ensure that both teams work together and effectively. One way to ensure everyone is on the same page is by creating a lead scoring system.

Filling the sales funnel requires constant freshness and updating. Successful companies understand that their pipelines never remain static and that there is always work to be done. To achieve this, marketers must practice their scripts regularly. Instead of looking for potential customers based on their ability to buy products or services, they should look for business challenges they can solve.

Secondary solutions are another great way to fill the sales funnel. Secondary solutions should provide additional information about the capabilities of your product or service and why it is better than the competition. Secondary solutions are also essential for building relationships with potential customers. By presenting them with content that can help them solve problems, you can get closer to closing a deal.

A clogged sales funnel can choke your business. However, it is possible to unstick an obstruction in the pipe by following the perspectives. Keeping detailed records of each lead’s progress can help you pinpoint the problem. If your vendors aren’t following through, you might want to consider replacing them.

Using a CRM tool, such as Pipedrive, is key. Not only does it track your leads, but it also allows sales reps to set activity reminders. It also helps them focus on the most important tasks. These include prospecting calls, demos and follow-up.

A smart sales funnel starts with identifying your ideal buyer or customer. This can be based on a previous long-term, high-value customer relationship, or a new customer profile. A business organization must then qualify the buyer or customer according to their specific needs. Once a lead is qualified, a sales representative will know if the lead has the budget to purchase the product or service.

Using sophisticated pipeline management tools will provide visibility into your sales process and increase salesperson productivity. For example, Outreach helps sales reps book more meetings with customers by giving them access to AI-assisted voice and email functionality. The tool also provides detailed data on the seller’s needs. Keeping your sales pipeline on track is vital to the success of your business. You can’t afford to wait until your sales pipeline is empty.

Filling the sales funnel is the first step in your sales process. Prospects flow through the pipe like water through a pipe. Occasionally, some contacts may not make it all the way through, but this is unlikely to harm your business. But if your sales funnel isn’t full of leads, your sales performance will suffer.

Sales channels can be divided into four stages. These stages include customer research, contact, booking a meeting, and closing. While you can also break the process down further, these are the general stages of a sales process for most B2B SaaS companies.

The next step is to make sure you have a clear plan for managing your sales pipeline. You should monitor the pipeline on a regular basis and make necessary changes accordingly. You should also monitor key metrics that affect the flow of your sales pipeline. For example, you should purge stale accounts, identify high-value deals, and work toward a faster sales cycle flow. Finally, you should identify which sales representatives, teams, and techniques are most effective.

Getting the right mix of leads is key to growing your sales. The goal should be to maximize the number of high-quality leads in your pipeline. The more highly qualified your leads are, the more likely they are to convert. For this reason, you should spend more time on hot wires and avoid cold wires.

Advisors are finding that technology makes it easier to connect with potential clients and find the right leads for their practice. Here are some examples of how technology helps fill the sales pipeline.

While the majority of Craig Lytle’s practice focuses on helping clients with their life insurance and financial planning needs, sometimes a client needs help with something else. This is where technology comes in.

Lytle is CEO of Income & Estate Planning Partners in Newark, Del., and is a Goosehead franchisee. Goosehead’s digital agent is an online tool that leverages relationships with hundreds of insurance companies to create a home and auto package that fits a client’s needs.

Leads enter Lytle’s Salesforce. It can then help create the type of coverage the client needs. For a client who lives outside of the Lytle area, you can work with a local agent where the client lives and then split the commission.

In one example of how he was able to use Goosehead to help a client, Lytle said he was contacted by a mortgage loan officer in New Jersey to help a client who was moving to Texas and needed homeowners insurance. “I’m not licensed in Texas, but I was able to get the contact to a Goosehead agent in the zip code the customer was moving to,” he said. “We collaborated to get the client covered and split the commission.”

In another example, a client who moved to Oregon needed help insuring his car and RV. “We were able to use this technology to help them get their coverage,” Lytle said.

“Without this technology, people who moved to Texas or Oregon in the past would have gone to work with another agent somewhere else,” he said. “But for the client who wants to work with me because he knows me and trusts me, it’s a good way to help him. It’s also a great way for me to work with a local agent where they’re moving because of the particular nuances of each state as well as each state’s licensing issues. It’s a win-win all around.”

No more ‘plain vanilla’

Using technology for lead generation means advisors have to spend less time filling the sales funnel and more time closing sales.

Taylor Schulte uses his podcast, “The Stay Wealthy Retirement Show,” as a way to promote his practice and lead SEO on Google. Schulte is founder and CEO of Define Financial in San Diego. He describes his podcast as the top of his sales funnel because he wants potential customers to find it when they go online to search for “best retirement podcast” on Google.

“After we show up in SEO, we want to move potential customers into the middle of the funnel, which is to subscribe to our newsletter or our podcast,” he said.

But turning middle-of-the-funnel movers into real customers takes time, and that’s by design, he said.

“We have a very detailed sales process. It takes about four to six weeks for someone to go through it from start to finish,” Schulte said. “We always say if you want to hire us tomorrow, we’re probably not the right person. What we do is provide free retirement and tax analysis. You can think of it as a kind of financial life plan.”

Schulte specializes in working with people who are over 50 with $1 million or more in investments and who have tax issues in retirement. It directs potential customers to your website, where they are directed to a landing page that gives them information on how they can get this free analysis.

“If they think we’re a potential good fit, they can schedule their call right on our website. We use scheduling software called Acuity Scheduling. This allows them to schedule the introductory call so we can discuss whether we’re a good fit to work with them in the future “.

Schulte also uses Acuity to send automated educational emails to prospects as they move through the sales process. “So it’s not radio silence on our part,” he said. “We’ve used technology to create a great customer experience. We’ve taken a very simple vanilla sales process that a lot of advisors use, and we’ve created an amazing experience and we’ve leveraged a lot of technology to do that.”

Using platforms to grow community

Trent Grzegorczyk created his private community, the Retirement Planning Club, which is hosted on the Skool platform. Grzegorczyk is founder of Resilient Financial Planning in Traverse City, Michigan.

He uses his YouTube channel, The Retirement Planning Coach, to direct potential clients to the club. After joining, you can take three of his classes for free. From there, you can sign up to purchase some of their programs and consulting services. “The ultimate goal is for them to eventually become our wealth management clients,” he said.

In the five months since he launched his community, he has seen it grow to over 180 members. “I think these results are good, considering it’s only been a short time,” he said.

Grzegorczyk said his niche client is someone over 50 who has been doing do-it-yourself investing for a few years and has accumulated some money but needs a second opinion or has decided he needs a professional adviser. He said that this type of self-directed customer is already comfortable with receiving an education online and wants them to receive that education from him.

He also wants to start using an online tool, New Retirement, that will allow him to work alongside clients who want to direct their own retirement planning with the help of an advisor.

“Building an online community is nothing new,” he said. “But for independent advisors looking to grow online, this is a good model.”

Automation with personalization

Adam Cmelja likes to quote the saying, “Never delegate something that can be automated, and never automate something that can be eliminated.”

When it comes to lead generation, Cmelja believes that this should be automated rather than delegated. He is president of Integrated Wealth Management, a Carmel, Ind.-based practice serving independent optometrists.

Cmelja said she uses automation to schedule appointments and also to capture the right prospects for her practice.

Using technology allows you to “capture important information you would like to know about the potential relationship.

“For example, you can create online forms that will ask a potential customer to fill out some qualitative and/or quantitative data about themselves. We have a built-in integration that says if you check that box and want to receive our newsletter, it will automatically add you to our email newsletter list. They’re giving us permission to market to them in the future. And it also allows the advisor to put restrictions on when they want to take calls with potential clients. So it’s this idea of ​​blocking your time because you can control how leads come to you, and it also puts a barrier on your time and frees you up to work on your business.”

While Cmelja is excited about using technology for programming, he also sees it as an opportunity to do some personalized marketing to the prospect.

“You can set up a generic appointment confirmation email, but that’s a missed opportunity to communicate with a customer and personalize that interaction,” he said. “With us, the first email they get after booking an appointment with us is something like, ‘You might not believe it right now, but we’re doing a little happy dance here in the office because we’re so excited. to engage in another conversation with someone who wants to work with us.”

He described technology as a way to “communicate to a potential relationship your values, your purpose, your perspective, your culture, your mission and the personality of your company.”

A sales process is a set of repeatable steps a salesperson takes to take a potential buyer from the initial awareness stage to a closed sale. Typically, a sales process consists of 5-7 steps: Prospecting, Preparation, Approach, Presentation, Objection Management, Closing and Follow-up.

What is the most important skill in sales?

Top 5 Skills for a Sales Career

• Confidence: keep a positive attitude.
• Resilience: Communicate with conviction.
• Active listening: understanding customer needs.
• Rapport building: selling your personality.
• Entrepreneurial spirit – continuous self-improvement.

What are the 3 most important things in sales? Being successful in sales and learning to improve in sales comes down to 3 things: empathy, a genuine desire to help, and persistence.

What is the most important part of sales?

Discovery is the most important part of selling well. The best salespeople know that doing a great discovery job demonstrates to your customer that you will provide a top-notch customer service experience.

What is the most important part of the sales process and why?

Needs Assessment This is possibly the most important step in the sales process because it allows you to determine how you can really be of service. To be a highly effective salesperson, that is, to sell to the prospect’s needs, you must first understand what those needs are.

What is most important for success in sales?

In business and sales success, you must have credibility. You can only succeed if people trust you and believe in you. Study after study, the element of trust has been identified as the most important differentiating factor between one salesperson and another, and one company and another.

What is sales pipeline analysis?

The sales pipeline analysis process involves evaluating why a given contact succeeds or fails in the last set of activities before closing a sales deal. To conduct pipeline analysis successfully, you will need to analyze key metrics with an effective CRM tool.

Why is the sales channel so important? Why is your sales pipeline important? Having a visible sales pipeline helps a team monitor the progress of their efforts and gives them an accurate picture of what needs to happen to grow the company’s revenue. Improved sales results mean more money for the company and for the reps who earn a commission.

What is a sales funnel or pipeline analysis?

A sales pipeline represents the stages a consumer goes through to become a customer. The sales funnel represents the number of leads that pass through these stages. A sales pipeline looks at the different steps in the sales process, from getting the lead to closing the sale.

What is sales funnel with examples?

An Example of an Effective Sales Funnel Post a great Facebook ad that drives traffic to a landing page. On the page, ask your prospect to sign up for your email list in exchange for a lead magnet. Pretty simple, right? Now you have leads instead of prospects.

What is sales funnel analysis?

Sales funnel analysis is the process of analyzing the series of actions a user takes before reaching a specific goal, usually called a conversion. It shows you where users are abandoning and where there is friction in the conversion path.

What do you mean by sales pipeline?

What is a sales pipeline? A sales pipeline is a visual representation of where all your prospects are in the sales process. This allows you to assess likely revenue and determine the health of your business. It provides a snapshot of the health of your business.

What is sales pipeline steps?

The typical stages of the sales pipeline for prospects are: prospecting, contacting, qualifying leads, nurturing leads, pitching, following up with leads, receiving the opportunity, and finally closing the deal.

What is your pipeline Meaning?

are being planned or underway. The common expression in American English is in the works.

How big should a sales pipeline be?

Sales managers look for a magic number they can multiply by their salespeople’s annual quota to determine their ideal pipeline size: “The ideal sales pipeline should be exactly three times your sales rep’s annual quota.” Unfortunately, there is no universal factor that can be multiplied by quota to get an ideal…

What does a healthy sales funnel look like? Pipeline Shape: A healthy sales pipeline should look more like a cocktail glass. One that is wide at the top, but narrows very quickly into a long, thin stem that only slightly recedes in width as it progresses toward the bottom.

How do you calculate sales pipeline?

First, take the number of deals in your pipeline. Multiply this by the average deal size, then divide by the average length of your sales cycle in days. So in this case, there would be $4,166 moving through your sales funnel every day. (The higher this number, the better!)

What is included in a sales pipeline and how do you calculate its size?

Sales share ÷ closing rate = the perfect pipeline size. Using this formula, sales managers can quickly calculate the ideal pipeline size for sales reps on an ongoing basis to determine if reps are on track to hit their target numbers.

How do you calculate sales pipeline growth?

The formula is: number of deals in your pipeline X overall win rate percentage X average deal size ($) / sales cycle length (days).

How much should you have in your sales pipeline?

Every company sales rep has probably heard this rule of thumb: fill your pipeline with at least 3x your revenue goals for that period and you’ll be in good shape.

How many leads should I have in my pipeline?

Understand Your Close Ratio “If you close 50% of your leads, you need two leads for every sale you expect to close to reach your goals,” says Kline.

How much weighted pipeline should you have?

Pipeline coverage is calculated by dividing your open pipeline by how much quota you need to close. The rule of thumb is to have 3x to 4x channel coverage. This means you want to have 3 to 4 times more pipeline than quota.

What is the ideal pipeline coverage?

There is a common rule of thumb that many sales managers apply. It is that the coverage ratio of the pipeline should be between 3 and 5.

How is pipeline sufficient calculation?

To measure this metric, take your total pipeline for a period and divide it by your share for that same time period. For example, if a rep has $500,000 of pipeline for the second quarter and their fee for the second quarter is $125,000, their pipeline coverage is $500,000 / $125,000 = 4.0x. This rep has 4x pipeline coverage.

Why is pipeline coverage important?

Some of the effective uses of a sales pipeline include weighting certain customer stages and measuring overall coverage. Both strategies can help organizations identify underperforming customer segments and determine whether changes should be implemented.

What does pipeline mean in mortgage?

A mortgage pipeline refers to mortgage loans that are locked in with a mortgage originator by borrowers, mortgage brokers or other lenders. A loan remains in an originator’s pipeline from the time it is blocked until it falls through, is sold in the secondary mortgage market, or placed in the originator’s loan portfolio.

How does mortgage pipeline coverage work? The hedging position is calculated by adjusting the dollar length of the mortgage pipeline for the expected repercussions. The firm places the hedge by selling short the appropriate amount of TBA MBS. A well-planned mortgage portfolio management program reduces the risk of loan price volatility at the commitment stage.

What is a mortgage pipeline manager?

Allocating and monitoring each loan processor’s pipeline to ensure all loans move through the pipeline in a timely manner and members are contacted in a timely manner, meeting…

What does pipeline mean in banking?

What is a pipeline? In finance, the term pipeline is used to describe progress toward a long-term goal that involves a series of discrete stages. For example, private equity (PE) firms will use the term “acquisition pipeline” to refer to a number of companies they have flagged as potential acquisition targets.

What does loan pipeline mean?

A portfolio of mortgage loans is a collection of loans that have been originated but not completed. In some cases, loans have been offered to prospective homebuyers even though sales have not yet closed. The concept is simple. Loan officers originate loans and guarantee a certain rate.

What does pipeline mean in banking?

What is a pipeline? In finance, the term pipeline is used to describe progress toward a long-term goal that involves a series of discrete stages. For example, private equity (PE) firms will use the term “acquisition pipeline” to refer to a number of companies they have flagged as potential acquisition targets.

What is the meaning of company pipeline?

A pipeline is a term that refers to leads or deals lined up to meet a company’s revenue goals. For example, a sales pipeline shows the number of deals expected to close in a month, quarter, or year.

What is pipeline investment?

What is pipeline theory? The pipeline theory supports the idea that an investment company that passes all returns on to clients should not be taxed like regular companies. Capital gains, interest and dividends as returns are key concepts in understanding pipeline theory.

What does hedging mean in mortgage?

[hedging] A securities transaction that reduces the risk of an existing investment position. An issue that has surrounded the mortgage industry for years is the idea of ​​risk management or hedging your pipeline.

What is hedging in mortgages?

Hedging: Opposite Positions For a portfolio containing mortgages or mortgage-backed securities, these securities are sold short, to eliminate the risks of rising interest rates and capital losses, or falling interest rates and refinancing.

What is hedging explain with example?

In practice, coverage occurs almost everywhere. For example, by purchasing homeowner’s insurance, you protect yourself against fire, theft, or other unforeseen disasters. Portfolio managers, individual investors and corporations use hedging techniques to reduce their exposure to various risks.

What is pipeline business model?

What is a pipeline business model? A pipeline business model is a traditional value chain in which parts or goods enter a system and are transformed through a linear process into a final product that reaches the consumer, such as a grocery store or an automobile manufacturer.

Is Apple a business or a platform? Traditional businesses usually create products and/or services that meet customer needs. These companies are compared to platform companies called pipes. For example, Apple’s phone business is a pipeline, but the AppStore is a platform.

What is the difference between platform and pipeline business models?

Pipelines seek to maximize the lifetime value of individual customers of products and services, who are, in effect, at the end of a linear process. Instead, platforms seek to maximize the total value of an expanding ecosystem in a circular, iterative, feedback-driven process.

Is Netflix a platform or pipeline?

Technology is an important enabler for platforms, but using modern technology does not automatically make a company a platform. Netflix, for example, is not a platform business despite being a technology company. It is essentially a linear TV channel with a modern interface.

What is the difference between a platform and a regular business model?

The key difference between platforms and most traditional business models is that platforms are multiple. By definition, they serve several groups of users. Platforms create value by bringing these people and companies together and enabling them to exchange value.

What is a platform business model?

PLATFORM BUSINESS MODEL DEFINITION: A business model that creates value by facilitating exchanges between two or more interdependent groups, typically consumers and producers. Like Facebook, Uber, or Alibaba, these companies do not directly create or control inventory through a supply chain the way linear companies do.

What is characteristic of a platform driven business model?

These platform-based business models have four characteristics in common: they are open, scalable, connected and intelligent. Its success is largely due to its focus on a two-sided platform and building a holistic business that skews an isolated approach.

What is a platform in business terms?

A platform is a product that serves or enables other products or services. Platforms (in the context of digital business) exist on many levels.

Is Netflix a pipeline or platform?

Is Netflix a platform or a pipeline? Netflix is ​​not a platform business, but a linear TV channel that has a modern interface. Like HBO, it makes and licenses its own content.

Is Netflix a pipeline business?

For example, with the help of the generic strategy, Netflix Inc. is using the traditional pipeline approach to create new movies and series on the Internet. The pipeline business model gives the company an advantage to control the production of entertainment content.

What kind of business model is Netflix?

Subscription video on demand Netflix is ​​one of today’s pioneers in subscription-based content. It runs on a subscription video on demand (SVOD) model. Subscribers pay for a monthly plan and get access to a huge media library…anytime, anywhere. Therefore, subscriptions are Netflix’s main source of revenue.

What are the stages of sales?

Typically, a sales process consists of 5-7 steps: Prospecting, Preparation, Approach, Presentation, Objection Management, Closing and Follow-up.

What are the 7 stages of the sales process? Let’s break down the seven main stages of the sales cycle: prospecting, contacting, qualifying your lead, nurturing your lead, presenting your offer, overcoming objections, and closing the sale. We’ve also included an extra step that can help speed up this sales cycle.