What is a sales pipeline? How to build an unbeatable one?
Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2024 6:43 am
The sales pipeline is a sales approach that assumes that sales opportunities go through a series of typical stages before being closed.
These stages of the sales pipeline depend on the sales process followed, which ideally aligns with the buyer's decision-making process .
The goal of a sales pipeline is to move sales opportunities through it, either to the next usa phone number list stage or immediately to the “lost” stage. Occasionally a sales opportunity may also skip stages. Learn more about sales pipeline stages .
A sales pipeline is often visually represented in a CRM in a Kanban board view , so that the sales team can have an easy overview of which deals are in the pipeline at any given time.
Here's what this view looks like inside Salesflare .
visual sales pipeline
Visualize your sales pipeline to gain a clearer view.
You can see which rep is working on which sales opportunity, with which prospects, and what the value of each potential deal is.
At the top of each stage, you can see the total value of the opportunities in that stage, which gives you a good idea of the expected revenue your sales pipeline will generate. Learn more below .
What is the difference between sales pipeline and sales funnel?
You often hear people talking about a “sales funnel” instead of a “sales pipeline.” And when they do, they usually mean the same thing.
The term “sales funnel” (as opposed to sales pipeline) refers to the fact that a healthy sales pipeline will often contain a much larger amount of opportunities in the early stages, as many do not progress to the next stage and are lost.
The pipeline therefore does not exactly look like a tube, but more like a funnel, like this:
funnel
Note that the ideal funnel should have its inflection point in the qualification stage (more on that in a moment). After this stage, the conversion rate from one stage to the next should improve dramatically, as it has been established that the opportunities are well-qualified and that the prospects are destined to buy.
The V-funnel representation, which is often seen on the Internet and in software, is therefore misleading. It can give the false impression that it is normal for salespeople to lose many sales opportunities after qualifying them. And this is not the case.
These stages of the sales pipeline depend on the sales process followed, which ideally aligns with the buyer's decision-making process .
The goal of a sales pipeline is to move sales opportunities through it, either to the next usa phone number list stage or immediately to the “lost” stage. Occasionally a sales opportunity may also skip stages. Learn more about sales pipeline stages .
A sales pipeline is often visually represented in a CRM in a Kanban board view , so that the sales team can have an easy overview of which deals are in the pipeline at any given time.
Here's what this view looks like inside Salesflare .
visual sales pipeline
Visualize your sales pipeline to gain a clearer view.
You can see which rep is working on which sales opportunity, with which prospects, and what the value of each potential deal is.
At the top of each stage, you can see the total value of the opportunities in that stage, which gives you a good idea of the expected revenue your sales pipeline will generate. Learn more below .
What is the difference between sales pipeline and sales funnel?
You often hear people talking about a “sales funnel” instead of a “sales pipeline.” And when they do, they usually mean the same thing.
The term “sales funnel” (as opposed to sales pipeline) refers to the fact that a healthy sales pipeline will often contain a much larger amount of opportunities in the early stages, as many do not progress to the next stage and are lost.
The pipeline therefore does not exactly look like a tube, but more like a funnel, like this:
funnel
Note that the ideal funnel should have its inflection point in the qualification stage (more on that in a moment). After this stage, the conversion rate from one stage to the next should improve dramatically, as it has been established that the opportunities are well-qualified and that the prospects are destined to buy.
The V-funnel representation, which is often seen on the Internet and in software, is therefore misleading. It can give the false impression that it is normal for salespeople to lose many sales opportunities after qualifying them. And this is not the case.