Many people truly believe that to increase sales and expand a firm, you need to hire more workers. However, to recruit additional staff, you must increase your revenue.
What frequently occurs is that recruiting is postponed until a significant project is completed. Then it’s a mad sprint with everyone on deck to get the resources in place to make it work and keep the customer pleased.
- When you’re dealing with all of this and have a tiny staff, it’s easy to drop the ball and ignore your sales funnel. This implies that you could wake up one day to find that the project is operating nicely, but your larger lead pipeline has dried up.
- When the focus shifts away from managing a sales funnel, things can quickly go awry. It must be constantly replenished with high-quality leads, which are then pushed forward and finally converted into paying clients.
- Whatever the reason for the shift in emphasis (and there might be several), it is critical to find a solution. There will be no business if there are no sales. That’s all there is to it. The first step is to examine your existing activities and procedures to identify any areas that may be improved.
When you’re on a small team, time is your biggest stumbling block. Consider all of the parts that contribute to your pipeline, both directly and indirectly, and look for methods to optimize and automate as much as possible. Here are some tips to get you started:
A sales pipeline NOT Begin by inspecting the different stages of your pipeline:
- Are you concentrating your efforts on the appropriate deals?
- Do you receive the proper kind of leads?
- Is your system up to date and maintained regularly?
- How active is your pipeline (i.e., how well do leads migrate from one step of the buyer experience to the next)?
- Is there a sufficient number of leads per stage – are there any gaps?
These indicators will provide you with a fast sense of how healthy your pipeline is. Don’t be concerned if it needs work. Now we’ll take a deeper look at why it’s stagnating and, more importantly, what you can do about it.
Make your sales funnel more efficient.
When working with a small team, you won’t have much of a budget to play with. However, you must guarantee that you have a working sales funnel that generates the correct type of leads at the level you want.
The size of your pipeline will be significantly influenced by how you set up your funnel. Just keep in mind that the goal isn’t to get as many leads as possible. You need to obtain as many of the correct sorts of leads as possible. These are the leads who will be the best fit for your organization and are most likely to become clients. It’s pointless to waste time creating leads that will never convert.
Improve your time management skills.
A pipeline that does not generate enough leads at each level may simply be the result of poor time management. This is especially true for smaller teams, which may easily become distracted by all of the other aspects of operating and developing a firm.
Determine what you are not doing.
When was the last time you referred to your marketing strategy? Examine it to determine if there is anything you aren’t doing – or not doing very effectively – that may help you fill your pipeline.
Consider experimenting with something new, such as referral marketing, social selling, event marketing, and so on. All of these strategies are sometimes neglected when teams are pressed for time, yet they may be effective. Give them a shot.
Remember to check back in a week for four more useful hints. A sales pipeline may be compared to the beating heart of your firm. As a result, its value and significance cannot be overestimated.
This means that if you don’t successfully manage your pipeline, you risk losing potential clients and your business may suffer as a result. Today, we offer four more ideas for your small team:
Keep track of pipeline metrics
Your sales pipeline is a dynamic, breathing entity that is always changing. As a result, you must keep track of the important sales KPIs that it generates, which include things like:
- The number of transactions in your pipeline
- The average contract size in your pipeline
- The average proportion of transactions won by you (close ratio)
- The average length of time it takes for a contract to conclude (sales velocity)
Set aside time each week to evaluate these indicators, as they will provide you with an ‘at a glance’ snapshot of the health of your sales funnel and business.
Tracking the outcomes over time will also provide you with a clear picture of how any adjustments or enhancements you make to your sales process contribute to overall growth. Make sure that your indicators do not “jump”. Their graduation should be as smooth as possible, and if the gap between them is quite large, then check that the advertising campaign is set up correctly and that the above steps are correctly followed.
Provide additional material to your prospects.
While phone conversations and emails are at the center of most sales communication, prospects may frequently want more detailed information to determine whether your product or service is a good fit for their company.
Consider what sort of material you can give to your prospects at each stage of the funnel to assist reinforce your message and move them forward.
As you drive prospects farther down the sales funnel, content becomes increasingly more critical. So, what type of material do you offer?
Keep in mind to follow up.
Buyers nowadays have more options than ever before, and as a result, they want more assistance in making the correct selection and selecting your product or service. It took 3.68 sales calls to clinch a transaction ten years ago; now, it takes more than 8!
To close the deal, the top salespeople will continue to follow up with leads. However, most salespeople quit after two calls, so make sure you constantly follow up.
Remove any dead leads
It’s critical to focus on high-value leads, but it’s also critical to know when to let go of a lead. It may be difficult to let go, especially if you have spent weeks or even months developing and maintaining a connection with someone.
A lead is dead when they indicate they are not interested, when they can’t be reached, or when you’ve spoken to them several times and they can’t be moved further in the pipeline.
Learn to rapidly identify these dead leads so you can move on to the next sales chance to clinch a large deal – without wasting any more time attempting to resurrect prospects that just will not purchase from you.
Extra tip: Improve and increase the number of conversions. The following techniques work very well in marketing to increase the conversion rate:
- Take care of the functionality and usability of the site. If it is an online store, then the shopping cart must be a required attribute of the purchase;
- Allow visitors to communicate in real-time with your consultant or manager, who will promptly answer all questions;
- A fairly new, but effective method – is “A / B testing”. Its essence lies in the fact that you create two different advertising offers for one category of goods (or position) and after a while, you check their effectiveness. Thus, you will determine which of them brings more conversions and, accordingly, will invest more in its promotion.
The eight best practices we’ve presented will assist you in keeping your sales pipeline healthy, making your work more organized and structured, shortening and speeding up your sales cycles, and meeting your sales quotas faster, all while bringing growth and profit to your business even with a small team.
