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Today, sales organizations have more ways to connect with leads than ever before. Increased interactions from multiple customer touch points lead to more sales opportunities. Mostly, the critical factor is managing the activities within your sales process.
In the sales process, understanding sales development is critical for your sales teams or sales managers. Every decision in the sales process plays a critical role in improving sales conversions.
A sales pipeline forms the basis for generating sales revenue. A sales pipeline helps you track and determine activities at each sales process, such as in the follow-up stage and leading nurturing process. Therefore, an effective sales pipeline is important if your goal is to increase sales.
The greater the control you have over the sales pipeline, the higher the sales revenue you will achieve.
Sales Pipeline
A sales pipeline is a way to track the stages each lead (potential customer) goes through in a sales process. A sales pipeline provides a transparent picture of how your sales team engages with leads at various sales stages, i.e., the steps taken to foster leads and close the sales.
Since a sales pipeline tracks all sales opportunities, it becomes easier for sales officials to determine the number of sales that will be successfully closed each time. The activities in the sales pipeline can be seen visually in your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software.
Advantages of sales pipeline
- Identify the position of each sales lead in the process
- Discover overlooked leads
- Cover the entire sales process effectively
You can build an effective sales pipeline with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales solution.
If your top priority is increasing sales revenue, build a sales pipeline.
Building a sales pipeline based on the analysis of your customer data and sales trends helps you stay ahead in the sales curve.
Here are the steps for building a sales pipeline
- Define your sales cycle stages
- Identify the number of opportunities and target accounts
- Common characteristics of opportunities
- Build a sales process or alter your existing process around
- Enrich sales pipeline with more leads
- Deploy a sales solution to keep your sales pipeline strong
Define your sales cycle stages
A sales cycle covers various stages needed to close a deal, from connecting with a lead that shows interest in your product to educating the customer about your product’s features using videos and content to signing the contract and closing the deal.
You must design these stages in line with your prospect’s buying journey. You might have a better sales cycle, but reviewing and replacing sales stages over time helps you strengthen your sales pipeline.
Identify the number of opportunities and target accounts
Discuss together with the sales team and identify how much time they spend contacting leads and how many people are working on proposals. This will help to get an idea of prospects and companies you could sell your products to.
Moreover, this helps your sales team and managers to identify and predict which opportunities are likely to become customers. You need to know the percentage of opportunities at each stage so you can predict the conversion rate per stage.
By assigning the percentage of prospects that are likely to buy your products to each stage, it is possible to estimate revenue.
Common characteristics of opportunities
Next step is to find the common characteristics of each opportunity at each stage. It includes the actions (sending email) your sales team has taken and the responses from the prospects (agreeing for the meeting or a demo). This data will help you refine your sales goals and sales processes.
Build a sales process or change your existing process
Once everything including your customer data and sales stages is set, it is time to build a strong sales process. When you are to create a new sales process, you must define activities required at each stage. You can create a robust sales process based on the activities defined in the sales stages. With focus on the activities, you will have control over your sales process and can generate more revenue.
A good sales process helps you close deals successfully, and it provides a good framework that you can follow for each sales process.
Enrich sales pipeline with more leads
You need to constantly empower your sales pipeline with leads. You can follow the defined sales process or alter to match your business. Whenever needed update your sales pipeline and ensure your pipeline is evolving with more prospects.
Deploy a sales solution to keep your sales pipeline strong
There are solutions available that can be used to create an effective sales pipeline. Among the solutions that stand out is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales.
Dynamics 365 Sales offers a personalized workspace where you can build an efficient sales pipeline. It allows your sales team to manage activities on leads and tap into the opportunities effectively.
Microsoft Dynamics Sales, which is designed to help small and medium enterprises to improve their sales process empowers your sales team to get and close deals faster – all by building strong relationships with your customers.
To make sales effective using D365 Sales, it makes sense to team up with the leading Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner.
Experienced Microsoft Gold Certified Partners offer thorough direction on building sales pipeline using D365 sales solution and other solutions such as Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dynamics 365 Sales, and Marketing, and more.
If your business is in the Middle East, Africa, North America, Europe, or Asian countries, rely on the expertise of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partners in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kenya, Jordan, Germany, Canada, Pakistan, and India.