The Sales Pipeline is the overall value of all active opportunities at each stage.
What makes this metric so important for your business is its ability to directly pinpoint sales-marketing influence on revenue.
The most appropriate place to track it is in your CRM. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are not only the house of processed customer data, revenues, or built relationships, but also the place for tracking sale campaigns or team performance.
"In general, the more complex the sales process is, the longer it will take to develop and close a business"
Using sales data to track pipeline value can often be a double-edged weapon. Because it relies on strong tracking of leads to opportunities and accurate tracking of opportunity value. If your sales team doesn’t correctly process and convert leads (deals) or doesn’t track the value of opportunities, then you can't estimate the targeted deal value or set priority order.
Several Tips For Making a Successful Sales Pipeline
- Define your stages clearly so you can associate sales activities with them easily.
- Use technology such as CRM, marketing automation or Business Intelligence to save time and manage your sales pipeline easier.
- Capture as much information about the prospects as you can. The more you know about them, the better services you can offer.
- Estimate your close date so that you can better forecast against your targets.
- Take your time with the sale as all prospects buy at varying times.
- Automate what you can, such as follow-up reminders.
- Analyze every step to see where you can make improvements and increase conversion.
How does Deal "Value" Field work in eWay-CRM 5.0?
This new field is available in the last version of our CRM which is eWay-CRM 5.0. Added into your list of deals to find out the total value of your pipeline. Deal Value is simply calculated as Deal Revenue * Deal Probability.
Group your deals by owners or statuses to get a summary by sales managers or workflow stages. Use it as a basis for the sales forecasts. This feature is aimed mostly for Sales managers, Sales representatives or Project managers, just for those who supervise the system, contracts, deal opportunities etc.
Sales and Marketing are supposed to be tightly aligned and ideally if they work together to target prospects and acquire customers. Simply aligning the marketing team with revenue goals can drive big changes in that relationship.
The ideal sales pipeline should have these key elements:
- Sales Cycle Complexity -> Quality
- Days in Stage -> Speed
- Yield Probability -> Volume
As we said above, Deal Value is a clue for Sales Managers. It shows the potential of each contract and, also to conduct them where they should be concentrated and how should they allocate their resources. This is a huge benefit of this feature.
Once your customer enters your sales pipeline, they become a sales opportunity. Each sales opportunity in your pipeline has its own value.
In eWay-CRM there is a field Price, you can see the total amount of all Deals expresses the total estimate of the final amount if the deal finishes as expected. In order, to be able to estimate this realistically, you should assign a certain risk for each opportunity - field Probability which represents the current amount of the contract.
In the event of the probability increasing or decreasing, the targeted amount remains the same, but the Deal Value is currently changing. The closer you get to the end date of the Deal, the more its probability should intensify.
You can run your probability manually or let eWay-CRM calculate it automatically, based on your workflow.
You should be focused on the highest Deal Values. It means there, where the probability percentage is the highest. Contracts with low probability have little chance of success. You can leave them as they are, not wasting your time. So we hope that this article was beneficial for you, what we can say is good luck and good selling!
Download eWay-CRM Free and see for yourself how eWay-CRM can contribute to your business.
