By Mark Faust

How accurately can you project the sales that will be closed in the next week, month or quarter? Are your team’s projections accurate and reliable? If you experience unpredictable undulations in sales forecasts and revenue, consider implementing a more effective sales pipeline management solution, because the lifeline of many businesses is in the Sales Pipeline.

Ask yourself what it would be worth to: 1. know what deals are going to close by when, 2. be getting the optimal production out of your sales force, 3. know on what you need to focus and 4. how much is needed in order to deliver on the orders?

We interviewed Rye D’Orazio, a partner with Ray & Barney Group, a national consulting firm that has worked with large seed companies as well as a host of small and midsized companies. Here are some points Rye made about the benefits of implementing a pipeline solution in a SharePoint software solution or centrally shared spreadsheet in a simple Excel format.

·         You can quickly access a view of the pipeline around 1, 3 or 100 reps

·         You’ll foster consistency across the organization, in communication, management and productivity

·         Gives you the ability to more accurately predict revenue and production needs

·         Streamlines & Shortens sales cycles

·         Focuses management on the right areas needing their coaching or assistance

Many managers say their critical success factor is spending more time in the field with the right reps on the right calls to better coach the reps and help advance more of the best business. The pipeline dashboard is perhaps the most needed tool for focusing management.

To begin the process management should involve team in assembling a list as to what they think needs to be managed. The effort should be positioned not as a “reporting tool” but a tool to direct management where to better support, coach, and help them sell more, and better manage resources.

Management should also explain how this helps sales people to see what and where they need to focus more time; i.e., prospecting, advancing, or closing accounts and the art of balancing the large accounts with enough smaller accounts in order to give them both stability in commissions and higher potential earnings.

The next step is to identify your target markets and criteria of what is a real prospect. Then you can label the Sales Phases, for example, they could be:

1.     Identifying your prospects

2.     Profiling your prospects

3.     Setting of appointments or phone call

4.     Identification and qualification of Opportunity

5.     Proposal

6.     Identifying your advocate

7.     Footprinting – getting your customer to participate in your building of your proposal

What is in it, only 10 or so items of info,

1.     Client

2.     Contact

3.     Opportunity descript

4.     Projected close

5.     Line of business

6.     Location

7.     Dollar opportunity

8.     Likelihood to close

9.     Using the process

10.  Online Current Views of the Sales Pipeline and Reporting

The process needs to be online. If you haven’t migrated sales information online yet, now is the time, the speed and ease of keeping this up to date online is incontrovertible.

This dashboard becomes the tool for owners and managers to have a more accurate view of the sales pipeline and provides better information for coaching reps and running sales meetings. The team will begin to focus on reviewing each opportunity by phase, line of business, location and other elements that are most important for them to get and keep a customer. Suddenly, the focus is on prioritizing activities and helping both your sales reps and customers, make more money.