Crucial Sales Pipeline Stages You Need to Know

Successful sales teams always test different strategies, and channels, and are equipped with the best sales tools. However, all these are done to drive leads through the sales pipeline, which is the backbone of any sales and marketing activities.

First of all, what is a sales pipeline? 

The sales pipeline is there to bring structure to your workflow and enable you to keep track of potential customers at every step of the process. 

If you feel like you’re just cruising along your sales pipeline without a clear understanding of what each stage requires and exactly what sales and marketing tactics you need to employ to reach your ultimate business goals, then this guide is for you. 

The Main Stages of a B2B Sales Pipeline

Let’s outline the main stages of a B2B sales pipeline:

• Prospecting and Lead Generation
• Lead Management and Qualification
• First Meetings and Calls
• Assessing the prospect’s needs (making a proposal)
• Closing the Sale
• Customer Retention

Some sales pipelines may be more detailed than others and have additional stages, but this is the essential backbone that you and your team have to create.

Let’s quickly brush up on what each of the steps means.

1. Prospecting and Lead Generation

Both prospecting and lead generation comes into play at the very beginning of a sales process. 

The process of prospecting refers to pinpointing potential customers and making them acquainted with your solution via cold emailing, social selling, networking, and the list goes on.

You can implement a CRM to manage prospect information and interactions automatically.

Lead generation nurtures leads’ interest in your solutions.

The goal of moving leads closer to becoming customers is achieved by numerous tactics, including:

• content marketing;
• setting up lead magnets (giving away free resources in exchange for leads’ emails);
• social selling campaigns;
• referrals;
• networking at events and webinars;

and others, depending on the specific company.

Usually, B2B specialists leverage two key channels — LinkedIn and Email. LinkedIn refers to social sales and is potentially a very strong channel for establishing a solid lead flow-in. Sales teams of any size incorporate LinkedIn automation that speeds up lead generation substantially, as it takes over all manual tasks of salespeople.

An automation tool is usually a SaaS product, which means you pay for its monthly usage. It offers to build custom campaigns for LinkedIn or email and run them on autopilot. A campaign can consist of a connection message (that’s usually sent on LinkedIn to establish a connection with the lead) and then a series of follow-ups. It’s due to a sales manager to come and check on the progress of campaigns, tweak messages, or change targeting. 

The same process usually takes place in email outreach. Salespeople build email campaigns and test different email messages. Thus, leads can be generated on autopilot or manually (by sending emails yourself). 

In almost any automation tool of your choice, you’ll be able to define your target audience, get the emails and LI profiles of your leads and kick off several prospecting campaigns of a few steps — to increase the chances of successful lead engagement.

VIDEO 

The process of lead generation in Closely — all-in-one lead engagement and routine automation platform

The outreach tactics may vary here: from direct pitches to engagement through content. You can test many of them and decide which one hit it for you.

2. Lead Management and Qualification

If during the first step a sales team establishes the lead influx, during the second step they have to qualify all those leads that arrived, thanks to their messages, right targeting, analytics, and a whole lot of other factors. 

Not every lead is created equal – some are not in the position to make decisions in their company, for others your product may be out of their budget, or they may not fit the audience you’re targeting. 

To ensure that the leads who have the authority and resources to invest in your solution stay on top of priorities, you have to qualify your leads.

Essentially you have to assess the quality of your leads according to criteria that matter to you and establish a lead scoring system. Lead management and qualification also have the potential to be automated.

3. First Meetings and Calls

At this stage sales reps generally aim to accomplish a few goals:

• Identify leads’ pain points;
• Gather enough information about the lead to qualify them further;
• Nurture a connection;
• Present the solution and show demos;

These first meetings can either be set up via call or video conference or in person. What matters is that you prepare the questions you need to ask, the steps you want the lead to take and that you have a roughly structured outline of how you expect the meeting to go.

After this, your team should already know the pain points of the lead.

Don’t forget that you need a powerful CRM system to help you harness the power of details and keep contacts in order.

4. Assessing the Prospect’s Needs

This stage includes the analysis of all the data you have on the prospect: their needs, their specific situation, and all the factors that go into them making the decision to buy.

This insight is revealed through frequent meetings, demos, calls, and further lead research.

Lead nurturing is a marketing tactic that ensures you stay in your lead’s informational circle. The task here is to make your leads memorize you as a brand. They should recall your brand after a while — when the need for your solution pops up.

In automation tools, there is an option to send messages to your current leads to inform them of your updates. You can automate such campaigns as well to avoid spending a wealth of time on manual tasks.

On average, sales teams that incorporate automation see a surge in open and reply rates — because the more touchpoints with leads you create, the higher chances of enticing them. The more leads you’re able to connect with — the higher your chances of coming upon those who are looking for your solution at this moment. Your sales and marketing should work aligned to ensure your potential buyers are warmed by receiving content, updates, or even relevant to them ads.

5. Closing the Sale

This is the most important step of the pipeline, where you encourage prospects to make a purchase. This is the moment when they ask you for the payment details and become a member of your community.

6. Customer Retention

Customer retention is done by sending out emails with promos, campaigns, newsletters, or content valuable to the customer, or making a phone call with new proposals.

This way you make sure your current customers will continue bringing in revenue in the future. 

Customer retention is also about keeping activity in your communities if you have such. Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other social media should be active with your content publishing or with any useful discussions going on inside the community. 

CRMs help greatly in ordering your connections in a way that helps to sell more: storing needed details of your conversations or contact data of a lead is paramount. You need to have that data at your fingertips to improve your performance. If you’re looking for a sales pipeline example, you can check out any sales team’s CRM system — it will be filled with leads going through the sales pipeline stages.

In conclusion

To be able to maximize your profits and keep track of sales opportunities, it’s crucial to understand what each step of your sales pipeline entails and what strategies you need to employ. In this article, we covered the most important components of a B2B sales pipeline.

One of the most important aspects here is automation. The quality of contact data you get and how easily you can surf through the features of your helper, an automation tool — define your future success. Modern sales teams are equipped with not only automation tools but CRMs to keep track of the connections they build and improve sales techniques.

Use these tips to power up your business 🔥