SALES FUNNEL & PIPELINE

In a study by the CRM company Salesforce they discovered that 44% of companies did not have a system or tool in place to qualify market leads. And with up to 79% of leads never converting to a customer, businesses need a system and processes to qualify a lead while having a clear and concise sales cadence to convert the prospect to a client.

There is a common mistake among many businesses that they use the words sales pipeline and funnel believing that they are the same thing which is not correct. They both describe the flow of prospects through a sale, but there’s an important difference between the two commonly confused terms.

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A sales pipeline is a set of stages that a prospect moves through, as they progress from a new lead to a customer. Unlike a sales pipeline, which focuses on the set of actions taken by sellers, a sales funnel represents the quantity and conversion rates of prospects through your pipeline stages.

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The two tools are critical to business leaders, managers and sales representatives as they exactly see the efficiency of a sales representative and sales department. By knowing the drop off rate of prospects as they move through the funnel, they will allow managers and marketers to clearly know how many prospects they need at the top of the funnel to convert the customers required to make the sales quota.

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Mapping out the sales process and knowing what happens at each stage, overcoming the objectives at each section will allow the sales representative to better qualify the prospect and ultimately convert them to a customer.