Sales Qualification in Pipeline Management

Turn Prospects Into Customers and Opportunities Into Sales.

Sales Qualification in Pipeline Management

Sales Pipeline Management can make a big difference to a small business’s bottom line, but it has to be the right pipeline management. So what is the right pipeline management?

Lots of people talk about it, but not many really understand the subject. Based on ways popular software works they’ll think it’s about sales forecasting.

Sales guys guess at a value, close date and %probability, putting these into a spreadsheet to calculate the forecast. Accountants add these up across offices, but nobody believes the reports. The whole idea is a futile exercise with bean-counters wasting time in a pretence of management control.

Most small businesses won’t use the technique, probably rightly, because it doesn’t tell them anything. It’s a big company concept for big company reporting up the line.

But they should use a proper pipeline management process – something that helps them “manage” their way to more sales, with more predictability, and at lower cost of sale.

The emphasis needs to be on the word “management”. Forecasts coming out of pipeline management should be a side benefit. The real win comes from planning how the sale will progress from first call to cash, and managing it through that process – Plan what needs to be done, Act in accordance with the Plan, and Review progress, changing the plan if necessary.

Every business has a first call to cash process. They do use a Scope, Qualify, Propose, Close method in some form.

That’s all proper pipeline management is really – the way we do business, written down, planned and reviewed.

But the simple act of writing it down, planning it for individual sales opportunities and reviewing both the process and individual plans focuses the manager on doing the right things at the right time.

Here’s a video demonstrating one approach to pipeline management. In this case we’re using Continuous Qualification to keep us focused on the right things, so the right things will happen

Every time we check off a milestone the weighted %probability of the deal goes up by 10%.