Keeping your pipeline stuffed is a sure path toward frustration, (and a lousy way to impress your boss).
Build your sales pipeline in a way that deals flow through with ease from top to bottom.
How? I’ve got 10 tips for how to build a healthy sales pipeline.
1. Know your solution.
Know how you (your product, your service) help people. If you don’t know your solution, then why are you putting together a sales pipeline?
2. Know your ICP, Ideal Customer Profile.
Knowing your perfect customer upfront is absolutely key. This is going to help you determine what goes into your pipeline.
Discover and develop your own ICP with the Ideal Customer Profile Masterclass.
3. Know how to bring value.
What are the questions that you need to be asking?
Are there studies that you share that customers normally like, (or whatever it might be)?
How does this value turn into outcomes that customers get after they buy from you?
4. Build your cadence.
You can begin to build your cadence based on the answers to the questions above.
How many times do I have to send them emails, mail, or a text to turn them into a customer? I need a cadence that I can administer multiple times to many, many people at the same time. So, as you build out your cadence, don’t build it so complicated that you can only handle one prospect at a time. That’s not a cadence.
Read these 10 Steps to a Great Prospecting Cadence
5. Create your questions and talking points.
We spend so much time developing the information we want to share and not enough time spent on the questions we ask. In my cadence, my messages, my conversations, in everything I communicate, what are the questions I’m going to ask? What are my talking points?
My absolute objective is to be able to have this platform of information that I’m so comfortable asking and talking about at any time with any prospect that it becomes a routine.
6. Establish a routine.
I can establish a routine that I can repeat over, and over, and over again. If you don’t have a routine, it’s just not going to work because there are too many activities involved to be successful.
Organization of a routine brings a method to madness.
7. Leverage your CRM.
Don’t think you can get by without a CRM. Of course, you don’t have to have a complex CRM. The top of the food chain is Salesforce and Dynamics, for instance. If you’re a small business, you really don’t need those. You can get by with Zoho, or any number of more simple CRMs.
8. Know your CTAs, call to actions.
As you’re asking questions, or going through your cadence, what are your call to actions going to be? You need to make sure that you have one for each message you send out.
9. Build your schedule.
This builds off of your ever-important routine.
What’s your schedule going to look like Monday through Friday? I realize no two days are ever alike, but you’ve still got to have routines.
Routines ensure you follow up enough times with these prospects as you work to understand who stays in your pipeline and who comes out. (You have to be willing to take things out of your pipeline just as much as you are putting things in.)
10. Execute the plan.
This means continuously reviewing my pipeline because I don’t want a sewer pipe. A sewer pipeline is where I have all these names and all this stuff in there, and I just don’t know what to do with them.
I want to have a water tap that I’m putting prospects in. The questions I can ask have been prepared and practiced. I know the solution I can help them with. They fit my ICP. I know how I can bring value, and I can move them through quickly. That’s executing.
Listen to the 6-minute episode of The Sales Hunter Podcast for more on this topic: Ep. 79. Is Your Sales Pipeline a Sewer Line or a Water Tap?
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How to Use the Contrast-Anchor Method for Price
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Copyright 2023, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of A Mind for Sales and High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results.
