MarketStar Blog

As of 2022, 92% of the United States' total population has internet access. That translates to over 305 million users. Whether their intent is to find information, entertainment, or to connect with others, one thing is certain- today's customers live online. And with a reported 40,000 Google search queries per second, it looks like they are pretty active. This creates an ocean of opportunities for organizations to utilize their online presence and leverage a plethora of tools and channels to spark curiosity, capture leads, and nurture them throughout their buyer journey.

Key Takeaways:

• Effective sales pipeline management can help you organize your sales process efficiently and make better business decisions

• A sales pipeline represents the complete journey of a buyer – from coming in as a lead to becoming a customer

• Sales pipeline software helps track each stage of your pipeline, monitor the process, and helps in understanding the next steps

• Sales pipeline CRMs offer customizable pipelines that help manage leads, opportunities, and customer relationships throughout the sales process

• A CRM tool helps you understand if a lead is responsive and if they’re interested in your product or service

In today’s competitive marketing world, businesses need innovative sales strategies to attract leads. And the sales process plays a vital role in attracting those leads and converting them into customers quickly. 

From generating leads and building a contact repo to following up and closing the deal, your sales process requires systematic planning to help the team close the deals faster. 

However, managing it manually can be time-consuming and tedious. To help manage things efficiently, you can empower your team with effective sales pipeline tools.

This blog will cover everything you need to know about sales pipelines and the top tools to manage them.

What is a Sales Pipeline?

A sales pipeline includes several stages, and the leads are moved from one stage to the next as they move through the process. The stages include lead generation, lead nurturing, marketing qualified leads, sales accepted leads, sales qualified leads, closed transactions, and after-sales.

Today, organizations employ technology to move, monitor, or evaluate prospects through the phases of a deal, and this technology is called sales pipeline software. It enables businesses to keep track of their prospects and clients and know where they are in the sales funnel.

With a sales pipeline enabled in your work process, you will know how many deals your salespeople need to close in a given time.

The importance of maintaining your sales pipeline is straightforward – to stay ahead of the game and manage your salespeople. It also helps to improve your sales operations process, get a picture of your targets, and better revenue forecasting. 

Are you looking to be more successful in your business? Identify the changes that can be made within your sales pipeline, so your prospects move from one stage to the next faster.

How to Build an Effective Sales Pipeline?

We’ve listed down the steps to help you build a successful sales pipeline:

• Understanding your target audience is the first step to building an effective sales pipeline.

• Next, set up your sales cadences for the best accounts by identifying and targeting them from your database.

• Group those accounts based on product interest, location, and previous interaction with your brand.

• Finally, set up a successful sales pipeline with the right tools and software.

Read on to explore the best sales pipeline management tools that can help you set up an efficient sales pipeline.

Sales Pipeline Tools

Sales pipeline management tools help you organize your entire selling process.

It gives you a clear view of your pipeline by tracking every stage, streamlining the complete process, enabling your team to function better, and helping in understanding business growth.

These tools can also accurately evaluate your leads, predict sales, and track key metrics. Stay informed of your prospects, enable your sales team to follow up with them, and make better decisions with an effective sales pipeline.

How a Sales Pipeline Tool Can Help Your Business

By using a sales pipeline tool, you can organize all the processes in your pipeline efficiently.

You can understand where your leads are coming from and where they are in the pipeline and automate scheduling meetings, sending emails, and more.

Apart from minimizing human errors and saving time in repetitive tasks, it helps your business with the following:

• Understanding customer behavior: Sales pipeline tools can track conversations and metrics, which helps in understanding your customers and their pain points better.

• Making better decisions: The tool offers insights regarding leads, conversions, and processes, helping you make better decisions and understand where your business is headed.

• Generating more revenue: It helps you understand which leads are cold/potential, and how interested they are in your product/service while translating into more conversions and revenue generation.

The 4 Essential Tools to Manage Your Sales Pipeline

Let’s look at the top sales pipeline management tools, their features & benefits, and why customers prefer using them for managing their sales processes.

1. Salesforce

Salesforce is one of the top CRM software providers as it redefines the way businesses connect with their customers.

It is designed for marketing, sales, and customer service ops to create meaningful customer relationships by understanding their requirements.

This CRM helps in creating an effective sales funnel to nurture customers. It provides excellent automated features and customer service tools to help manage good relationships with your leads/customers.

According to Salesforce customer success, companies that switch over to Salesforce see an average of 25 percent increase in revenue.

Benefits:

• Salesforce helps communicate with customers/leads using automation tools

• Gives a 360-degree view of your customers and engages with them accordingly

• Removes the burden of using various applications by syncing data from them all

• Positively impacts online customer support by providing chat assistance

• It helps your brand have a unified approach with an omnichannel feature

• Collects insights to understand your customers and business better

2. Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a fully functional, cloud-based CRM tool for managing sales effectively throughout the pipeline. It helps you stay focused on hot deals, track leads, and predict business revenue.

Pipedrive offers custom web forms and chatbots to automate repetitive tasks. It helps you get the most important deals fed into your pipeline and track calls/emails/contact history for each deal. Control your sales pipeline through a mobile device and boost your work by integrating Pipedrive with your business tools.

Benefits:

• Pipedrive is easy-to-use and customize

• Can track the number of active deals and give detailed information for each open deal

• Guides you with the deals that need prioritization

• Adaptable and cost-effective plans

• Offers machine learning-powered sales assistant for all plans

• Workflow automation for most plans

• Pipedrive doesn’t have all the features that Salesforce does, but it is perfect for small businesses with smaller budgets.

3. HubSpot CRM

HubSpot CRM is a cloud-based tool that supports sales, marketing, customer service, and content management with better resources and strategies. You can avoid your sales falling through the cracks and easily manage your deals.

HubSpot CRM helps you to design attractive brand profiles and organize all the important communication details with your leads/customers. It allows you to add new deals directly from the CRM with up-to-date details.

Whether you already have an established sales process or are just starting, HubSpot CRM eases your work by creating an ideal process. With HubSpot, you don’t need the help of a technical team to edit, delete, and add deal properties and stages. 

Benefits:

• It allows you to create visual dashboards and design a sales funnel the way you want it.

• It can be connected to your social media handles.

• The website integration feature will notify you when a lead visits your website.

• The features of HubSpot CRM are not as complex as other CRMs’

• It also offers a clear view of all the tasks/activities of the team in a single dashboard

4. Lusha

Lusha is a data enrichment tool that enables you to retrieve phone numbers, email addresses, and other contact information quickly and easily. It helps you to access your leads’ contact details and B2B company info within seconds.

Marketing and sales professionals can use Lusha to drive business growth, boost campaigns, and improve revenue.

Benefits:

• It helps gather accurate B2B contact information

• It allows data enrichment at scale

• One-click CRM integrations

Bottom Line

The goal of any company is to increase revenue and generate leads. However, most leads are lost in the pipeline due to irregular/negligent follow-ups. 

An effective sales pipeline management system can help convert your leads into customers. If you haven’t implemented sales pipeline management for your business, it is high time you do it immediately with expert help. 

That’s where You need MarketStar as your sales and revenue accelerator. MarketStar is a pioneer in the sales outsourcing industry. With over 50+ world-class clients served, we create growth and drive results for companies of all stages and sizes using tailored solutions to help you hit your specific business goals. 

Sales as a Service is growing in popularity year by year with an increasing number of executives seeing the enormous value that Outsourced Sales bring to the table. The high cost of living combined with the long and costly recruiting process, expensive industry turnover, and a future that isn’t very predictable are only a few challenges faced by many organizations today.

Key Insights

Like all areas of business, telemarketing has undergone rapid changes in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Call volumes have increased, contact center managers are looking for better tools, and there is a renewed focus on increasing process efficiency. 

A study by the Harvard Business Review highlights how difficult calls saw a 50% uptick during the pandemic.

Back in the late 90s, an American software designer, Alan Cooper, developed a concept that changed and redefined how today's marketers and sales teams target and interact with their buyers. "To create a product that must satisfy a diverse audience, logic might tell you to make it as broad in its functionality as possible to accommodate the most people. This logic, however, is flawed.  The best way to accommodate a variety of users is to design for specific individuals with specific needs." This Cooper's statement led to the invention of a concept known as "Buyer Persona" which proves to be the most crucial step in targeting and engaging with the right prospects. Researching and finding out who your current as well as ideal buyers are and whom your product value proposition resonates with will help you define the right parameters for attracting viable leads and retaining your audience.

Key Insights

It is tempting to do everything in-house. The more you can do in-house, the less you pay the third parties. But at a granular level, this approach can prove to be challenging.

Key Insights

• Your customer onboarding strategy is probably the most important stage of the customer lifecycle 

• While it comes right at the start of their journey, with your offering, it sets the tone for their whole relationship with your product and company 

• The ultimate goal of any customer onboarding program is to get your customers to come back to your product

A 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profit by 25%, according to a report by Bain & Company.

Why? Because loyal customers are more likely to repeat their purchases. 

Effective customer onboarding is one way to ensure this. 

User onboarding is so critically important because it sets the tone for the ongoing relationship your customer has with your product. A good customer onboarding process will: 

• Keep Your Customer Engaged: They will clearly understand and experience the value they’ll get from your product. More importantly, it will give them a reason to log back in and use your product again and again.

• Improve Trial Conversions: If you offer a free or discounted product trial, user onboarding is where your trial users get to experience the value of your product. A good user onboarding process— right at the start of their trial — will help them to convert into paid customers.

But how do we create the perfect customer onboarding experience? 

The article shares the top actionable practices and trends of customer onboarding for 2022. 

1. Simplify the Sign-up Process

The average landing page conversion rate stands at 2.35%. The top 10% of sites are looking at 11.45% and above.

The above onboarding statistics brings us to a common misconception– that customer onboarding doesn’t start until a customer has signed up for your product. 

While every company operates differently, if you see a higher-than-average drop-off rate, it suggests you’re asking for too much information too soon. 

Such an approach gives a negative brand review or recommendation. 

Ask yourself the following questions while working on your company’s sign-up page: 

• Does your page make it easier for customers to sign up?

• Are you collecting only the essential information to personalize users’ experiences?

• If the answer to these questions is a resounding yes, you’re on the right track! 

Don’t forget that you can always collect more information about the customers in the later stage

2. Send a Welcome Email

A welcome email expresses gratitude. It speaks volumes about how much you value your users.

It also sets expectations for the customer onboarding process.

A few tips that can help you craft a stellar welcome email are: 

• Ensure that your content is crisp, actionable, and easy to understand. 

• Consider including a call to action (CTA) along with the welcome email. 

• Share the email IDs of your support team so that your customers know who to reach out to in case of queries. 

• You can also make way for AI-powered writing tools and automate the entire process of sending welcome emails. 

3. Integration and Data Imports

If you are a B2B business, then your customer onboarding strategy is more than just helping your customers learn how to use your product.

Your product is now part of your customer’s technology stack. This means that they may need to set up integrations with other tools they use or even invite their team to get the most value from your product.

Automate as much as you can.

Set up an integration between your customer’s marketing automation platform and your product. This will help you remove sticking points that might stop the customer from getting value from your product. But ensure that such a practice is optional and not mandatory.

4. Product Walk-through

A well-thought customer onboarding plan consists of product walkthroughs for your customers. This helps them get set up and complete key tasks within your product. 

However, product walkthroughs can be done away with if your new customer is already familiar with your product. An unskippable walkthrough can be just as much a barrier for your clients. 

Remember that not everyone will want to go through a product walkthrough the first time they log in. Make it easy for your new customers to return to your product walkthrough later. 

For some users, such walkthroughs might not be enough to get them started. Make it easier for your customers to find extra support.

Building Better Rapport

It is easy to think that the main goal of your customer onboarding process is to help your customers start using your product. It is so much more than that. 

Your ultimate objective is to set your customers up for long-term success, where they become not just your repeat customers but also loyal brand advocates. 

Your metric for a successful customer onboarding program is whether your customers log back into your product in the days, weeks, and months after first use.

Key Takeaways

In the dynamic marketplace that we are in today, building long-lasting relationships with customers is the only way for organizations to ensure the success of their business goals

Key Insights

• In the past few years, the methods of delivering adtech solutions have dynamically transformed the industry

• This sudden surge has left marketers scrambling to capture the eyes of viewers whose attention is more divided than ever

• Adtech offers a way out with its countless opportunities

• As it continues its spread, ad tech companies will be able to develop more integrations, more data sharing, extended reach across all channels, and cleaner integrations against content

You run ads, and then your ads dominate the industry. All thanks to the brands that worked on it with laser-sharp focus.

However, there is an invisible force that is keeping the lights on–adtech.

Advertising technology has been around for a few years, but it only recently caught the attention of savvy ad tech agencies.

In the era of rapid digitization and big data, brands are recognizing the need of striking long-lasting relationships with ad tech companies to make themselves more powerful and attractive to clients.

The industry is already rife with fierce competition, operating at a breakneck pace.

In the age of social media, agencies are feeling the need to investigate innovative ways to interact with relevant users, rather than relying on typical broadcast or digital media buys.

The advantages for agencies investing in adtech are plentiful. According to the Global Ad Spend Forecasts 2021 by Dentsu, global advertising is forecast to recover upto 10.4% growth, reflecting a total spend of $634 billion.

So, while advertising's purpose has not changed much, its methods have evolved. 

How Do You Navigate this Landscape?

From aligning sales and support to providing effective onboarding, we bring you the top 5 factors to consider while selling adtech solutions in 2022 and beyond. 

1. Differentiate Yourself 

The competition in the adtech space is fierce because there are thousands of companies that compete for a vast, yet growing amount of money. From Google to a budding enterprise you haven’t heard of, the competition is undoubtedly high. 

To succeed, adtech companies must find their niche. This is how you can ensure your service remains in demand, no matter who or what is in control of the market. 

Start with a good idea that has not been capitalized on.

The future of adtech involves understanding industry trends and what the customer needs. Successful adtech solutions locate holes in the marketplace and work backwards from the needs of these customers to develop and deliver a solution.

Effective content can be your weapon of choice here. It is a proven scalable tool while being relatively inexpensive to promote and position your company in a potentially saturated market.

From leveraging different content formats to providing greater value, there are many ways for companies to position themselves.

2. Specialize Your Sales Team 

Many companies, especially in the software sector, have discovered the power of specializing in their sales functions to achieve new levels of growth.

While adtech companies aspire to be software, only a few have started thinking like software companies, especially when it comes to sales.

The guiding philosophy of specialization is that sellers should focus on closing rather than prospecting. Moreover, they should leverage a specialized “sales development” function to find qualified prospects that match their target criteria.

This specialized sales function should also move away from account management and growth, which then would be taken care of by teams specializing in the said skill.

3. Don’t Discredit Long Tail Sales

As you get more successful with your adtech solutions, it is tempting to focus on the big hitters. However, many of your competitors are also aiming for the enterprise level, making it a more competitive field. You face less competition when dealing with a small business. 

In the US, 28 million small businesses in America account for 54 percent of all sales in the country. Needless to say, the long tail in digital media accounts for a significant sum.

Advertising technology must be worked upon, keeping this in mind.

In today’s hyper-connected culture, many of these small enterprises are connected via bigger consortiums. Making connections with appropriate decision-makers is much easier. 

4. Build Your Own Tech Stack

As passionate as most adtech companies are about their prospects’ technology choices, many don’t apply the same concern for their own sales or marketing tech stacks. 

Some crucial elements such as sales automation, marketing automation, CRM, and a couple of key data sources are key to the success of your adtech solutions. 

CRM governance and hygiene are increasingly critical for garnering insights over long sales cycles and with increased cross-functional account involvement from specialization. 

5. Increase Your Investment

While we are in a better place than six to 12 months ago, the market remains uncertain.

A knee-jerk reaction for most companies in a recession is to cut marketing spend and cease all marketing activity. However, this can prove to be fatal for the growth of adtech solutions.

Marketing is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ function. It is central to business operations and holds vital things like customer experience, user experience, and customer trust and loyalty.

Smart marketers, over the last two years, changed and increased their investment compared to their competitors. They were able to grab a larger voice, and consequently, they feel they can grow their market share. 

Wrapping Up

The adtech solutions space is getting more complex and competitive every year.

For adtech companies, the priority is quite clear: build everlasting relationships by providing a stellar customer experience.

With the right tools and mechanics in place, it is completely possible for adtech companies to set themselves up for success, even in the saturated digital media space. 

A Customer Success program is an essential part of modern business, especially for technology solutions that are challenging to adopt in new environments. But customer success programs can also be a challenge to implement internally, especially if your organization doesn't have the infrastructure, expertise, or resources to handle it. In these situations, outsourcing CS can take those responsibilities off your plate. This allows you to give Customer Success programs the attention they deserve while you can focus on the unique value that your company is known for.