MarketStar Blog | Sales (4)

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. 

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 Takeaways

The market for sales-as-a-service continues to grow across the globe with major multinational and fortune 500 companies like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft augmenting their in-house sales teams along with outsourcing sales operations to drive revenue and efficiency in operations. 

Key Takeaways:

In the midst of a rapidly changing business environment, Software as a Service (SaaS) has witnessed a boom like never before.

Key Insights

2020 emerged as one of the most challenging years in recent years. With catastrophic health and economic challenges, the whole world looked for ways to respond and adapt.

Key Insights: 

• Many businesses choose to ignore small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), setting their sights on closing larger clients 

• Businesses will benefit better by targeting the SMB market which has a shorter sales cycle and less red tape 

• Striking connections with your SMB customers will be easier if you make way for personalization and a clear communication process 

If you are selling to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), you must make it an intentional part of your strategy, tailoring not just the prices but your entire approach.

SMB is a segment in its own right. Your SMB sales can only be successful if you remove barriers, understand the whys and hows of the SMB market, and adopt the right mindset to ensure success with SMB customers.

With almost 31 million small businesses in the U.S. alone, the SMB market represents a tremendous business opportunity for enterprises of all sizes.

Before we jump into effective strategies for successful SMB sales, let’s look at what the landscape is all about.

What Does SMB Sales Mean? 

As mentioned earlier, SMB stands for small- and medium-sized business.

SMB sales refers to salespeople selling products or services to this market. SMBs usually have fewer than 500 employees.

SMBs also have shorter sales cycles and cost less for salespeople to close a deal.

Since SMBs often have very different needs and customer pain points, it requires SMB salespeople to use a unique SMB sales strategy to land clients, compared to the strategies involved in any big enterprise.

7 Easy-to-Implement Tips for Selling to Your SMB Customers 

Many businesses choose to ignore SMBs, setting their sights on closing larger clients.

But, in comparison, SMBs have less red tape, resulting in shorter sales cycles. It is also easier to get in touch with key decision makers, entailing more success for your SMB sales strategy.

It is vital to keep in mind that SMBs don’t always remain an SMB.

An SMB today might grow into a multi-million dollar company in a few years. And this big enterprise will keep on using your product or service for years to come.

Let’s walk through some of the best sales techniques for SMB customers. 

1. Connect Early 

As you get down to fine tuning your SMB sales strategy, make sure to add early engagement as the first part of the process.

Interact with potential customers before you start pitching.

By making yourself available at the very start of the decision-making process and maintaining consistent contact, you will provide greater value throughout the process.

Additionally, you will be top-of-mind when the time comes for your SMB customers to make a purchase. 

2. Qualify Properly 

Qualifying leads help you to determine whether a lead fits into your ideal customer profile and will convert into a paying customer.

Lead qualification is critical to any segment that you are targeting, but more so for the SMB market. Keep the following points in mind when evaluating an SMB business: 

• Has the business been registered last week? 

• Has the SMB determined its business model yet? 

• How much funding does the SMB have? 

Such questions will help you evaluate if you are zeroing down on a SMB that fits your business. Otherwise, you will be depleting your own resource pool in chasing the wrong client. 

3. Niche Down 

Regardless of what you are selling, it won’t be a good fit for everyone.

One you have zeroed down on your ideal customer type, you can make the process even more seamless by focusing on a smaller cohort.

For instance, let’s take restaurants as your target SMB customer. Rather than simply targeting restaurants of a certain size, target those that cater to a specific demographic.

The idea is to get as specific as possible. This is how you will get to know everything about your ideal SMB profile, enabling you to sell better and smarter. 

4. Keep it Simple 

When you are fighting to make a mark in the SMB market, it is easy to get caught up in the details. But an in-depth sales pitch isn’t what your SMB client wants to hear.

Don’t complicate your pitch.

In fact, a simple straightforward pitch, with touches of personalization will be more effective for making a sale.

Present your information in an easy-to-digest, bite-sized format. Cover the facets of your product or service that your SMB leads will care about. 

5. Offer an End-to-End Solution 

SMBs require products and services that will be up and running in no time, with little or no effort on their part.

That is why you must make it clear that your solution will meet their needs without an extra investment of time or money to install and build the features.

Regardless of your target SMB, ensure that implementation is fast and easy.

When you emphasize your understanding of their need for a turnkey solution, you show that you value their time.

6. Alleviate Worries 

SMB customers tend to be risk-averse, for many of them are bootstrapped.

For SMBs, every dollar counts.

You can set your customers’ minds at ease with some easy steps listed below: 

• Offer a free trial of your solution

• Provide a money-back guarantee 

• Make way for monthly payments rather than a yearly subscription 

• Feature testimonials and case studies on your website so they have proof of your product’s features 

7. Cultivate Loyalty 

Long-term customer loyalty comes with a slew of benefits for your business.

In fact, repeat business can generate valuable referrals for you.

So, it is important for you to maintain and strengthen existing SMB partnerships.

This starts with treating your SMB customers as valued individuals. Personalize their experience with your sales team. Be patient and offer assistance at every stage of the sales process.

Whether it be pre-sale or post-sale, every engagement must be guided with the objective of providing stellar customer service and support.

Summing It Up 

To capture a meaningful and sustaining partnership, it is critical to lead with the objective of providing value for your SMB customers, and not just to create value for your business. 

A successful SMB sales pitch will find a way to help clients achieve their dreams in a manner that is honest, transparent, and respectful.

Sales enablement is the process of supporting your organization’s sales team with the information and tools they need to be successful. While this is a fairly broad statement, it involves careful planning and coordination to ensure your company has a proper sales enablement program in place.

Prosthetic patients at the Hospital das Clinicas in São Paulo, Brazil, are receiving a new form of treatment. Each patient is fitted with an armband connected to a gamification platform. The platform, designed by Accenture, uses SAP Leonardo capabilities and has several virtual reality dashboards that entertain and encourage patients as they work with their prosthetic limbs. In addition to the dashboards providing improved detecting, measuring and analyzing capability, it also makes monotonous exercises fun and infinitely more engaging. Initial findings suggest that patients who use the gamified armbands have a greater acceptance of their situation, emerge from their sessions with higher self-esteem, and make much more progress during the course of their treatment.

Establishing a proactive sales operations approach is necessary if you want to gain more business or cross-sell to existing clients. On the other hand, a reactive approach is haphazard and just doesn’t work out in the long run. Being proactive in your sales strategy entails planning, profiling targeted accounts, finalizing and executing account strategies, and creating a process to receive continuous feedback to improve performance. When done right, it leads to more sales revenue.

Key Takeaways

• Implementing RevOps to unify and streamline your GTM operations can have numerous benefits for your organization–from increasing revenue coordination to better business-wide accountability

• It’s a big change. As you get started with it, it is essential that your current processes don’t pose a hindrance to your big plans 

• As a crucial component of any organization, your tech stack deserves the same attention as your RevOps strategy. It’s how you will be able to scale your GTM initiatives 

• It can be confusing to build your ideal tech stack. But once done, it can go a long way in ensuring that your various customer-facing teams have access to the same data. This will help you optimize your workflows and infuse new efficiency in your campaigns 

Advancements in tech stack and increasingly sophisticated buyer behaviors have mandated an evolution in operating models if enterprises hope to stay ahead.

Organizations, especially those in the B2B space, are increasingly opting for newer approaches to enhance their customer acquisition and retention strategies.

The concept of centralizing teams from marketing, sales, and customer success–the core concept behind RevOps–has become popular to accelerate revenue growth and go-to-market operations.

Companies are reporting significant gains in terms of accelerated revenue growth, about 100% to 200% increases in digital marketing ROI and 30% reductions in GTM expenses, according to a BCG report.

The importance of delivering a successful RevOps initiative relies heavily on having a deep understanding of the right technology stack which will support a well-aligned RevOps strategy.

But the sheer number of software and apps available for RevOps can make it a daunting task. Additionally, you don’t want too many systems in your technology stack as this can lead to limitations in individual systems.

Having said that, a full tech stack that is aligned with your RevOps strategy can be the game-changer you are looking for to align your sales, marketing, and customer success teams while ensuring streamlined workflows, in order to capitalize on growth opportunities.

How Does RevOps Affect Your Technology Stack?

No two businesses are the same.

This also means that not every tech stack is affected the same way by RevOps. While some companies require a complete overhaul of their RevOps tech stack, others might see no change.

The tech stack previously selected by your sales, marketing, and service teams provided each individual function with its capabilities. So the tools used by your service team were vastly different from those used by marketing. This changes with RevOps.

With RevOps in the picture, the underlying goal is to structure technology in such a way that it supports the customer journey across all touchpoints while unlocking more of your organization’s revenue potential.

A technological audit as part of your RevOps framework can help you get started. It will help you analyze the various gaps in achieving the ideal tech stack.

How to Evaluate the Ideal Tech Stack for Your RevOps Strategy? 

A hard look at your existing systems as part of your revenue operations practice can help you assess the gaps in your current tech stack and how the addition of any new software fits with the overall goals of your GTM operations.

• Start with Business Process Evaluation: Begin with a thorough map-out of your customer’s journey. Then document all the processes that your customer-facing teams go through.

• Do a Little Research: The purpose of this market research is to gather all relevant data about the tools that should be part of your organization’s revenue tech stack.

• Cost-benefit Analysis: When you map out each of your GTM functions with the tools available in the market, you will gain a better understanding of the software that will make up your ideal tech stack. 

How to Build the Perfect Tech Stack for RevOps?

In “The State of Business Operations in 2021” report, conducted by Tonkean and Lucid of 500 companies and IT professionals, only 24% of respondents were satisfied with their current toolset handling all workflow needs.

An ideal tech stack for revenue operations will include tools that monitor top-line data that can be easily integrated with other apps. Remember that your tools should help you scale your RevOps strategy and achieve overall business operations.

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

Since aligning and unifying your organization’s various functions under one umbrella is what RevOps is all about, it makes sense to start with CRM to get all your customer data into one place.

A CRM software will centralize customer data, putting it in one easy-to-access place.

This means that even if your data is coming from various sources such as Google Analytics, Social Media portals, and other apps, the chosen CRM for your tech stack will sort, clean, analyze, and store data in actionable formats.

For your marketing, sales, and service teams, this data serves as the single source of truth for their various campaigns.

2.Revenue Intelligence Software

Driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), Revenue Intelligence Software streamlines data gathering, synchronization, and management across your customer-facing functions. 

Such software is incredibly helpful as it eliminates siloed data entry that can potentially hamper the success of your GTM operations. Since it automatically captures data at every touchpoint, your teams have more accurate and reliable insights to fall on. 

This also means that your sales reps have better leads to deal with since your teams are better equipped to assess the direction of customer conversation as it unfolds. Consequently, you also allocate resources to the right team, expediting the lead qualification process, and optimizing conversions.

3. Project Management Tools

Collaboration is key to success for RevOps and project management tools can help you achieve it. Teams have a centralized place to effectively work on cross-cutting revenue-related activities.

Such tools are useful in the end-to-end management of projects, including task ownership, and deadline adherence. 

Bridging the Gap Between Strategy & Tech

A HubSpot report highlights that a whopping 61% of B2B businesses leveraging technology and automation in their sales processes will exceed revenue operations.

Selecting the ideal tech stack is your first step to scaling your RevOps strategy and streamlining sales.

As daunting a task it may seem, you can ease the process by understanding what your RevOps team needs in order to function properly. Build on this understanding to lay down the foundation of your RevOps technology stack.

Looking for the right RevOps strategy to compliment your GTM initiatives? Head over to our blog and read more about the top 5 areas of consideration for RevOps success!