Inside Sales Lead Management Featured Article

Sales forces are one of the most important parts of a company, but many of them aren’t always as effective as they could be. Jason Jordan, a partner at Vantage Point (News - Alert) Performance, writing in Entrepreneur, notes that 44 percent of organizations were ineffective at managing their sales pipelines.

Vantage Point’s survey included 62 business-to-business (B2B) companies, with 39 percent having revenue greater than $1 billion and 37 percent with revenue greater than $250 million.

Although these numbers might still sound impressive despite these companies reporting ineffective sales teams, Jordan pointed out that companies with effective sales pipelines grew 15 percent faster and had 28 percent higher revenue growth than their peers.

Fortunately, there are three simple ways that companies can improve their sales pipelines.

The first is to clearly define a formal sales process.

“This begs the question -- what specifically does a "formal sales process" mean? For starters, it means having clearly defined stages and milestones universally understood by your salespeople,” Jordan wrote. “If your sales team has to guess where a particular deal belongs or how to manage deals in each stage, you likely don’t have a formal sales process.”

Companies with a formalized sales process had revenue growth 18 percent higher than those that didn’t have one.

Managers only had to spend about three hours per month on pipeline management to get good results. Companies that spent at least three hours per month on pipeline management saw revenues jump by 11 percent. This means coaching employees on pipeline health, best practices and next steps to actually closing deals rather than closing dates, probabilities and the size of the deals.

For Jordan, it’s also a matter of training sales managers on how to manage pipelines. This entails determining the ideal pipeline size for representatives, coaching rather than inspecting and structuring meetings effectively.