Your company’s sales pipeline touches every stage of your sales process. It not only helps you keep track of where a lead is in that process, but also provides your sales team with a way to estimate how much money you’re projected to make.
However, it’s not enough to recognize the importance of your sales pipeline; you have to manage it too. Like any tool in your kit, you have to make sure your sales pipeline continues to perform like a well-oiled machine. Let it sit for too long, and your sales forecasts will grow cluttered and inaccurate.
To help you streamline your sales pipeline management process, and ensure that you always have a crystal-clear view of your buyer’s journey, we’ve put together a few tips for you.
With these developments in mind, the days of siloed sales and marketing teams have approached their end. However, as you approach the bottom-of-the-funnel, the line that separates sales and marketing can begin to blur, making it difficult to tell if your teams are achieving their goals. As vital as departmental alignment is, how can you ensure that both departments are not only happy but also producing the kind of ROI your company needs?
The solution lies in closed-loop marketing, and its partner-in-success, full-funnel marketing. Here’s how implementing these strategies can help you win more sales and better understand (and act on) the analytics associated with your sales pipeline.
Marketing shouldn’t work exclusively at the top-of-the-funnel, and sales shouldn’t relegate itself to the bottom-of-the-funnel. The two teams need to be comfortable exploring the top and bottom of the sales and marketing pipelines if they want to meet prospects where they’re at and help them reach the climax of their buyer’s journey.
A full-funnel marketing strategy can do this. As explained by Bizible, full-funnel marketing is when “marketers care about the entire funnel. Since the funnel ends at revenue generation, not lead generation, both the marketing team and the sales team should have the goal of generating revenue.”
If closed-loop marketing occurs when sales teams report to marketing with a breakdown on what happened to the leads they received, then full-funnel marketing is the precursor to that. By exploring the full-funnel pipeline, your marketing can guide prospects through each step of their journey, with each step garnering a different tactic. This helps marketers improve their sales pipeline management and prioritize the kind of marketing that brings in consistent ROI.