4 sales pipeline considerations for a new business

As a business owner setting up your sales team for the first time, you have a unique opportunity – you get to create efficient systems from the beginning, and avoid the problem many of your competitors face. Cumbersome sales pipelines ingrained in company culture are expensive to change and cause inefficiencies. You can capitalise on those inefficient systems by offering your leads and customers a superior experience.

A study in the Harvard Business Review found that companies with a formal sales pipeline management process generate 18% more revenue than those that don’t. That should be incentive enough to start your business off on the right path!

In order to create this superior experience from day one, here are four key elements of your sales pipeline you should consider.

1. Keeping admin to a minimum

A study from Pace Productivity found that sales reps spend an average of 23% of their time on admin tasks, as opposed to only 22% of their time actively selling! If you decrease this admin time, you’ll give your reps more time back to increase revenues.

The biggest impact on your admin is to eliminate the need for double handling of data and ensure reps have access to all information through a cloud-based pipeline management system. Find out how 1Centre can help.

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2. Moving leads quickly through the sales pipeline

The longer a lead remains stalled in one stage of your pipeline, the less likely they are to convert into a customer. Leads hate inaction. S,o the way you can close more leads than your competition is to create a pipeline and process that allows leads to quickly move through the stages without coming across roadblocks and bottlenecks.

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3. Use sales data to gain insights

With a manual sales process, it’s difficult to quickly access data on opportunities, leads, churn, and onboarding. Without metrics, you can’t see how changes impact your sales process. You also can’t see if there’s a certain point in the pipeline where leads are dropping out.

Using a cloud-based system means that all your sales data remains in one place, can be accessed by anyone on the team and is always up-to-date and true. Further, it can be sliced and diced to gain insights from the process or about any lead or rep. Your sales data will be an invaluable tool for future growth. So, set it up right from the beginning.

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4. Making onboarding as painless as possible

All too often, companies focus on speeding up the sales pipeline and neglect the onboarding process. After all, if a client has already converted, the rest is simple, right?

Not so. Clients will drop out or grow cold if the pipeline process takes too long or contains too much resistance. Not to mention, the longer a client is stuck in onboarding, the longer until you start earning from them.

Credit checks are one key area where onboarding can get stalled. There’s a lot of paperwork that needs to be filled in on both sides, and the back-and-forth can hold an account up for weeks. Because this is a manual process, it’s also hard for sales reps to know exactly where each application is at.

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1Centre makes this easy by automating the entire process. Credit checks become a single form for the client to fill in, which is automatically submitted to agencies for results. Sales reps can see exactly what stage the check is at. It saves time and ensures clients can be quickly onboarded in a painless way.

How will you set your new business sales pipeline up for success?