Optimize your Sales Pipeline with These Salesforce Features
Is your sales team struggling to deliver consistently and missing sales forecasts? Are they failing to convert high-value leads or losing track of potential customers? Even amazing salespersons can find it difficult to perform if stuck with a below-par sales management system. Sales is a process made of several inter-connected stages. Together, they form a pipeline for revenues to flow. Inefficient lead tracking or lack of coherence across these stages clogs the pipeline. The solution is sales pipeline optimization by leveraging sales process automation tools.
This article discusses sales process optimization and Salesforce Lead Management features for efficient lead handling and conversion. Stay with us.
Understanding the sales pipeline
Just like we cannot have water flowing from a tap whenever we open it unless the water is in the pipeline, sales also cannot happen overnight if we do not ensure a lineup of potential customers across different stages of conversions. Any experienced salesperson understands the importance of building and nurturing a sales pipeline.
A sales pipeline can be defined as a visualization tool for representing and ranking potential customers in terms of their positions across a sales process, from initial contact to making a purchase. A healthy pipeline of potential customers assures a regular flow of business and helps maintain redundancies in case of accidental delays in customer conversion.
The crucial stages of sales pipelines are:
Prospecting
Potential customers enter a sales pipeline through the prospecting stage. This can happen through multiple routes, like cold calls, referrals, inbound queries, online and offline outreach campaigns, direct marketing, etc. This is also known as the lead generation stage. As a foundational stage, without sufficiently strong prospecting, a sales pipeline cannot be sustainable.
Lead qualification
Not all leads generated during prospecting activities can deliver business. The reasons can be too many, like unfit for the target product, inaccurate lead data, or lack of purchase intentions. Evidence shows that salespersons spend a significant portion of their hours pursuing inaccurate lead information and misaligned leads. So, it is important to identify and qualify leads to improve the quality of leads. This may involve identifying their needs, ability and authority to purchase, budget constraints and intention to become a paying customer. Qualified leads improve the productivity of any sales team.
Lead engagement
Once leads are identified and qualified, contacting leads and interacting with them becomes necessary to understand their purchase intentions. This may involve making calls, emailing or direct messaging. The purpose is to encourage interaction and gather more information about the potential of the qualified leads.
Presentation and nurturing
This is the step at which salespersons pitch a product or service to potential customers as per the information gathered in the previous stage. The objective is to nurture qualified leads, develop a deeper understanding of their needs and build stronger business relationships.
Negotiation
It is the penultimate stage of a sales pipeline and, at this stage, prospects are emotionally committed to making the purchase. They are just looking for better prices and promises of post-sales services and support. So, salespersons need to address queries carefully and avoid making unrealistic commitments.
Closing the purchase deal
The final purchase depends on how satisfied a prospect is at the negotiation stage. They may choose to cancel the deal, put the purchase decision on hold or finalize the payment. Once the purchase is made, a prospect moves out of the sales pipeline for that specific product or service. If the decision is put on hold, salespersons continue nurturing the relationship for future sales opportunities.
A sales pipeline works best when every stage is working at its optimum capacity and feeding the stage ahead of it. For example, ‘Prospecting’ activities may create a high volume of leads but if the right identification and qualification are not happening, a sales team may perform poorly at the ‘lead engagement’ stage. So, it is important to optimize a sales pipeline.
What is sales pipeline optimization?
Sales pipeline optimization is a management practice that improves the efficiency and effectiveness of each stage of a sales pipeline for revenue maximization and shortening the span of the sales cycle.
A sales process optimization may involve:
- Defining stages of sales specific to an industry and company
- Setting the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for each of the stages
- Monitoring the performance of each stage against the KPIs
- Adopting the right lead nurturing strategies
- Automating repetitive tasks, like data entry, follow-up reminders, scheduling, analytics, etc.
- Ensuring seamless collaboration and cooperation between sales and support teams
Now, implementing these elements of sales process optimization requires taking a single holistic approach throughout the sales process. Any piecemeal decision-making or working in silos may jeopardize the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the process. Salesforce Sales Cloud, with its hosts of sales management tools and features, is the right choice to spearhead your sales team’s efforts for continuous and consistent performance.
Salesforce features for sales pipeline optimization
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management system with dedicated and customizable features for optimizing the sales pipeline. They offer endless opportunities to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of sales teams.
Some of these features are:
Salesforce Automation
This feature helps automate sales workflow, like creating email alerts, sending reminders or assigning sales-related tasks based on predefined criteria. It can accommodate even the most complex process automation logic flow based on the custom requirements of a company.
Lead management
Lead generation, data handling, processing, qualification and other related activities are prone to data losses. The lead management feature of Salesforce Sales Cloud can help capture data at the source and automatically assign scores to individual leads based on level of engagement, behavior, and demographic criteria. It helps sales teams to prioritize leads and better utilize their time.
Opportunity Pipeline Management
This helps to visualize opportunities for selling to prospects and customers based on their ongoing interactions and previous deals with the company. It provides the sales team with real-time guidance for accurate pitching and faster closure. Companies can also use this feature to forecast sales better.
Salesforce Einstein
It is an AI-powered sales pipeline optimization tool that logs sales events within the Sales Cloud, uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) capabilities to understand interactions with prospects, and leverages generative AI to create human-level customer interaction solutions. Companies can use customized predictive models for business-appropriate data analysis. This saves time, personalizes customer interactions, maximizes customer engagement, and improves customer experience throughout the sales process.
Salesforce Mobile App
Salesforce mobile application not only provides a host of Sales Cloud functionalities to geographically dispersed sales teams, it also offers offline capabilities. It means salespersons can use the app even in the absence of network connectivity. The system syncs the data with Sales Cloud automatically when a network is available. This allows better collaboration between teams from anywhere.
Final words
Are you planning to make your lead tracking system more efficient or improve the conversion rate? Salesforce Sales Cloud can be the best CRM for sales teams. Starting with efficient lead capture and qualification to increased sales productivity, implementing Sales Cloud can transform your business. However, the efficacy of any CRM depends on how aligned the implementation is with a company’s business realities. Out-of-the-box solutions may struggle to generate results. Contact Manras for customized sales pipeline optimization.
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