Building a sales pipeline begins with understanding our customers' mindsets and creating a streamlined process that is easy to follow and scale-up in the future. Here, we give our recommendations and tips about how you can use simple tools and tricks to build your own sustainable pipeline, then continually improve your processes to achieve compound growth.
To start, let's change our mindset from a sales pipeline that is driven by numbers to one that focuses on building long-term relationships with our customers. In this blog, we will discuss different ways to grow your pipeline with limited resources. It is more beneficial to retain existing customers than to spend five times as much to acquire new ones, so focus on quality over quantity!
This blog was written by our Head of Strategy, Aishwarya Suharu. Aishwarya has extensive experience working with early stage businesses to support their lead generation, network building and commercial activities.
Listen to your customers
Business development requires you to be a good listener, who is able to comprehend your customer’s pain points and have great insight of the business market to effectively communicate and negotiate your points to stakeholders. If you can learn to understand your customers' problems, their main requirements for a solution, and their restrictions, you will be able to navigate your sales pipeline with more confidence. If you can demonstrate that you can remove their roadblocks and provide them with a solution that delivers results, they are more likely to do business with you.
Use tools to gather data from your customers at each stage of the sales pipeline. Research the customer beforehand and follow up with them after calls to clarify any points and ensure they feel heard. This will help you determine which of your services is the best fit, ask any other questions about the project, and support your internal team with resource planning. This is especially helpful for smaller businesses.
Build your industry network
Business is normally won through the foundations of a solid relationship between customer and provider. This makes it extremely important to showcase your professional personality, your company's mission, services and your own personal brand in order to begin to forge connections and foster powerful relationships. Interact with your current, old and future prospects and customers, as well as suppliers and industry thought leaders through social platforms to increase your brand awareness and sense of technical credibility. By making yourself known in relevant spaces, a sense of familiarity with your network will be formed, putting you in a brilliant position to start reaching out and interacting with suspects. A great way to start growing your social media presence would be to select the correct platform for your target audience and then focus on some customer research to connect with thought leaders and industry experts through joining community groups, following industry hashtags and sharing valuable content to engage your audience.
Nurture your leads
A core part of any small or big business is to nurture relationships with your prospects, as this greatly impacts the level of sales, referral rates and stakeholder communication. Having a greater number of touch points will directly impact your prospects' decision making and trust with your team. While nurturing leads requires effort, the key is effectively triaging the prospects to know who is likely to buy your products and identify those who are nowhere near ready for purchase.
It’s important to engage and triage with your leads face to face over initial consultations, sharing supporting visual materials to showcase credibility, whilst also interacting with their social media channels to increase touchpoints. Respect each lead that comes, be warm and understand their pain points to determine where they are on their journey to better navigate towards a sale. And, don't forget, your lost leads are just as valuable as your won cases. They can often highlight important gaps in your products or messaging whilst still remaining to be an opportunity to spread the word of your work to others. Perhaps through a partnership? Joint content collaboration? Mutual introductions? So remember to send follow ups and thank you emails, no matter the sales outcome.
Streamline your management processes
A clean and easy-to-use customer relationship management (CRM) system can help you optimise and strategise your customer relationships. In the world of CRM, data is your best friend. Make sure to tag all customer information, from initial conversations and emails to materials and quick notes about phone calls. These data points will help your sales team better understand the customer and create a custom path to signing a contract or purchasing your products.
Utilise the well known sales funnel methodology to build a simple pipeline such as suspects, prospects, marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, proposal opportunities and won sales. Clear, limited and quantifiable steps will ensure that each customer is moving forward smoothly, and that all teams are aware of the communication and follow-up actions to continue conversations.
In conclusion...
Valuing your customers, past and present, is key to creating a sustainable sales or relationship pipeline. Listening to and understanding your customers, expanding your network with your target audience and systemising those conversations through a well setup CRM system are a great way to build long-term relationships. A customer relationship based on trust and transparency will increase sales and strengthen your brand.
To discuss ways to build a strong pipeline, drop us a message. We love working with new teams and solving new challenges.
Thank you for reading one of our strategy series blogs. Next time we will share our insight into other factors that can drive business growth for small businesses, so follow us on LinkedIn to get the latest updates!