Re-energising your sales pipeline

Business owners and leaders are busy people. So, managing your time is a vital ingredient to being successful and developing your business. If we were to observe you over a week, what would we find?

Would your activities reflect the priorities you have in your business? – whatever they may be.

One area that would probably have some focus would be sales, but in what sense?

Is your time in this area exclusively spent on servicing your customer’s needs today, or are you also horizon scanning and thinking about your sales pipeline for tomorrow?

This is a vital part of your future success and needs to have regular focus and thought

We often find it useful to work through a series of questions to address this:

Start with your existing customers:

• Who are they and why do they buy from me?
• If you’re not sure why they buy from you, engage with them and ask them.
• You can also ask them if they know anyone else who might benefit from buying your product or service – referrals are a very important part of any sales pipeline.

Targeting new customers:

• Once you have identified who your customers are, develop a target list of businesses that appear to be like them.
• Understanding why your customers buy from you should then enable you to be very specific in your sales approach and to focus on their needs.

Gaining new customers:

• Identifying customer groups that like your product or service will increase your sales conversion rate.
• But measure your success, how may potential customers do you have to speak to, to gain one new order. This information will enable you understand your sales funnel and will therefore build a sales process that is repeatable and measurable.
• Be deliberate and systematic in your approach. Use social media to identify targets, interact with them to encourage engagement and look to build a platform for communication with them.

We have seen this simple process work in numerous businesses. It is about being smarter and making use of the information you already have to build a more robust and lucrative sales pipeline for tomorrow.

If you need help with this, get in touch with us, we can help.