What a sales pipeline is and how to build a strong sales pipeline coming up. What is a sales pipeline and how does that help grow your revenue over time as a salesperson? Let’s take a look at it and let’s break it down. I’ve put a drawing here to help you, kind of, visualize this. Essentially, a sales pipeline, you hear about that all the time in sales, how does that look?

It basically looks like this over the course of time.

What I’m going to do is walk you through this, how this works, and how you can build a strong sales pipeline so that you can be the most effective salesperson that you can be. Let’s take a look at it. With the sales pipeline, I’ve demonstrated this over a six month period, here. I’ve broken this out into different months in the pipeline, as you can see there.

The purple, here, that would be the lead flow that you have and the sales that you get out of that. The way that a sales pipeline works is you have lead flow that comes in and you work those leads in the first month, but generally, you don’t get a lot of sales right away with any type of new lead source.

You don’t see as much sales come out, so you’re closing ratio or your opening ratio on those leads really doesn’t look very good. One problem is, with a lot of salespeople and sales organizations, is they open up a new lead source and they don’t see the sales right away and they start looking at their opening ratio and thinking that’s very low and they turn it off. That’s the last thing you winna do.

You winna allow the pipeline to build so that you can see what kind of results you’re actually going to get. As you see here, over the course of time, the pipeline starts to fill. After two months, you’re still working the leads you received in month one, but you also have new leads that are coming in in month 2, so the pipeline’s getting a little bit more full. As a result, you’re starting to see more sales come out and your opening ratio is getting a little bit higher.

Now, as you fast forward through the pipeline over the course of many months, you start to see the pipeline really get to where it’s full.

I’ve demonstrated that over a six-month period, here. I think that’s probably pretty common for most all lead sources unless you have a really long sales cycle, your pipeline may extend a little bit longer. Generally speaking, over a six month period, your pipeline fills up and then, by the time you get to the end, here, it sort of flattens out because it’s full at that point and your results are consistent. Let’s take a look at it. I’ve demonstrated here that each month your sales are getting a little bit bigger and the bucket of sales that you have down here is getting larger.

After six months, you’re getting quite a bit of sales on a monthly basis because you’re getting sales that are new, new sales coming in, of course in the sixth month, but you’re also getting some sales from leads that came in the month before and you’re getting some sales from the leads that came in the month before that, all the way back to the beginning because people aren’t ready to sign up right away all the time, right? Some are ready in a day or two, some are ready in two weeks, some are ready in six months. That’s why it’s so important to work your entire sales pipeline, not just your new leads. When you work just your new leads, your sales always look like this and it never gets better than that.

If you work your entire pipeline, the new leads that you received and the leads you received six months ago, you’re going to have sales that look more like this, with an opening ratio that looks more like that, which is going to be pretty powerful.

This is going to stay consistent until the end of time if you consistently work those leads and consistently get new leads. Let’s talk about some tips on this. I’ve bulleted those over here. Number one is lead flow. You need to have lead flow.

You need to have leads coming into the pipeline at all times consistently. If you don’t, you’re gonna have to where your pipe dries up in certain areas and that’s gonna affect your sales and your results. You want a consistent lead flow, every month you’re getting consistent lead flow from a particular source, month over month so that the pipeline stays consistent. Number two, here. You winna have consistent effort and discipline.

One thing that happens with salespeople a lot is they have a really good month, and they close a lot of deals, they have a month that looks sort of like that, and they’re excited about it, and they let their feet off the gas a little bit.

What happens is those sales start to fall because the pipeline starts to dry up in areas so you don’t see the results that you had previously because you let your effort and your discipline kind of lag a little bit. You wanna stay consistent there. Number three is you need a defined process for how you work your leads, and you need to be consistent to that. What do you say on the first call?

How often do you follow up? What’s the cadence there? What kind of email communications are you sending? You need to have that documented so that you have a consistent process that you can consistently follow so that you can see the results consistently that you’re looking for. Also, this is for scalability.

If you bring on another salesperson or a sales partner or you grow your sales organization, you’re going to want your entire sales team to have a similar looking pipeline, so they need to be following the same process.

Number four, you wanna work the entire pipeline. Like I had previously talked about here, you can’t just work the new leads, you have to work all of the leads all the way through. If you work the entire pipeline, it’s going to stay consistent. The last tip here is just don’t give up too early.

I touched on that in the very beginning. If you have a new lead source, don’t start judging it right away. Be consistent to it, work on it, give it a good six months of effort, and then see what the results are.

At the end of the six months, you’ll understand what your actual opening ratio is on those leads that you can project forward and you’ll know the number of sales that you consistently get on a monthly basis that you can project forward. You don’t winna start projecting forward based on results that you’re seeing over here or it’s going to be skewed and you’re going to winna stop.

This same strategy, the sales pipeline, also works for marketing. You could literally, instead of calling this a sales pipeline, you could call this the marketing pipeline because generally, whenever you start marketing, whether you’re doing online advertising or offline advertising, you’re gonna not really see the greatest results in the world in month one, right? If you stay consistent with it and just keep chipping away at it and optimizing it, after six months, you’re probably seeing some pretty good results there.

Take this strategy back to the fort, talk about it with your sales team, see if you can build a strong sales pipeline so that you can grow your business. If you have any additional tips that I missed here, leave it in the comments.

If you liked the video, like it. Share it with your friends. Thanks for watching. Happy marketing.

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