A Sales pipeline represents your sales process, which consists of all the steps necessary to sell a product or service to your customer.

Each sales step represents a single action or group of actions that need to be taken in order to complete that specific phase of the sales process, and move the opportunity to the next one.

A functional sales pipeline should include and lead you through sales steps including (as examples): Initial Contact, Qualification, Meeting, Proposal and Close. By following and addressing each step, your chances are enhanced of not only closing a successful deal, but also learning and optimizing your processes in the future.

A robust sales process can become a key driver to help you achieve your sales and revenue targets and grow your business.

In this presentation you will:

• explore the reasons why scalability in your sales process is so important
• reveal some proven tactics you can deploy to achieve this

Is your sales process scalable? What practices do you use to ensure your sales process copes with the growth of your business?

Join us to learn all about this vital subject.

It might be simple enough to qualify a lead, but managing an opportunity is more complex. Why? For one thing, it means higher stakes–a salesperson’s valuable time must be invested in working an opportunity. In the end it has the potential of becoming that which everyone on a sales team is after: a closed sale.

All efforts are focused on getting that opportunity to pay off, but there is always a risk factor. Not all sales close. Will this one be wasted costly effort, or will it (as everyone hopes) turn to profit? How can you improve the odds in favor of your company and sales force?

For opportunity management, the essential key is in accurate evaluation of risk factors. Know all about your target prospect company–or at the very least the industry and the general patterns of most companies within it. Know which job titles you need to reach and engage as part of the sales process. Have some understanding of your target company’s buying process. Have all your qualifying questions well lined-up before investing serious time and effort.

Knowing the Buyer

In sales strategies, the key component is opportunity management. In opportunity management, the key component is risk evaluation–having as much information as pssible to weigh the sale on side of a win.

Sales Rep Flexibility

Today it is best to allow salespeople to utilize their “on the ground” judgment and sales techniques, allowing them to make opportunity management decisions with relative freedom. Today sales requires a focus on results–not process.

Analysis of Lost Opportunities

Many miss that an analysis of sales must not only include wins, but losses as well. When losses are taken into account as part of opportunity management, it can provide plentiful data contributing to new sales strategies, improved closing ratios and increasing sales velocity.

Vital Qualities of a CRM Solution

A CRM solution is the backbone of both a sales force and a business. As an opportunity moves through the steps of the sales process, the precision of that CRM applications becomes more important. When you’ve truly reached opportunity management–where a sales rep is all-in–your CRM solution had better be fully supportive, or you run the risk of losing opportunities.

The Viewing of Opportunities

The hands-on handling of sales opportunities is an important subject–but there is an underlying factor that has an impact on opportunity management: the way an opportunity is viewed.

Perhaps more than other more average fields, you really need virtues in sales management. The bottom line: if you don’t clearly understand how a sales manager needs to be poised for the future, you reduce the chances of creating value and  growth.

A question which any businessperson is going to ask after closing that first sale is: How can I keep that customer now that I have them?

The answers to that question add up to account management. It is the set of activities needed to keep your customers once you have sold them. Account management is critical because retaining and selling to an existing customer costs far less than pursuing and selling to a new customer.

What is forecasting? It is doing your level best to accurately predict the amount of sales that will be closed during a particular sales period—month, quarter, half-year or year.

There are 2 main components to sales forecasting: the people, and the technology. Without technology accurate forecasting is pretty near impossible. But the other side of it is an understanding of people—specifically the people in your sales team.

A sales manager walks into a company, is hired, and is expected to take the sales team—and the company bottom line—to new heights.

When sales management newly comes into a company and is faced with an existing sales team, he or she will be confronted with a number of pain points. This is a list of them, and roughly the order in which the new sales manager should handle them.

Today in sales management, lead generation has radically changed, due to the proliferation of the Internet. Because information on your product or service is now so freely available—along with that of your competitors—it is very easy for potential buyers to compare products. 60 to 70 percent of the decision making in B2B sales is made before the decision maker approaches the supplier. This has a profound impact on the lead machine.