A well structured sales pipeline is crucial in order to keep control of your sales process and to have a 360-degrees view of your leads, opportunities and customers. The key to having a successful business lies in the ability to identify new opportunities that fit with what you sell, analyze them quickly and then take action.

Organizing sales pipeline can be difficult if it's not done properly from the start. That's where CommerceCore™ comes into play! With it's Sales module, you will be able to structure your sales process so that everything is under control at any given time.

If you are looking for a way to improve your sales pipeline, in this article, we will explore how to use CommerceCore™ as a tool in order to streamline the process of managing the entire sales cycle from lead generation all the way through closing deals.

This is an essential and often overlooked aspect of e-commerce growth that can be easily optimized with CommerceCore™. Read on for more information!

What is a sales pipeline?

At its core, the sales pipeline is a summary of available and upcoming sales opportunities managers can use to better determine the revenue they will generate, the bottlenecks in their sales funnel, and projected cash flow.

82% of buyers accept meetings with sellers who proactively reach out (source: Top Performance in Sales Prospecting, RAIN Group)

When business owners go further into the data from their sales pipeline, they may uncover various insights:

Revenue and cash flow projections

Only a small fraction of your leads will turn into opportunities. Managers may use this information to estimate sales and plan budgets and human resources in the future. This also allows businesses to more easily change sales objectives based on the effectiveness of their current sales funnel.

Over-allocation of resources and resource gaps

Within your sales funnel, you may discover that certain salespeople are focusing on leads that may never convert, while accidentally ignoring prospects that are ready to acquire your products and services and are more likely to sign larger contracts and agreements. Learn how to make better use of your team's time in order to get greater long-term results.

Length of the sales cycle

It might take weeks for certain firms to consummate a contract. Negotiations, for example, might span months. Utilize your sales pipeline to determine how long it takes your team to transfer leads from the top of the funnel to the sale.

Bottlenecks and impediments in the process.

For example, you may discover that the proposal step often slows the sales process by a week owing to the necessity for specific quotations. Armed with this knowledge, you may look for solutions that can automate the process of producing project estimates. Alternatively, during the lead generation stage, you may realize that certain prospects are uninterested in the collateral you share. In this situation, test new marketing assets to determine how well they respond and if they are more likely to convert into later-won chances.

Success of sales reps and a skills deficit

A good sales funnel also reveals who of your salespeople closes the most sales, has the highest ticket values, and need more assistance and training to meet their quota. With this information, you can aid them in improving their performance and getting their sales statistics back on track.

How Does a Sales Pipeline Differ from a Forecast?

It's not unusual for sales pipelines and predictions to be mixed up. Despite the fact that a pipeline includes all prospects that salespeople are handling, regardless of how mature or new they are, sales forecasts offer a time estimate for when those opportunities will close.

Predictions and pipelines serve distinct functions:

The Process of sales pipeline management

The sales pipeline is a visual representation of your entire lead-to-customer process, from the first contact with a prospect to their final purchase. It shows both how long it takes for each step and which steps are most effective at converting leads into customers

The process of the sales pipeline is all about nurturing leads and closing them. In between, there are lots of steps involved that make manual lead nurture, predicting conversion probability, and track the communication require a lot of time and effort. 

90% of companies are now using at least two lead enrichment tools to learn more about prospects (source: Gartner, Sales Development Technology: The Stack Emerges)

Organizing the sales pipeline is all about organizing your lead nurture campaigns by setting up different stages that reflect each stage of the buyer's journey. When organizing the various stages, you need to take into account how many touch points are required before a sale can be closed and determine which nurturing strategy will work best for each client based on their specific needs.

Adding new leads into the Pipeline is as simple as adding them into your CRM, letting you focus on organizing and customizing their journey based on industry best practices rather than spending time organizing the data after it's added to your system. This allows for better lead-nurturing strategies that will help boost your conversion rates significantly! 

CommerceCore™ CRM and sales

The CommerceCore™ customer relationship management and CommerceCore™ sales Merchant Operating System modules make it easier for us to manage our customers and sales in an efficient way. With CommerceCore™, we can simply track the workflow from the starting to the end. The CommerceCore™ CRM module will help us to manage the leads, opportunities, and customers of our organization. The sales module manages sales quotations, orders, price lists, etc. In CommerceCore™ all the modules are linked to each other and if we make a change in one module, it will automatically be updated in the other modules also, which will make our jobs easier.

Organizing sales pipeline with CommerceCore™

With the CommerceCore™ Sales module, you can automate all tasks in the pipeline and keep your leads organized through the entire sales process without wasting any time or resources on manual entry. 

• The sales pipeline is designed to keep track of leads, opportunities and contact activities. It allows you organizing the process by stages that reflect each stage in the lead's journey towards becoming a customer.

• One of the most important features for organizing your sales pipeline is having a strong reporting system that lets you make real-time decisions based on what's happening in your business. With CommerceCore™, you get access to all this data right from the dashboard of the CRM!

• You can see exactly how many clients are at each step along with their contact information, the stage they are in and their contact history. You can also get reports broken down by client, lead source or industry so you have a clear idea of who is moving forward with your product and where leads are dropping off without having to run multiple reports on different software platforms.

• Live reporting lets you organize accordingly based on real-time data. This is crucial for organizing your sales pipeline and to be able to make the best decisions possible in regards to lead generation, nurturing and conversion rates. 

• Using the CommerceCore™ Sales module makes it easy for you to see where leads are dropping off at any given stage so that you can tweak things accordingly or identify an opportunity with a specific industry or client that needs a different approach.

Conclusion:

It's all about organizing the sales pipeline, from lead generation to closing deals and CommerceCore™ makes it easy for you to keep track of your clients along with their contacts without wasting any time organizing them after they're added into your CRM! This is an essential aspect of e-commerce growth that can easily be improved with CommerceCore™.

When it comes to sales, there’s no such thing as too much organization. With the CommerceCore™ Sales module, you can automate all tasks in the pipeline and keep your leads organized through the entire sales process without wasting any time or resources on manual entry. Schedule a demo today to learn more!