Make pipeline management easier
Posted: Wed May 28, 2025 4:22 am
Take advantage of Sales Cloud’s automation to ensure you spend your time on what matters: building relationships with prospects and moving them through the pipeline.
Why is a sales pipeline important?
A sales pipeline gives you a bird’s-eye view of where every deal stands in the sales process — and any obstacles that may hinder a successful sale. With this information, you can address roadblocks and increase the chances of closing the sale.
A sales pipeline also provides a clear picture of potential overall revenue, allowing you to create accurate forecasts. With these forecasts, you can see how likely you are to hit revenue targets and adjust sales strategy as needed to make sure you hit your goals.
Ultimately, a healthy sales pipeline is about keeping deals moving. Without one, prospects can get stuck in the sales process and reps may not know how to get them unstuck. This results in missed sales targets and lost revenue — not to mention a frustrated sales team.
How do sales pipelines work?
A sales pipeline follows the journey prospects take from first contact to america phone number list purchase. Once a sales lead has been deemed qualified (a good fit for the product), they enter the pipeline as a prospect and reps track progress as sales conversations unfold. When the prospect meets specific exit criteria (requirements needed to complete a pipeline stage), they move to the next stage in the pipeline. This progression is typically tracked using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform often built into sales software and displayed in a dashboard that provides a visual representation of the pipeline’s health and performance.
You can compare this journey to a free-flowing river. If there are problems upstream, there will eventually be problems downstream. For example, let’s say you noticed deals are getting stuck in the meeting/demo stage. In too many instances, prospects attend the meetings but don’t move forward, causing a bottleneck. To tackle this, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your demo videos and refine the content as necessary, or review the recordings of recent demos to identify areas of improvement. You can also offer additional training for your reps on how to lead effective demo calls.
Why is a sales pipeline important?
A sales pipeline gives you a bird’s-eye view of where every deal stands in the sales process — and any obstacles that may hinder a successful sale. With this information, you can address roadblocks and increase the chances of closing the sale.
A sales pipeline also provides a clear picture of potential overall revenue, allowing you to create accurate forecasts. With these forecasts, you can see how likely you are to hit revenue targets and adjust sales strategy as needed to make sure you hit your goals.
Ultimately, a healthy sales pipeline is about keeping deals moving. Without one, prospects can get stuck in the sales process and reps may not know how to get them unstuck. This results in missed sales targets and lost revenue — not to mention a frustrated sales team.
How do sales pipelines work?
A sales pipeline follows the journey prospects take from first contact to america phone number list purchase. Once a sales lead has been deemed qualified (a good fit for the product), they enter the pipeline as a prospect and reps track progress as sales conversations unfold. When the prospect meets specific exit criteria (requirements needed to complete a pipeline stage), they move to the next stage in the pipeline. This progression is typically tracked using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform often built into sales software and displayed in a dashboard that provides a visual representation of the pipeline’s health and performance.
You can compare this journey to a free-flowing river. If there are problems upstream, there will eventually be problems downstream. For example, let’s say you noticed deals are getting stuck in the meeting/demo stage. In too many instances, prospects attend the meetings but don’t move forward, causing a bottleneck. To tackle this, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your demo videos and refine the content as necessary, or review the recordings of recent demos to identify areas of improvement. You can also offer additional training for your reps on how to lead effective demo calls.