The sales pipeline is the bond between an organization’s sales and marketing departments. It’s what helps teams establish to forecast accurately and enables them to drive accountability by product, segment, and geography. In a nutshell, it’s something teams can rally around.
How does Salesforce help you to manage your pipeline?
In Salesforce, every possible deal is logged as an opportunity. It’s the central place where reps maintain all customer details, like contacts, the products the customer has shown interest in, the size of the deal, the next best action steps, deal maturity, and project closure timelines.
The sales teams need a high degree of discipline and thoroughness in logging and keeping this data updated.
Managers need to review every prospect so that the data shows accurately on the Salesforce platform. If this is not followed religiously, the rest of the process won’t work as intended. Discipline in managing the platform is fundamental to establishing pipeline accuracy.
How to build a pipeline engine
Your pipeline engine needs to fire on all cylinders. In Salesforce, the cylinders of pipeline creation include multiple roles:
Typically, in a sales organization, Account Executives create over 50% of pipeline in Salesforce. They are responsible for logging new opportunities, closing deals, and managing customer relationships.
- Business Development Representatives create about 25% of the pipeline. Their focus is primarily on outbound prospecting, and they are responsible for connecting with leads and then passing the qualified leads to account executives who drive them to closure.
- Sales Development Representatives handle inbound leads. They follow up on opportunities generated from the website, chat, and calls. They also pass qualified leads to account executives and have a vital role to play, especially in small business sales teams.
- Enterprise Corporate Specialists manage smaller deals within large enterprise accounts to allow account executives to focus on larger ones. Their primary focus is on acquiring new business.
- Cloud Sales Representatives are exclusive to a particular product, for instance Salesforce Platform. Their primary focus is on existing deals. However, they do represent a small portion of the pipeline creation.
As a business owner, you need to understand each of the functions associated with your pipeline engine. How much can they handle?
How do they function on a day-to-day basis? What are the challenges they are facing? Are they getting the support they need? Staying on top of these points will help you empower them with the best resources they need to grow the pipeline.
How marketing fuels pipeline
The Marketing Department has one goal: to help all the Sales team constituents: the account executives, Business Development Representatives, Sales Development Reps, Enterprise Corporate Specialists, and Cloud Sales Representatives drive qualified pipeline generation.
This is achieved with the following:
- Brand awareness. This drives new prospect growth by helping prospects and customers understand who you are and what you do. It’s a critical step in establishing credible, trusted relationships.
- Demand generation. These include paid advertising, text or display, through social media content publishing such as ebooks and research reports, third-party emails, and podcasts. You can run campaigns on these lines to market products that are specific to certain industries and regions.
- Events. This is a medium to establish a direct connect with peers, industry leaders, and the community at large. Even based experiences are typically held in-person or live-streamed and available on demand thereafter.
- Account-Based Marketing. This is the white glove service on the Salesforce platform. Marketing teams can deliver content, campaigns and experiences specific to the target audience to augment relevance and engagement with key accounts. That, in turn helps expand the pipeline.
- Digital. This involves the creation of online collaborative communities. This is where you engage customers at a deeper level, and showcase offers and product demos. Each of these interactions turns into a lead that is handed over to the relevant reps on your sales teams. You can drive additional traffic to your website or store with paid ads, email marketing, and social media campaigns.
- Enablement. This involves equipping your sales teams with the right tools to drive the selling process and close deals. For instance, you can arm your business development reps email templates, call scripts, and use case scenarios. You can support account executives by providing them with tools to fast-track deals like ROI calculators and competitive analysis apps.
As a business owner, you need to drive a wholesome mix of marketing strategies to augment pipeline creation, evolution, and closure. Ensure that everything your marketing teams do, has a direct linkage with your pipeline.
How to measure and understand pipeline growth?
On the Salesforce platform, your sales and marketing teams can access pipeline data with real-time reports and dashboards. And Tableau allows you to do a further deep analysis of your sales operations.
In Salesforce, there is an in-built high-level framework called the accountability performance matrix or APM. It’s a sequence of tables that show the pipeline data segmented by product, source, segment, and region.
For instance, on the product accountability performance matrix, you can see a row for each product with columns for the following items:
- Forecast
- Open Pipeline
- Closed Business
- Pipeline generation
You can analyze the value of your deal and the year-on-year comparison for each item.
As a business owner, one of your key responsibilities is to set up a good measurement framework to identify and fix problem areas. You should be able to measure your pipeline by product, segment, source and region.
Establish a pipeline council to drive action
Establish a core team comprising sales, product, marketing, and operations leaders to review the accountability performance matrix. It’s a future-ready approach.
It will tell you how much of the fiscal quarter is over and how much you have achieved.
You can colour-code each cell, for instance,
red (needs immediate attention),
yellow (you’re doing ok but can improve),
or green (going as per plan).
For red and yellow boxes, data is shared with relevant teams and actions assigned.
To keep a close watch on progress, you must conduct weekly pipeline council reviews. Ensure that you have cross-functional representation in the council. That will help you to make key decisions and act on them fast.
It takes a well-oiled machinery to make all this work. Data sharing, cross-functional teams, and prompt adjustments to plan, strategy and execution.
That’s how Salesforce can help you align marketing and sales around your pipeline and drive growth.
Girikon Inc is a certified Salesforce Implementation Partner and can help you drive growth by aligning your marketing and sales teams around your sales funnel.
Get in touch with one of our Salesforce Consultants today to learn more about Salesforce Consulting Services
About Girikon
Girikon associates with Salesforce Partner Success Managers to develop expertise on the latest offerings from Salesforce, e.g. Salesforce Einstein, Mulesoft, Commerce Cloud, and more. ensuring that their customers can leverage the Salesforce Platform to its complete potential.
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