An organized sales team is the backbone of every business, where, ideally, sales teams follow an organized sales process and pipeline management approach to make businesses successful.
What Is Sales Pipeline Management in CRM?
Sales pipeline management refers to the process of managing sales opportunities and tracking them through different stages of the sales process until they close either successfully or not. It provides a clear visual representation of each stage in the sales process that eliminates the hassles of the traditional way of tracking and following up on sales leads that run on a spreadsheet.
In reality though, when the business grows, it’s highly challenging to manage and control each stage of the sales process in the pipeline.
Implementing pipeline management software can overcome the following challenges:
- A HubSpot study reveals that the lack of an effective sales prospecting strategy is a significant challenge faced by most salespeople. Pipeline management software helps the sales team to analyze and identify potential leads and track their buying interests. It facilitates them to upsell and cross-sell their products or services at the right time to the right prospects.
- While using the spreadsheet, it’s time-consuming and difficult to keep the sales data updated, whereas pipeline management automatically updates the sales data in real time.
- Implementing pipeline management allows business management to oversee the sales process as it offers clear visualization of the sales process that a spreadsheet can’t provide.
- Managing sales processes manually is time-consuming as most of the tasks are repetitive. Pipeline management software automates the mundane tasks in the sales process, which allows salespeople to focus more on prospecting, qualifying leads, and developing customer relationships.
- The sales pipeline involves different stages or steps in the sales process, and it’s not an easy task to track and follow up with all the leads timely. This might cause loss of some leads and prospects – which are a potential business opportunity – during the process. Using pipeline management in CRM helps salespeople track prospects over time and convert them into sales consistently and timely.
Therefore, it’s crucial to help your salespeople and make their efforts simple and effective. With Zoho CRM, the sales team can overcome these challenges and close deals in a strategic and effective way.
Why Do Businesses Need Zoho CRM’s Pipeline Management?
A study conducted by Harvard Business Review shows that companies who mastered pipeline management achieve 18% higher revenue growth than the companies not following a proper sales process.
Here are some significant reasons for businesses to use Zoho CRM’s pipeline management automation:
Zoho CRM’s pipeline management offers a comprehensive view of sales performance on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis that helps sales managers and business owners to forecast the future of their business and make essential changes to improve sales performance. And, don’t forget about the advanced reporting capabilities integrating Zoho analytics into Zoho CRM directly!!
Zoho CRM pipeline management process helps sales teams to increase their conversion rates and win more paying customers while controlling and optimizing sales processes. This is especially visible with organizations with multiple sales people who must have the sales quote KPIs (e.g., sell ad space in the magazine, sell HVAC equipment and services, etc.) |
It helps businesses, especially larger organizations/ small enterprises, to forecast every stage of sales processes based on real-time reports. The cloud-based Zoho CRM pipeline management allows businesses to scale up their resources to meet the upcoming business scenarios. |  Deep analytical insights with advanced systems |
Automating the routine tasks of the sales team allows them to concentrate more on productive tasks, including generating and nurturing leads and converting them to deals. The workflow automation feature of Zoho CRM automates the routine tasks of the sales team, ranging from sending emails and following up leads to updating fields. The most common examples of the CRM automations are covered in our video: |
How To Manage And Customize Sales Pipelines In Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM’s pipeline management empowers sales teams to focus on creating, nurturing, and closing potential leads while growing customer relationships.
The best place to manage your potential sales is the Deal module of Zoho CRM. There you can either follow the default Zoho sales pipeline flow or to customize the steps of the sales process to your specific organization’s needs.
In this video you could even find two different pipelines – one for B2B and the other one for B2C.
Not less important is to see the full picture of your sales progression. You could track your deals progress in the deals module using Kanban view as described in this video.
