Pipeline is a term every salesperson and sales leader has heard many times.  Typically, each is actively trying to fill and manage the sales pipeline – some with better success than others.  A strong pipeline produces great benefits: an easier sales process, efficient use of time, and higher productivity rates.  Bottom line: more sales.

Building and managing your pipeline, draws analogies to training for and running a marathon.  Here’s how.

Mindset and training matter.

A marathon is 26.2 miles in length. Sometimes the sales process feels like that!  Marathons are run by people ranging in age from teens to those who have reached senior status.  Runners tackle the distance at various paces – some fast, some slow, many somewhere in between.  Marathons are not for the faint of heart but, anyone can complete one with the right mindset and training.

Sales requires guts too. To run a marathon, you must dedicate time to training, you must be persevering, goal focused, physically fit and strong, and get everyone else out of your head – you own that space. As you train, it is important to monitor and measure progress, take corrective action, and continue to maintain a schedule as you approach race day. Completing a marathon is about training to continually improve performance to reach your goal.  Wow! There are so many similarities to being in sales!

Pipeline development requires a plan. 

Training for a marathon requires plan and schedule to help you hit your race date, handle the distance, and maintain pace. The combination of completing the physical activities required to build stamina and increase distance over time while fueling yourself properly, builds efficiencies, strength, keeps you from injury, and increases your best chance of success. 

To develop your pipeline, you need a plan. You must identify specific prospecting activities to complete within a defined time frame, with the primary goal of getting meetings.  Pipeline development via a solid prospecting plan, strategic management of active opportunities, and building girth throughout the pipe, is critical to reaching the 26.2 mile mark and winning the sales race.

Pipeline strength and sales stages.

For our purposes, let’s think of sales stages as the overall race distance covering the sales process start to finish.  It doesn’t matter if your sales cycle is short, longer or varies.  You will adjust the cadence of completion of sales stages in the cycle, to suit your sales reality. 

Defined sales stages are an easy way for salespeople, sales leadership, and executives to speak, understand and review a common sales language.  Sales stages might be: prospect, lead, opportunity, request for quote, in process, in negotiation, won, lost, on-hold.  Each defined stage aids in understanding where each opportunity is in the process, much like runners understand key milestones in the race.

Defined pipeline percentages express position in the pipe considering the whole – like mile markers.  For instance: 10% initial contact, 25% first meeting scheduled, 40% site walk through, 60% initial proposal, etc.  Defined data points allow you to quickly run real-time reports from your CRM showing how many opportunities are in each stage of the pipeline. Defining pipeline percentages and what each means leads to more specific reporting. Consider these “sales vitals” for each opportunity. 

The pipeline is easiest to manage when defined in a way that illustrates how sales stages relate to the health of the pipeline.  The early pipeline stages for instance (i.e. prospect, lead), are where it is important to have high volume. The more prospects we have, the higher chance we are building a healthier, more robust pipeline overall, as opportunities fall off or progress.  When you look at your pipeline you should be able to easily identify how robust it is in each stage of your sales process.  Knowing how full (or not) your pipeline is in all percentages of the pipe and relative to sales stages, signals you to turn up the activity rate where needed and shows you how likely you are to finish the race strong. Using your CRM to filter these and other key data points make it easy to know how healthy your pipeline really is at all times.