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Cape Town – A sale is simply selling a product or service in return for money or an act of completion of a commercial activity, according to Standard Bank’s BizConnect.
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Selling is not something you just do. Rather, it is a skill to be mastered. Some individuals are born salespeople, but those who are not have to learn sales skills - over time and with practice.
Master the art of selling, and you will be able to make your business fly. It's simple: the success of your sales can lead to explosive growth and profitability.
The sale is important because it impacts the bottom line of the business. Without selling, there is no buying, which means that no-one is paying for your products or services - and that means there is no business. Learning how to sell is therefore one of the most vital lessons to learn if you want your business to succeed.
Understanding the sales pipeline
Building and managing a sales pipeline can be critical to a small business's success because it creates a stable sales cycle. The pipeline is the amount of business you try to close in a month, quarter, year, or any other defined period.
A sales pipeline works by placing leads or prospects at the different stages of the sales process/sales cycle, and then measuring their progress through the pipeline, from unqualified lead to satisfied repeat customer. Like all pipelines, the sales pipeline may leak and prospects will be lost.
Generally presented as a spreadsheet that tracks all of the business your sales team has pursued, the sales pipeline gives you the ability to track how many sales you close. Over time, it's possible to achieve a level of consistency that will let you forecast sales with greater accuracy.
This in turn gives your sales team greater confidence and helps operations staff plan accurately for future demand.
Tracking the sales pipeline will also shed light on where your sales team falls short. You may find, for example, that your conversion rate is low or that you are you converting plenty of customers, but only getting a small share of their total business.
Ways to effectively manage your sales pipeline:
- Identify the customer's total budget, the likely length of the sales cycle, and the key decision-makers
- The largest driver of lead-to-sale conversion is the time it takes to respond to a customer, so be sure to measure response times
- Give stuff away. Offer customers free advice that is pertinent to their business and demonstrates how well you know your own area of expertise
- Consistently measure the factors that turn leads into sales. This will enable you to identify high-quality leads and get your sales people to focus on them more
- Don't take no for an answer. It often just means "not right now". When you hear no, continue to follow up at regular intervals. It may take a year to close a deal, but it will be worth it
- Get your sales team to report on their wins and losses at weekly pipeline meetings. Analyse that data and try to determine where it is that your people are falling short
Make cash flow more reliable
Ultimately, sales pipeline management is nothing more than estimating incoming cash flow.
Look at your leads and prospects, make some estimates of the likelihood that they'll eventually buy your products and services, and feed that information - along with the expected spend - into your projections to find out how much revenue you can expect to earn.
The biggest benefit of managing your sales pipeline effectively is that demand for your services will be smoother and your cash flow more reliable. An in-depth analysis of when and why some of your leads and prospects are lost will highlight specific areas for improvement and help you train your team better.
Tracking the pipeline will also give you the ability to construct a profile of prospects who are more likely to buy and prospects who are less likely to buy. This knowledge will help you to focus your marketing material and allow you to more accurately qualify your leads, leading to a more streamlined, more efficient and less costly sales process.
