Improving your sales pipeline
When an agency is finding that they are constantly falling short of their goals, despite a healthy pipeline, it can often come down to one of three things. If you have faith in your closing techniques and proposal writing, the issue is most likely with your pipeline management.
We found this when working with one of our previous clients, they had a strong pipeline with around £1M worth of leads and they were turning over around £2M, but nothing was closing and things were getting stressful.
Upon investigation, we discovered that they were using a traditional funnel/stage-based pipeline tool and that 95% of their pipeline was made up of opportunities with a qualification score of 43% or below. Meaning that they were only going to win 1 out of every 12 deals.
Stage-based pipelines are typically only 9% effective at converting opportunities into closed deals. This means that 91% of the leads that enter the pipeline never close. This can be frustrating and demotivating for salespeople, and it can also give agencies a false sense of security about their sales pipeline.
Whereas, a time-based pipeline involves qualifying opportunities based on their likelihood of closing within the next 60 days. This helps you to focus your time and resources on the deals that are most likely to close, and will also give you a more accurate picture of your sales pipeline.
For this agency, by focusing on qualifying their leads better, they were able to reduce the size of their pipeline and increase their win rate to over 80%. Which made a huge difference in their business and helped them to achieve their sales goals.
From this experience, we created our AgencyQual score tool, based on our own experiences working with many Agencies over the last 15 years.
In our experience, agencies that switch to a time-based pipeline see their conversion rates increase from 9% to around 50%. This is a significant improvement, and it can have a major impact on your bottom line.
Our AgencyQual score tool is one of the many free resources available to everyone who joins our Mastermind groups or Agency MBA. Or if you would like some more specific 1:1 support with your pipeline and conversion get in touch.
