Building a Pipeline of New Business

A sales pipeline is the best way to be organised with your business and make sure that you make the most of opportunities and resources.

There are a number of effective computer programmes that can help you monitor your sales pipeline – it’s worth spending some time working out which is the best one for you and your business. The programmes can usually be bought from a value added reseller than can give you extensive training on how to get the most out of the package.

Using your sales pipeline to seek new business means that you must know every detail of the pipeline and what it represents, so allow yourself to see the peaks, troughs and trends before you start increasing your business development.

Know Your Resources

Before you can utilise your sales pipeline to build your business development, you have to know what resources you have, including outsourced staff, additional cover, freelance expertise and your full-time staff.

There’s no point identifying downtime in your pipeline and then finding that all of a certain team are unavailable. You must know who is needed in which area, what equipment is required and so on, that way you can actively look to fill the downtime with the necessary tasks.

Spot Opportunities

Once you’ve got to grips with some sort of sales pipeline software and understood your resources, you can start to look for opportunities. Ideally, you want your sales pipeline to show a relatively constant level of business and certainly to reflect your capabilities. You don’t want to be paying for expensive staff or equipment if it’s sitting there empty half the time.

You can actually use the slow times in your sales pipeline as a marketing tool. Although you don’t want to sound desperate or that you’re struggling for clients, you can say that there is some downtime that you want to fill. You may have to expect a little more of a haggle with the client, but this is better than having empty capacity.

Don’t Over-Promise

It’s important to use your sales pipeline effectively in terms of what you can’t do as well as what you can. Recognising the downtime in your business is as much an opportunity for business development as it is for trying something different. You can use your sales forecasting to see when the best time for staff holidays, for example, is or when to refurbish or invest in new equipment that will take time to learn.

Instead of always trying to find new business to fill the downtime, use your new-found sales forecasting information to make your business as effective as it can be. There’s no point having your HR manager’s holiday when you most need additional freelance workers, for example.

By seeing the trends in your business, you will be able to offer customers exactly what you can supply, which will help to strengthen your business pipeline. Customers would rather that you said what you realistically can deliver and having a carefully planned business pipeline will come a long way to making that a core part of your business strategy.