Sales Pipeline Management

While most companies understand the metaphor of a sales pipeline, few use the pipeline model for maximum revenue impact. Instead, pipelines at many companies are simply a snap shot of the opportunities that that the sales team has in progress.

Stage One employs a proven pipeline model for managing, tracking and reporting sales opportunities that delivers predictable results and holds people accountable to their committed plan. Equally important, the model allows managers to set the flow of new opportunities to the right levels for the company’s sales cycle, customer retention and close rates.

The Stage One pipeline model keeps the sales team focused on the qualified opportunities that have the highest probability for successful closure, the shortest time horizon and the largest potential for revenue. It accomplishes this by focusing the team on:

  • Systematically qualifying opportunities with a rigorous examination process
  • Uniformly ranking opportunities for differing sales team views
  • Consistently estimating time frames associated with each milestone of the opportunity’s sales cycle
  • Carefully allocating sales team members’ time budgets to the opportunities of greatest importance

Adopting the Stage One pipeline model leads to a selling cycle that is more stable and predictable. As a result, the sales team is focused on higher quality opportunities. They can also do a more effective job of budgeting the time invested by sales team members and minimizing waste. By applying the right resources on the right opportunities, sales close rates improve. This means that sales managers can manage more reps with the comfort of knowing that they are all under proven process control that delivers superior results.

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