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Drive Sales Growth through Effective Sales Pipeline Management - Free White Paper
By Ian Brodie | January 25, 2008
Our new Lighthouse Business Consulting website is up and running. I’ve put up the first (of hopefully many) white papers up on the Articles page.
It’s a bit of a heavy one to start off with - 13 pages on Sales Pipeline Management. However, one of the things I’ve learnt over the years is that sometimes the things which really help you improve your sales aren’t necessarily the sexy things. Sometimes it’s the dull basics of managing in a systematic way that makes the difference.
Here’s the intro to the white paper:
In today’s increasingly competitive world, companies must focus obsessively on maximising their sales opportunities. They must ensure that:
- They invest their sales time, resources and investments in the areas of highest return
- They achieve a regular flow of sales into the company to avoid damaging “boom-bust” cycles
- They are able to rapidly respond to the changing needs of customers and specific opportunities and adapt their sales tactics accordingly
- They can identify and diagnose which areas of their sales approach are working well and which need improvement
- They can accurately track and forecast their sales and take corrective actions where needed
Sales Pipeline Management is a key management tool which has been developed to address these issues – yet many companies fail to implement it effectively, if at all.
Many organisations still rely heavily on instinct, guesswork and “seat-of-the-pants” management to control their sales pipelines. As a result, many are trapped in a vicious circle where they over-focus on highly visible areas such as closing late-stage deals, and under-invest in key areas such as early-stage lead generation.
This leads to a further drying up of quality opportunities, a panic-driven focus on closing the few remaining opportunities in the pipeline at all costs, and more neglect of the critical front-end. For small or medium-sized businesses – and particularly for owner-managed companies – this can be even more crippling, as the key business-winners are often also heavily involved in the execution of sold work – and are easily dragged away from working on filling up the earlier stages of the pipeline.
The issue behind these problems is often the lack of a visible and rigorous sales pipeline management process. It doesn’t have to be complex – but it does have to be done.
You can go straight to the downloads page here: White Papers from Lighthouse Business Consulting.
Enjoy
Ian
PS Feel free to give feedback both on the white paper and the website.
Topics: Sales Management, Sales Processes |
January 25th, 2008 at 6:52 pm
I found your site on google blog search and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. Just added your RSS feed to my feed reader. Look forward to reading more from you.
- Sue.