Learn how to effectively track your pre-deal sales pipeline stages, from leads to sales-qualified leads, and optimize your sales prospecting process.
Transcript
Hey, this is Krista Moon, president of Ascend Business Growth. Today, we'll discuss tracking your pre-deal sales pipeline. Typically, when I talk to clients about optimizing their sales data, they jump immediately into the sales pipeline.
This is great because, when you get an appointment, the prospect needs to go through certain stages to get from, “Yes, I'm interested in talking to you about your solution” to “I want to buy your solution.”
But the hardest part about sales is actually getting that appointment!
How do you track the stages of what happens before they become a deal?
3 Stages in the Pre-Deal Sales Pipeline
The first is a lead—a contact who may be a good fit for you, but nobody's quite sure yet. These could be leads from your website, trade show, conference, or other sources.
Once they're in the system, they need to be qualified.
Marketing qualified leads meet certain criteria that make them a good fit for your company. Things like job title, role, industry, number of employees, and annual revenue.
Once this lead matches your criteria, they're marketing qualified leads.
At this point, the seller can look at the list of marketing-qualified leads and decide which they have time or want to try to tackle. Who will put time into calling, emailing, connecting on LinkedIn, the whole nine yards, right?
Sales-qualified leads—The seller looks at the marketing-qualified lead list. They pick the ten or however many they want to do that day. Now they become sales qualified: they're in the sellers' pipeline to contact.
And then, of course, the next step would be to get ahold of the prospect. When the prospect says, “Yes, I'm interested and continue the conversation,” then they become a deal where they go into the deals pipeline.
However, the pre-deal sales pipeline consists of leads, marketing-qualified leads, and sales-qualified leads.
To learn more about managing your sales data, check out our CRM Migration Accelerator workshops in the description.
We'll see you in the next video!
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