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We know that customer experience determines the longevity of enterprise organizations. Whether you need to improve retention, increase expansion, or improve your adoption rates, the customer experience makes the biggest difference across industries and product offerings.
But the other critical element to net revenue retention and growth is your sales pipeline. The strategies and workflows your revenue teams use to close pipeline opportunities make the difference between successful enterprises and those that slowly lose their foothold in the market.
To help optimize your sales pipeline using workflow intelligence, we’ve highlighted 5 key areas that your team can focus on today to increase opportunities and revenue for your organization.
Let’s get started.
How should you think about optimizing your sales pipeline?
When we talk about an efficient pipeline, we mean each step in your pipeline is operationalized and scalable with a hybrid of automated and manual activities. Operationalizing your workflows is key to understanding what activities impact your revenue goals and which ones have a low ROI. When each employee knows the sequence of best practices for each engagement, you can trust that no one is wasting time or resources on low-value activities.
Some activities may not move the needle for your revenue goals, but your pipeline strategies won’t work without them. This is where the mix of automated and manual activities comes in. If your team is not leveraging automation in your engagement strategies, you risk missing opportunities, providing the wrong information to prospects, and, worse, burning out your team.
When you’re looking at the aspects of your sales pipeline to optimize first, consider how it can be operationalized, scaled, and automated.
4 ways to optimize your pipeline
Now that you know what to focus on, let’s go through the areas you can use workflow intelligence to improve your sales pipeline.
Shorten time spent between stages
No two sales are the same. The time it takes from initial conversation to closed deal is unpredictable from customer to customer. However, there are small wins between engagements and the various stages of your sales pipeline that workflow intelligence data can reveal for your enterprise.
Take a look at everything from the way you structure your outreach sequences to how you schedule demos, or who in the organization talks to prospects at what time. Efficiencies made at the granular level are the ones that will have significant impact on your overall revenue goals, because they are the activities that are repeated daily for all your different audiences.
As you evaluate your process, look for ways you can eliminate steps, switch tactics to a more efficient communication channel, or update the process to reflect more effective strategies. No change is too small when it comes to saving money and making your team more productive.
Build a testing schedule for target audience segments
Efficiency is not always about eliminating activities for your team. You should always consider new customer experiences, new technologies, and new engagement strategies that help customers understand your product value and answer their specific needs.
Use the workflow data you have to understand which parts of the sales process requires the most effort from your team, which parts potential customers tend to drop off, and which parts drain resources. Come up with a monthly testing schedule so that you can systematically improve your lowest performing processes. Remember to only change one at a time so that you know exactly what your team needs to do to be most productive. Once you find the best solution, make sure to circulate the new workflows across your organization. Communication is integral to sustained efficiency.
Increase conversion rates with relevant communication channels
Speaking of communication, the next element of your sales pipeline to evaluate is your communication channels. Of course, most enterprise organizations know to employ email, phone calls, SMS, and social media messages. And you should continue to evaluate the efficiency of those channels and make changes accordingly.
But we also suggest evaluating the additional content prospective customers are consuming about your company and your product. Do you have a community forum where prospective customers can talk to current customers? Do you know when a prospect has visited your individual webpages? How do you note which employees a prospect has talked to before and during a sales cycle?
These are all important questions to answer and assign reporting tools to so that you can get an accurate, real-time view of what activities went into a successful sale and which were missing from deals you didn’t win.
Personalize content for more valuable conversations
Finally, remember that the sales cycle, whether you are trying to upsell an existing customer or close a prospective customer, should always focus on value for the customer. They need to know that your product can address their needs immediately and that they can get the answers they’re looking for quickly.
Once you’ve analyzed and optimized your communication channels, dig into the content of those engagements for places you can add value. Look at the performance data by audience, by account size, by contract size, and longevity of that customer. Look for trends in the questions that need to be answered by your team, and which can be answered on your website. Consider whether you can condense the information based on the audience member. Again, these small changes will result in big changes when repeated daily over dozens of customers.
Learn more about the impact of using the gold-standard for workflow intelligence data
Whether you want to increase revenue or reduce cost to improve your sales pipeline efficiency, you must start with granular, accurate workflow intelligence data. You need to understand the difference between a high-value activity and a low-value activity at each stage of the process, and how to improve them. And the gold-standard for workflow intelligence data is Retain.ai. If you want to learn more about how we help your team improve productivity and reduce costs, schedule a demo today.