Proper sales pipeline management improves the customer journey. Your call center agents guide your clients toward your brand. It would be best to plan every sales cycle stage and find new ways to improve it.
Let’s discuss sales pipelines and how they differ from the sales funnel. We will also explore the usual steps involved and the ones your brand needs. Then, we’ll go through the tools that can help you evaluate your sales channels.
Sales funnels often overlook how a company makes the customer journey possible.
A promising pipeline for sales means quicker leads and more extensive sales. It would help if you planned every step your clients will make toward your brand.
What is Sales Pipeline Management?
A sales pipeline visually represents where potential customers stand in the sales process. It shows the progress of your sales team in meeting their targets.
It aims to give an overview of essential sales factors. In other words, your sales channel should answer the following questions:
How many open and closed deals have your company made?
What sales potential do the sellers and the sales team have for a specific time?
What are the different stages that make up your sales process?
How are those open deals doing?
What has been done to grab these sales opportunities?
Which activities do you need to move these opportunities up the sales cycle?
A healthy channel for sales is crucial to any business. It shows you a glimpse into your company’s profitability, growth, and overall health. What’s more, it enables you to:
Form sales forecasts
Check potential problems in the sales process
Pinpoint issues and problems
Formulate ways to solve problems
Perform other strategic measures
What happens if a company doesn’t have a pipeline?
Having no sales channel puts your business at risk. Specifically, your customer service representatives may get in the way of your employees and affect the customer satisfaction score. They might act against policy and frustrate customers’ call center experience.
An organized approach and effective call center management allow you to resolve these issues before they worsen. Also, it enables you to streamline the sales process, have a system for organizing customer inquiries and track your key performance indicators.
Better returns, higher agent productivity, customer satisfaction ratings, and conversion rates.
Efficient customer service channels make call center agent training easier. Specifically, it informs call center reps on their knowledge base of performing well in their roles and having a positive language for excellent customer service. It increases call center agent performance.
Overall, a healthy sales channel and refining call center best practices let you find ways to improve your company and call center service. Your business always has room to grow. The channel helps you find more!
Sales Pipeline vs. Sales Funnel
People often assume the sales funnel and pipeline are the same. Yet, the former deals with how customers come to your brand. It considers the client’s perspective.
The funnel usually has four stages:
Awareness – The client learns about your brand.
Interest – Customers get curious about your company.
Desire – Clients want your products and services.
Action – Customers would like to buy your goods.
As the name suggests, it’s often shown as a “V” shape. It implies that there are fewer customers as they pass through the stages. The funnel lets only the willing buyers out.
It doesn’t show how it happens from the company’s perspective. How does a business get customers from point A to B of the funnel? This part is where the channel comes in handy.
Stages of a Sales Pipeline
The typical channel for sales has five stages:
Lead generation
This phase involves grabbing attention for your brand. Your marketing teams will launch ad campaigns that eventually draw in leads.
Qualification
It’s when you verify your leads. You do this by giving customer surveys and sending emails for customer feedback and customer data to monitor your overall customer satisfaction. If you receive positive customer experiences, you may consider them as qualified leads.
Consultation
Your call center agents will speak directly to your leads on this level. They’ll ask about their needs and recommend solutions by the company.
Proposal
It involves marketing content. The ultimate goal is to close a sale.
Sale
The sales channel doesn’t end after a customer buys your product or service. At this stage, the goal is beyond customer satisfaction but for customer retention and customer loyalty to encourage existing clients to purchase more.
It shares similarities with a sales funnel. As we said, a sales pipeline views it from the eyes of a business.
Remember that your business may need more steps. It will depend on your industry and other factors. Add and remove steps to create the best sales pipeline.
What is pipeline management for call center
We will focus on how your call centers should handle sales channels and call center management practices.
Contact center agents’ role is mainly in the Consultation stage. After all, they are the contact centers that speak one-on-one phone calls with your clients and apply all the knowledge base they learned from call center training for positive customer interaction and customer satisfaction.
Call center agents may serve as your marketing teams.
They listen to customer concerns.
The agents may also conduct surveys to understand clients further.
You must get the best customer service agents for your company. Also, you have to guide your call centers in handling sales. Here’s how to do it.
Hiring
Of course, your business deserves only the best. That’s why you should know how to find exceptional applicants. It will depend on your company’s goals and other call center metrics.
You may want to add personality tests in your selection process for efficient employee engagement. These can help you identify key traits and how they navigate on customer calls.
For example, it will help you find successful call centers with quick handle-time and first call resolution on customer calls.
Their training must apply to the work correctly with an effective call center manager, call monitoring tools, call center best practices, call center scripts, and call center software tied in altogether for a heightened customer experience.
Otherwise, you’ll waste time for yourself and the agents. Also, match their onboarding with their different traits.
No matter what happens, never settle for subpar workers with no knowledge base on call center operations. It’s not worth it, even if you need to meet high demand.
Call Center Team Training
Once you’ve selected, it’s time to train your new call center agents. Ensure the training methods have all the best practices and an experienced call center manager. It will help reduce your turnover rate.
Tailor their training based on their skills and agent performance. It will let you tap into their strengths