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 centers?

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 or improve their inadequacies. In turn, they can deliver top-notch call center performance and not fall into the prevalence of abandoning incoming calls.

If needed, keep it up with additional training—leverage interactive voice response and call monitoring tools to enhance call center service.

During their first time, they’ll speak with their first irate customer. Let the situation be a learning experience for your call center employee. Listen through the call. While difficult, it can provide insight into their call center performance, how they spend their call volume, average handle time, effective first call resolution, and navigation on customer issues.

It’s also vital to train a call center manager well. Make sure you have a training program just for them.

Call center software is also crucial in determining call center metrics and how it affects the call center’s service and customers’ call center experiences.

Motivating

During work, you must maintain a positive presence and employee engagement. Be a social leader who promotes optimism and change.

Ensure everyone follows the same customer service goals and blueprints of customer satisfaction metrics.

Also, look out for small details. Yet, you should avoid micromanaging workers. That way, they’ll gain the confidence to serve customers.

If you find issues with an agent, give constructive feedback on their call center performance. 

Moreover, develop a coaching culture. You may want to start a buddy system, so workers learn from each other for better customer interactions.

Call center management

As we said, you should let employees do their work. Yet, you must have a system for determining priorities. It will help your call centers provide a contact center solution, resolve issues quickly, and avoid negative customer experiences.

What’s more, this could help them adapt to unexpected situations in handling incoming calls. Ensure you have enough workers during busy hours for an outbound and inbound call center. Figure out how to assign your call centers efficiently.

Form a quality assurance team to maintain employee performance if you’d like. The agents might find it easier to speak with the Q&A team. As a result, Q&A can help them better.

Customer Satisfaction

Your company must have clear goals for customer service. Moreover, call center agents should uphold the same ones at work. That way, you get the same level of performance throughout the workforce.

Agents must always treat customers with respect. They must keep a calm voice when speaking to them. Customers shouldn’t think the agent is rushing the call for effective customer interactions and cementing customer loyalty.

Let workers access the caller’s history and customer information. It helps them find solutions for the client. As the client speaks, the agent should write down their concerns.

The agents should understand how clients feel. That way, they could find the best solution. If there has been a mistake, they must briefly apologize. Then, they should quickly resolve the issue.

Call Center Best Practices: Make the most suitable pipeline for sales.

Your business may have different pipeline stages. As we said, this will depend on several factors connected to your company. Ask yourself the following:

• Who are my potential customers?
• How can my products and services help customers?
• Why do they choose you instead of your competitors?
• How do I keep in touch with customers?

Creating a buyer persona can help. It’s a made-up person that has the qualities of your potential customers. Use that to learn more about client interests and needs.

What’s more, use the best software to assist you. Use the best sales pipeline management programs such as:

• Bitrix24 – Bitrix24 is a collaboration software with complete tools for management, collaboration, and communication. It provides a unified platform for your files, projects, messages, tasks, and contacts. You can also use the platform by simply registering for an account and inviting your colleagues.
• Freshsales – is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution that provides businesses across different industry verticals and navigates their interactions with existing and potential customers. Features include a one-click phone and sales lead tracking, sales management, event tracking, etc.
• HubSpot – is a leading CRM, marketing, sales, and customer service software company with a simple mission: to help companies maximize sales and grow better. 
• Outreach.io – is among a more-recent wave of customer relationship management platforms seeking to go across the static world of data organization. The tool wants to roll up its sleeves and get in on the real action—that is, to turn the valuable insights of data into actionable strategies.
• Pipedrive:  is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution that also works as an account-management system to help with marketing and the entire sales process. Pipedrive’s proactive nature automatically tracks and organizes calls and emails and synchronizes schedules across devices.

These can provide several features for your sales channel needs. More importantly, they let you track essential metrics in real-time, such as:

• Amount of new leads per month
• Amount of deals
• Pipeline value
• Average sales velocity
• Average deal size

Sales Pipeline Reviews

The most efficient sales channels will get clogged eventually. Also, the factors that affect them change constantly. In response, you should regularly have sales pipeline reviews for effective customer interactions.

See if there are any issues with your current channel. Then, discuss them with your team. Overall, the review should increase productivity and drive purpose. Here are the steps to do it:

1. Collect Information

Before you and the team come together, make sure you’ve prepared. List all the call center issues you would like to discuss.

2. Organize the meeting

Follow a particular order when talking about the call center issues. It makes sure the review is fruitful and efficient.

3. Propose solution

Highlight specific call center problems. Then, report possible solutions.

4. Add helpful tips

Provide steps that are easy to follow. The agents can do their job more manageably for a better customer experience.

Final Thoughts

With these in mind, a sales pipeline is vital to an organization. Without this tool, it is easy for a company to delude itself into thinking that only having numerous clients already results in profit. Your sales pipeline is crucial to the business since it measures and shows what you, the business owner, through your sales representatives, are doing during the entire sales process to ensure that lead clients turn into business opportunities.

Keep in mind to align your sales and marketing, refine your outbound sales strategies, improve your cold calls and email campaigns, and always ask for referrals. Lead generation is your companion!