Quantify actual deal flow across your sales stages to forecast revenue, calculate required SDR headcount, and track progress toward bookings targets.
While a sales funnel represents the sales process of an organization and expected conversion rates between each stage, a sales pipeline quantifies actual leads within the pipeline and shows a company where its money is within the process.
The impact: Your pipeline can be used to estimate how many SDRs your company needs to meet your bookings target, and how many leads each SDR needs to generate. This feeds the funnel to get the number of conversions to meet your targets. The pipeline can also be used to forecast revenue and compare forecasts to actuals.
The goal: Model your company's pipeline in order to get a thorough understanding of the value of each stage and how your sales cycle affects lead progression.
How can Golden Section Assist?
Managing an expensive funnel. We once ran a company that would have $85K of investment in a sales opportunity just before the contracting stage. This represents a huge amount of investment. The deal could fall apart due to a personality rejection or misreading an email or a mistimed joke. As a result, we built gates at different stages of our funnel (see 2.33 Sales Funnel Creation) and also our pipeline gained increased executive scrutiny at different stages. For instance, onsite demos cost $10K and usually occurred when the opportunity was already $40K invested. Therefore, executive approval was required as was a meeting with the sales team and demo team to approve the onsite demo.
While a sales funnel represents the sales process of an organization and expected conversion rates between each stage, a sales pipeline quantifies actual leads within the pipeline and shows a company where its money is within the process.
Quantify actual deal flow across your sales stages to forecast revenue, calculate required SDR headcount, and track progress toward bookings targets.
The impact: Your pipeline can be used to estimate how many SDRs your company needs to meet your bookings target, and how many leads each SDR needs to generate. This feeds the funnel to get the number of conversions to meet your targets. The pipeline can also be used to forecast revenue and compare forecasts to actuals.
While a sales funnel represents the sales process of an organization and expected conversion rates between each stage, a sales pipeline quantifies actual leads within the pipeline and shows a company where its money is within the process.
While a sales funnel represents the sales process of an organization and expected conversion rates between each stage, a sales pipeline quantifies actual leads within the pipeline and shows a company where its money is within the process.