What is a sales pipeline?
Funnels, pipelines, leads and conversions – sometimes sales lingo sounds more like a plumbing job than a marketing process!
In the practical sense, a sales pipeline describes the process you use to deliver consistent leads (aka potential customers) into your business.
It can help to visualise your pipeline as the journey a prospective client takes with your business, from the first time they become aware of you to developing interest and (hopefully) making a purchase.
Every business is different, but when it comes to sales, there are generally five stages to the salespipeline:
- Initial contact
- Qualification
- Meeting
- Proposal
- Close
How a hot pipeline can help your business
Wouldn’t it be great if all your prospective customers found you on the internet, approached you, and made a purchase on the spot?
This may happen once in a blue moon, but to really grow your business, you need to be proactive about discovering and nurturing your leads as they move through your sales pipeline.
A study by the Harvard Business Review revealed an 18% difference in revenue growth betwee companies that had a defined formal sales process and those that didn’t.
When you have a healthy pipeline, you’ll have the data necessary to improve your sales process and forecast business results. Plus, you’ll have a better idea of how and where to allocate resources to close sales and get a more precise overview of the health of your business – now and in the future.
Why outsource your telemarketing?
In the real world, pipes allow something (such as water) to travel from a source to a destination. But of course, you need there to be a source! If your water pipes are connected to an empty tank, they’re not going to be able to deliver.
The same goes for a sales pipeline. You need a steady flow of interested customers to grow your business.
One of the most important aspects of a sales pipeline is the number and quality of leads. Naturally, you’ll get the most value out of sales-ready, warmed up customers rather than people who aren’t really in the market for what you have to offer.
But getting these high-value warm leads requires skill and time that many businesses just don’t have. Would you rather have your sales consultants spend hours every day cold calling to come up with a list of warm leads? Or would you rather hand them a list of prospects who are already interested in buying and let them spend their time closing deals?
By outsourcing your telemarketing, you can do just that.
This is what New Zealand’s largest independent insurance brokers, BrokerWeb Risk Services (BWRS), discovered when undertaking a test campaign with the Hot Leads team.
Hot results
Throughout the telemarketing campaign we ran for one of our insurance clients, we were able to quadruple the number of leads for one of their key referrers and finished up the campaign with a mindblowing conversion rate of 55%!
Thanks to this investment in outsourced telemarketing, our client created a smoking hot sales pipeline with more than 80 telephone appointments and 75 email enquiries to follow up with.
A telemarketing campaign with Hot Leads helps your business skip to the good part: you spend less time cold calling dead leads and more time closing deals with clients who actually look forward to hearing from you.
Sound good?
If you’d like to work on your sales pipeline with a hot telemarketing campaign, contact Hot Leads today to find out how we can help.
