Sales pipeline

[avante]

Hi all - I work for a professional services firm and we are trying to place a value on our sales pipeline process. Has anyone looked into doing this before? Essentially, some of the business leaders don't believe in CRM / pipeline management but we think numbers speak for themselves so we thought of trying to estimate the incremental sales that would result from CRM / pipeline management. I'm looking around for ideas on how this would be done. Thanks in advance!

 

[exceladdict]

Hi avante,

Interestingly I've been fighting for about three years to implement a better CRM system at my work too, and we've just got the first buy-in from the CFO and one of our heads of business unit. The key thing was demonstrating to the people who are ultimately accountable for the numbers (heads of business units, heads of salespeople, heads of finance) the benefit of better management of the sales pipeline.

People are hesitant, especially on a subscription basis, to commit to big CRM systems but rather than going full blown salesforce, you could try something smaller like hubspot or a bespoke option for your industry. The CRM system salespeople will often give you a sweetheart deal because they know that once you start using it, you're unlikely to switch.

The key things for us to demonstrate were:
- The concept of customer lifecycle revenue/value/profit, demonstrating the lifetime benefits of a potential sale
- Opportunity costs of the current system (for example, ours was difficult to use, meaning salespeople were choosing not to enter data until a sale was almost complete, meaning follow up was harder, information sharing across teams was very difficult)
- Efficiency benefits of using better systems - data capture allowing automated email follow up, customer satisfaction surveys, for example

Interestingly my position is not in sales but our KPIs are to influence successful sales, so it's very important for us that the process is measured and accountability can be more fairly placed and particular parts of the sales funnel can be improved.

Very happy to discuss further!