Business owners spend a great deal of time and money marketing to many, in the hope of attracting the few to their business. This process can be likened to a pipeline with a wide mouth narrowing as it goes along. The wide mouth represents the number of prospects you need to get interested in your product, so as to end up with enough conversions to hit your sales targets – the (much) narrower end of the pipeline. If the pipeline isn’t constantly topped up with new prospects who are then moved through it to be converted into customers, sales become uneven, income is inconsistent, and running the business becomes crisis prone.
Classify and monitor prospects
The stages in a sales pipeline can be different from business to business, and particularly between business-to-business (B2B) and business=to-consumer (B2C) type businesses, but there are some essential similarities. In all businesses there is a need to generate inquiries. The technique may be through advertising, shopfront display, cold calling, word of mouth or networking.