Sales Pipeline Explained & Sales Pipeline Stages

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Today, we'll look at how to manage & grow sales by using a sales pipeline and how to master sales pipeline management.
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One of the best ways to keep track of sales is with a sales pipeline - an important tool that helps you manage and grow sales.

Sales Pipeline vs Sales Funnel
A sales pipeline is a set of steps and activities in each step needed to transform a lead into a customer/client or an opportunity into a project. The steps in the sales process are called sales pipeline stages. When you look at your sales pipeline you basically know what to do next. You can easily identify next steps for each opportunity.
A sales funnel is a visual representation of the number of opportunities or leads and the conversion percentage between stages. The funnel can help you understand where opportunities or leads fall through the cracks. If you have a low conversion percentage between two stages, it means you identified a gap in your sales process that needs to be solved.
For organizing your sales department and your opportunities, a sales pipeline will give you the best results.
- Organizes leads and opportunities clearly
- Sales reps can easily identify what to address and when
- Provides real-time info opportunities, workloads, performance
- Helps streamline sales activities
In a study, VantagePoint discovered that companies who not only define but master their sales pipeline enjoy a 15% higher revenue growth.

Sales Pipeline Management Best Practices
The first thing you’ll have to do is document your sales process and define pipeline stages.
Standard Sales Pipeline Stages
• B2B sales pipeline stages differ substantially from B2C pipeline stages.
• Standard sales pipeline stages for B2B may include: New Lead, New Opportunity, Discovery, Estimating, Follow-Up, Negotiated, Closed.
• Each pipeline stage should list the activities and actions that a busines developer should accomplish.
Sales Pipeline for a Construction Company
What we want is to start each opportunity we receive in the New Opportunity stage. An opportunity for a construction company could be an invitation to bid, a website inquiry, a call for service or an inspection inquiry. Most of the time we’ll have to gather some additional information such as building plans, specs and requirements, so we can add that as a stage in our pipeline. Next, it’s go/no-go decision time.
If our decision is a no-go, then we mark our opportunity as closed, not bidding. If we decide to bid this opportunity, then it goes to the estimating phase.
Once your proposal is out the door and in your client’s hands, the follow-up stages come in and we like to separate opportunities in follow-up in two stages. If you bid multiple clients for an opportunity, then it should be in a follow-up client not awarded stage first. It’s only after you know who that client is that you start calling them to find out what your price looks like compared to your competitions’ and so on.
Once we find out if we got the project or not, we can close our opportunity with the right status depending on whether we won, lost, or maybe we didn’t even bid the client who won.
Now that we have our sales process all documented and broken down in stages, it is time to adopt a tool that will help us track our opportunities.
Sales Pipeline Management
We can manage our sales pipeline with an Excel spreadsheet if we have a small sales team and we bid a relatively small number of opportunities. What we have to do first is set up a spreadsheet with all the columns needed like opportunity name, location, pipeline stage, clients. Then setup a sales pipeline chart in excel. And lastly, implement formulas to obtain a sales pipeline calculator excel. You could also implement a sales pipeline dashboard excel, but it’s a bit more time consuming.
Another way of managing our sales pipeline is with a Sales CRM software or a Sales Pipeline CRM. Once a tool is selected, we’ll want to import our current data like clients, contacts, open opportunities or leads.
Advantages of Sales CRM Software:
• perform sales pipeline analysis
• sales pipeline dashboard, sales pipeline funnel graphic, and sales pipeline graphs
• sales pipeline forecast and sales pipeline velocity
• generate any type of sales pipeline report
If you need help implementing your sales pipeline, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We also offer sales pipeline management training via our free workshops.
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