Sales Pipeline.

Every business that writes quotes has a pipeline, even if it only exists in the managing director's head. It means every deal that has started but not yet been decided. A managed sales pipeline makes this list visible and assigns each opportunity to a stage, for example first meeting, need clarified, quote sent, negotiation, won or lost. In a CRM this typically appears as columns through which cards move from left to right.

The pipeline should be distinguished from the marketing funnel. The funnel describes how many people get from first awareness to an enquiry and counts visitors, clicks and forms. The pipeline starts after that: it only contains contacts that sales has accepted as a real opportunity, in other words sales qualified leads. The funnel is about volumes and rates; the pipeline is about individual deals with an amount, an owner and a next step.

Three things can be read from a pipeline. First, its value: the sum of open quotes, often weighted by the probability of each stage. Second, its velocity: how long a deal takes on average to move from stage to stage. Third, its bottlenecks: stages where cards pile up, such as many quotes without a response. A handful of KPIs, such as number of opportunities, win rate and average order value, turn this into a revenue forecast.

A pipeline is only as good as its upkeep. The most common faults are stages that everyone interprets differently, deals without a next step and dead entries that have been 'open' for months. Clear entry criteria for each stage help, for instance using BANT for qualification, as do a date for the next step on every opportunity and a fixed point at which lost deals are actually marked as lost, with a reason. What sales needs at each stage is the subject of sales enablement.