Maintaining sales pipelines requires a significant amount of time and effort to establish channels of communication, generate relationships, and build trust.
This is why it can be a very stressful experience when one of your channels slows or seemingly stops altogether. You may find yourself thinking, “what did I do wrong?” or “why aren’t these strategies working?”
While there may be some factors at play that are out of your control, with a little digging, you can discover areas of your sales strategy that could use some improvement.
Rest assured, once you determine what’s causing the hold-up and make the necessary changes, you can get your sales pipeline back up and running and jumpstart new leads.
Determine the Cause
Sales pipelines can slow for many different reasons, so your first step should be to determine the cause. Once you figure out what’s not working, you can start fixing the problem.
A slowdown in lead activity can be caused by external OR internal factors. A clue to help you determine which is affecting your sales pipeline is to determine whether your pipeline stalled all of a sudden or slowly over time. Typically, outside factors cause sudden changes while inside factors contribute to a more gradual slowdown.
Some outside factors that may cause sudden changes include:
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- Economic factors: market downturns, inflation/rising costs and interest rate changes.
- Competitive landscape changes: increased competition, competitive product launches or shifting customer behaviors.
- Unforeseen external events: natural disasters or global events, new industry regulations or policy changes.
These are just some of the most common examples, but an external factor is really anything that causes uncertainty and/or has the potential to negatively impact consumer and business spending.
When your sales pipeline slows over a period of time, look internally for these factors:
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- Poorly defined prospect target qualifying.
- Sales messaging that no longer resonates.
- Sales process bottlenecks and leaks.
- Disengagement by your sales team.
Internal issues are often caused by a combination of one or more of these factors. It’s important to look over your strategies, analyze the data, and look for patterns that may be hurting your ability to generate new leads.
Strategies to Fix the Problem
Now that you have a better idea of what caused the problem, how do you fix it?
Here are some actionable solutions you can use to jumpstart your sales pipeline:
If external, employ these strategies:
- Revisit how you position your product or service and make sure your sales messaging focuses on solving a problem instead of just highlighting features and benefits. Problems don’t go away when buyers are affected by outside forces. They just change. Make sure you know what problems your buyers are facing and tailor your approach to solving them.
- Provide a clear picture of the Return On Investment (ROI) your products or services offer to your customers. These can come in the form of cost savings, labor savings, or by giving them a competitive edge against their competitors.
- Consider pivoting – offer new services or products that have higher demand in the market.
If internal, employ these strategies:
- Generate more inbound leads. Run targeted social media ads, provide educational content and hold events, use drip campaigns to nurture prospects, and create referral partnerships.
- Improve your sales team’s effectiveness. Provide new sales tools, including AI-assisted lead generation software, sales messaging automation tools, and better/more qualified leads lists.
- Study your competition for clues on how to better differentiate.
- Update your sales messaging.
- Analyze where deals are falling out of your sales process and update to fix the leaks.
Putting It All Together
Now it’s time to get to work. Remember, improvement doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time to build up sales pipelines, so naturally it also takes time to fix them when they’re stuck.
By continuously monitoring your progress, analyzing your data, and adapting your strategies to reflect changing market conditions and customer behavior, you can jumpstart your sales pipeline and restore it to the revenue-generating engine you depend on.
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