Pipeline Visibility

What is Pipeline Visibility?

Pipeline visibility refers to an organization’s ability to see and understand every stage of its sales pipeline in real-time. It’s a crucial concept in business because it determines whether sales leaders and teams can track deal progress, identify bottlenecks, forecast revenue, and allocate resources.

Your sales pipeline is the series of steps a prospect goes through from initial contact to closing the deal. Essentially, it’s a visual representation of your sales process, and your prospects move from one stage to the next until they reach the final stage of either making a purchase (Closed Won) or giving a final “no” (Closed Lost).

When you have high pipeline visibility, you have a clear and comprehensive view of all the deals in your pipeline, across every stage. You achieve this through CRM integration, regular data updates, and the use of analytics tools that can highlight trends, risks, and opportunities within the pipeline.

Synonyms

• Sales pipeline management
• Sales pipeline visibility

Terms Related to Pipeline Visibility

Before we dive into the importance of pipeline visibility, let’s define some related terms that are essential to understanding this topic. That way, you’ll have more context.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

CRM is the platform businesses use to manage and analyze customer interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. It helps you build and maintain relationships with customers, track data on leads and prospects, and identify sales opportunities.

When a new lead comes into your funnel, your rep will qualify them and put their information (e.g., company name, contact info) into your CRM. They’ll also add notes, like the source of the lead, and document interactions they have.

Your CRM also visualizes the sales pipeline for each customer. It separates live deals you’re working into columns from early discussions to an eventual close or loss of the deal. When an important milestone (like completing a qual call or delivering a sales demo) happens, your CRM reflects it.

So, you can always check your pipeline in CRM to see where deals are in the sales process, if they’re on track to close, how valuable each one is, and at what stage you should focus your efforts.

Lead qualification 

Lead qualification is the process of determining if a lead is ready to speak with a member of your sales team, whether they’re a good fit for your product, and which product(s) are best for them, if any.

Qualification is one of the first and most important sales pipeline stages because it sets up the rest of the sale. If the rep lets through an unqualified lead, conversion rates, long-term retention, and customer lifetime value (CLV) suffer further down the line.

You can go about sales qualification in a number of different ways, depending on the size and structure of your business.

• BANT is a classic lead qualification framework where the seller asks Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline questions. It helps reps understand if the prospect has an aligned budget, is the decision-maker, has a real need for their product, and wants to implement it soon.
• MEDDIC stands for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Process, Decision Criteria, Identify Pain Points and Champion. It’s a sales methodology designed for complex sales with multiple decision-makers and long sales cycles.
• SPICED is a framework that takes a more diagnostic approach to sales. Reps ask Situational questions, move on to the Pain that led them to talk to the rep and the Impact that pain has on them, and then go into the Critical Event — typically a deadline or implications for improving the Impact. “Decision” covers the final questions around who and what is needed to close the deal.

These are just a few examples, though. SPIN selling, the Challenger sales model, and GPCTBA/C&I (Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority/Consequences & Implications) are other popular frameworks to help your sales team qualify leads.

There are also several questions you need to ask to identify qualified sales leads. These include questions about how the organization measures success, how the company’s buying process works, and whether there are objections or potential roadblocks to the sale.

Deal stage

The deal stage is where a deal currently sits within your sales pipeline. It’s the phase in which leads have moved through the initial qualification and are actively being pursued by the sales team.

Deal stages can vary from company to company, but they typically include:

• New (i.e., prospect)
• Talking/Initial Contact
• Qualified/Opportunity Stage
• Meeting/Demo/Presentation
• Proposal
• Negotiation
• Closed Won or Closed Lost

You’ll set these up in your CRM. This is your visual representation of your sales pipeline.

Sales funnel

Though they have overlapping purposes, sales funnel and sales pipeline are two different concepts.

The sales funnel is the overall journey of a lead from acquisition to retention. It’s broader, more abstract, and measures quantity. It starts with Awareness and moves through Interest, Evaluation, Negotiation, Purchase, and Renewal.

Your pipeline is for active deals. It provides a way to track the progress of leads and customers as they move through different stages of your sales process. Your pipeline is narrower (i.e., only measuring deals in progress), more concrete, and measures quality.

Sales forecast

Sales forecasting is the process of estimating future sales performance based on historical data, market trends, and other variables. It’s an essential part of any business that wants to plan for growth and allocate resources effectively.

Pipeline visibility is a precursor to sales forecasting. Forecast accuracy depends entirely on the information about your deals in progress. 

If you can’t see where deals are in the pipeline, it’s impossible to make accurate sales forecasts. And you can’t predict when they will close, how much they’ll be worth, and what you need to allocate.

Win rate

Your win rate is the percentage of deals your sales team successfully closes. It’s a critical metric for understanding the effectiveness and efficiency of your sales process.

High win rates usually indicate a strong qualification process, sales efficiency, and a good understanding of customer needs. Lower win rates underscore issues with lead targeting and sales tactics.

Importance of Pipeline Visibility

Having complete visibility of your sales pipeline is crucial for the success of any business. Without it, you’re essentially flying blind and unable to make informed decisions.

Here are a few reasons why pipeline visibility is so important:

Accurate forecasting

As mentioned before, accurate sales forecasts depend on having clear visibility into your pipeline. This allows you to make data-driven predictions about future revenue and plan accordingly.

Effective resource allocation

Knowing where your deals stand in the sales process enables you to allocate resources (time, budget, personnel) effectively. You can focus on leads with the highest potential and distribute resources accordingly.

Identifying bottlenecks

With a clear view of your pipeline, you can quickly identify any bottlenecks in the sales process. This allows you to address them promptly and keep deals moving through the pipeline more efficiently.

Improving efficiency

Pipeline visibility gives you an understanding of how long it takes for a deal to move from one stage to another. When you know what’s causing holdups and where you’re losing deals, you can streamline your sales workflow and eliminate unnecessary steps and delays you find.

Better decision-making

Armed with accurate data about your pipeline, you can make informed decisions on strategy and tactics. You’ll have a deeper understanding of what works and what doesn’t. That’s what enables you to optimize your sales processes for better results.

Sales team coaching and motivation

When sales leaders know what’s going on with their team’s deals at any given time, they can provide support and proactively address deals that look stuck. During deal reviews, it’s also easy for them to pull up the details of each deal to provide personalized guidance to their reps.

Challenges in Pipeline Visibility

When it comes to staying on top of your sales pipeline, the number-one issue causing a lack of visibility is poor data quality. When your reps don’t add information into CRM, it gets cluttered with errors and duplicates, making it harder to track deals and forecast revenue reliably.

Even if you have high-quality data and everyone updates their CRM like they’re supposed to, data silos are another issue. When sales tools aren’t integrated with CRM, it creates gaps in the data flow.  This prevents teams from seeing the full customer journey and understanding the true status of a sales opportunity.

Let’s say everything runs perfectly. Deals that stall can still obscure the real state of your pipeline. Stagnation often happens because of poor lead qualification, insufficient follow-up, or lack of automation in routine tasks.

And if your system runs smoothly, you still have the issue of retention (employee and customer). High turnover within the sales team or changes in customer accounts disrupt visibility. New staff will inherently lack the necessary insights and access to information their predecessors had, creating blind spots in the pipeline.

Not to mention, a lot of sales orgs don’t have standardized processes. So, sales teams will handle their respective opportunities differently. For sales leadership, that makes it difficult to pinpoint where the problem lies. And it adds a layer of uncertainty to the reported status of a deal in the pipeline.

How to Improve Pipeline Visibility

So how can you address these challenges and improve pipeline visibility? Let’s explore some best practices below.

1. Integrate CRM with your sales enablement tools.

Every business has a CRM. That isn’t enough. You need one that integrates with the rest of your sales stack.

The most important integration for pipeline visibility is CPQ — the two platforms go hand-in-hand. A huge part of your sales workflow happens within CPQ, including proposal and contracting stages. When a prospect moves through a stage in CPQ, it should automatically trigger an update in CRM. That way, your sales team can see all the details without needing to manually update it.

Other tools that should integrate with your CRM include sales engagement platforms and contract management software.

And of course, all these tools should integrate with each other as well.

2. Consolidate your tech stack.

Depending on the complexity of your sales infrastructure and the length of your sales cycle, your reps might need to hop on several calls or communicate individually with several different buying group members.

If that’s the case you can’t just have a bunch of different tools that work independently. You need to consolidate your tools into one cohesive platform. Otherwise, your team will be switching between UIs too often.

If you’re going to consolidate your tech stack, one of the best ways to do it is with a CRM like Salesforce to manage all your customer data and sales processes. For product selection, quoting, contracting, signatures, and billing, use DealHub’s CPQ, CLM, billing, and digital sales room suite.

Then, integrate DealHub with your CRM to continually update your pipeline in real time. That’s ultimate pipeline visibility.

3. Define and standardize your sales processes.

Standardizing your sales process is essential for consistent pipeline visibility and accurate forecasting. Each stage of the process should have clear criteria and actions that need to be taken before a deal can move forward.

For example:

• A deal is “closed” when a contract is signed and you’ve received payment information.
• It’s in the “proposal” stage when a proposal has been sent to the prospect.
• Prospects move from “qualification” to “meeting” when your SDR has gone through your qualification framework and the prospect agrees to a demo.

This not only creates a more streamlined workflow but also provides clarity on where deals stand in the pipeline. When everyone follows the same process, there’s no ambiguity as far as deal status and next steps.

4. Train your sales team on data management best practices.

While integrations like CPQ-CRM will automate certain pipeline status updates, it’s still up to your sales reps to input customer details into CRM. They need to know how to accurately record and update data.

Give them guidelines for:

• Which data is critical to add
• How to document details of sales calls and meetings
• How to organize communication history with prospects
• When to move a prospect from one pipeline stage to the next

Include sales pipeline updates in your CRM training module for new hires as well.

5. Monitor and track pipeline data regularly.

Even with all these processes in place, it’s important to consistently monitor your sales pipeline data for any discrepancies or issues. Regular pipeline reviews will help you quickly identify areas that need improvement and take action to address them.

Some key sales metrics to track for this include:

• Conversion rates at each stage of the pipeline
• Time spent at each stage of the pipeline
• Overall sales velocity
• Win/loss ratio

In addition to standard sales pipeline reviews, you should also measure qualitative metrics like sales productivity to gain a more comprehensive understanding of your pipeline health.

Technology Needed for Visibility Into Your Sales Pipeline

With the right technology, your team will be closing deals left and right. Broadly speaking, there are four tools you need for complete visibility into your pipeline:

• CRM (customer relationship management)
• CPQ (configure, price, quote)
• Sales intelligence
• Sales analytics platform

These platforms work together by syncing data and providing key insights into your pipeline. It works something like this:

1. A sales rep adds customer info into CRM. When they move through the first stages of the pipeline, they add more information, such as contacts and communication history.
2. Once the customer is ready to proceed, they open CPQ and the customer info auto-populates from CRM.
3. As they move through configuration, pricing calculations, and quoting, CPQ guides them. When they finalize the quote/proposal and send it out, the pipeline stage automatically updates in CRM.
4. The same data sync happens as the prospect moves through contracting and signature.
5. Sales data (e.g., deal size, sales cycle length, win/loss ratio) is automatically pulled from CRM and CPQ into the sales analytics platform. The system aggregates and displays this data in comprehensive dashboards.
6. Your sales analytics platform helps you make sense of the data, providing actionable insights based on averages and trends you see across the sales pipeline. This is what helps shape future sales strategies and tactics.

Benefits of Enhanced Pipeline Visibility

There are untold benefits to having visibility into your sales pipeline. The most pivotal ones include:

• Tailored coaching from sales leaders
• Higher quota attainment for reps
• Accurate forecasting and planning
• Better high-level decision-making
• Effective resource allocation for sales initiatives
• A more personalized and proactive customer experience

Implementing the above mentioned tips and using an integrated sales tech stack means pipeline visibility is well within reach for you and your business.

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