Closing pipeline – How to organize it in your CRM?

What is a sales closing pipeline?

A closing pipeline is essential for any successful sales strategy. It helps to track the progress of a sale and ensure that no potential customers slip through the cracks. But, it’s not just about tracking – a well-organized closing pipeline will make sure you’re making the most of your leads and increasing conversion rates.

First and foremost, we need to understand when the closing phase of the sales cycle starts and what should a closing pipeline contain. 

So if we analyze the entire sales funnel from the client’s perspective, we can visualize 4 main stages of the funnel: awareness stage, interest, adoption or decision stage, and action or purchase stage.

And we can see as many stages in the closing pipeline from SDR perspective as well:

1. Qualifying: The first step of the closing pipeline is to identify potential customers. This means reaching out and finding out who would be interested in your product or service. To qualify a lead, ask questions to understand their current situation, challenges, and goals. Doing so will help you determine if they’re worth pursuing or not.
2. Engaging: After qualifying, the next step is engaging with them. You need to start building relationships with leads by providing value through content like blog posts, videos, and webinars. Show that you understand their problems and offer potential solutions through helpful advice and resources.
3. Presenting: Once you’ve created a connection with a lead you can begin to present your product or service. Presenting should be done professionally and accurately, as it can help to seal the deal and close the pipeline. When presenting, you should try to make sure that the customer understands your product or service and how it will benefit them. You should also ensure that any questions they have are answered adequately. If there are any objections or hesitations, try to address them in a way that is both respectful and effective.
4. Closed Won/Lost: After the presenting stage, the closing can go both ways: either you can win it or you lose the deal (no despair here, it might reopen sometime in the future). Closed Won or Lost is the final stage in the successful completion of a sales pipeline. This is the point at which a customer has made a purchase and all paperwork has been signed or expressed that they won’t go with the offer. During this stage, it is important for companies to ensure that their CRM system accurately reflects the changes in order to properly manage future interactions.

Closing pipeline in your CRM

To effectively close a deal, SDRs should update the CRM to track the progress of each sales stage. First, they must enter all pertinent information about the customer into the system, including contact information and any notes taken during customer conversations or meetings. Additionally, they must accurately log all actions taken throughout the sales process, such as product demos or email communication. All of this information should be tracked.

To effectively track all changes and information during the sales stages, a good pipeline organization should be implemented.

Also, let’s not forget that your sales pipeline should work well together with the marketing pipeline, as you’ll be receiving leads from the marketing team, that would need sales attention.

So, by the time a lead comes to the closing stage, you’ll need to set up a number of triggers and actions within your CRM to be able to work or pass the lead accordingly to your customer success team as well.

1. Start by adding important custom fields – custom fields are always welcome, as each business has its distinctive areas they need to focus its sales pipeline on, besides the common fields that are included in every CRM. For example, for our pipeline, adding the information of the client ICP is very important for the lead qualification to the closing stage. So, we added custom fields that will be either manually or automatically populated in our CRM.
2. Make sure you have real-time data on the deal – it’s important for the entire sales process to know how long did it take to close the deal, and how long would your sales cycle last on average, to predict future deals, set revenue goals, etc. So, besides the must-have information on the deal size (in your currency) and the deal period (in days/months/years), you should include the actual information on when was the offer sent, when was it followed up and when did the client get back to you with feedback or the final decision.
   
3. Keep your notes clean for closing – when the time comes, you need to be prepared with every information possible, to really show your deduction and effort in front of your client. Adding your notes along the way at each stage is crucial for the closing and the pipeline that follows as well – customer success. So, after each call or follow-up with the client, add your notes accordingly, and put in some dates and instructions for the Customer Success Manager to be able to continue the communication with the client as best as possible.

Closing words

The key is having a centralized and organized approach in mind when setting up your CRM system. By streamlining the process of closing deals, businesses are able to increase their revenue and profitability.

Closing pipeline is a critical step in any sales process that can mean the difference between success and failure. It’s important to take the time to properly organize your closing pipeline in order to maximize conversions and ensure that you are making the most of your leads in close collaboration with your marketing and customer success teams.

A successful closing pipeline involves understanding the customer’s needs, identifying the appropriate solution, and guiding them toward making a purchase from the client’s point of view, and an organized approach to the company objectives from the team’s point of view. It is important for businesses to continuously improve their closing pipeline in their CRM to increase their sales efficiency and effectiveness.