If you receive errors when attempting to view this white paper, please install the latest version of
Adobe Reader.
"Look into the powerful ways that companies with complex sales cycles can improve revenue growth with analytics that support
sales pipeline performance. With the right software and the best practices, your company can attain real-time,
data-based visibility into the
sales pipeline and shift strategies according to insights."
Source : SAP
Improving Sales Pipeline Performance through Enhanced Visibility: Leveraging Analytics to Focus on the Right Opportunities
Sales Pipeline is also known as :
Sales Pipeline,
Sales Pipeline Management,
Track & Forecast Sales,
Track Your Sales,
Manage Your Pipeline,
Eazydashboard Pipeline,
Sales Pipeline Analysis,
Sales Tunnel,
Sales Pipeline Info,
Sales Pipeline Stages,
Sales Pipeline Software,
Sales Lead Tracking,
Beyond Contact Management,
Gain Visibility Into Sales Pipeline,
Increase Forecast Visibility,
Pipeline Key to Selling,
Sales Funnel Keeping Control,
Managing Sales Pipeline,
Sales Pipeline Templates,
Sales Pipeline Sales Tips,
Selling Sales Funnel,
Pipeline Lifeline for B2B Sales,
Sales Pipeline Calculator,
Leads to Sales Pipeline,
Produce Sales Results,
Progress of Prospective Sales,
Sales Effectiveness and Performance,
Sales Pipeline Management Tool,
Contact Management Sales Pipeline,
Pipeline Insight Sales Analysis,
Qualified Sales Pipeline,
Sales Analysis Sales Performance,
Find Sales Pipeline,
Find Sales Pipeline Lead,
Sales Pipeline Tracker,
Indicators of Sales Pipeline.
Overview
For companies with complex sales cycles - in high technology, industrial machinery,
and advanced materials, for example - improving sales pipeline performance is
essential for achieving revenue growth. But these firms face significant challenges
determining which accounts should be the highest priority, what actions will
advance the sales process, and how best to ensure internal alignment to achieve
a healthy distribution of pipeline opportunities.
By pursuing best practices and deploying the right software to manage pipeline
performance proactively, companies can attain real-time visibility into opportunities
across discrete sales stages. These companies can leverage analytics to attain
data-based insights into their pipeline and immediately take actions to achieve
measurable improvements to sales pipeline performance. Such actions include
optimally deploying sales teams across territories to improve the quality of opportunities,
accelerating the advancement of opportunities from one stage to the next,
and further leveraging pipeline data to improve team performance. Taking these
key steps, companies are well positioned to better penetrate target markets and
achieve their firms' goals for profitable growth.
Importance of Enhancing Pipeline Performance
Addressing the Challenges of Complex Sales Cycles
In a complex sales cycle, it's important to understand
the discrete stages for converting a lead to a sale,
which will vary in different markets.
The success of any business depends
on acquiring, growing, and retaining
profitable relationships with customers.
To this end, companies need their sales
teams to establish the requisite connections
with the account base, attain
a deep understanding of customer
requirements, and ultimately win sales.
But efficiently and effectively focusing
a sales force on the right activities is
increasingly difficult, especially in complex
sales cycles. When the sales force
is pursuing many opportunities, each
involving multiple steps to close a sale,
determining which accounts to pursue
and how to manage the sales pipeline
becomes a significant challenge.
The main problem, quite simply, is the
fact that customers are considering
myriad alternatives to your offerings.
With rising global competition and an
increasing proliferation of products,
customers must navigate through an
enormous amount of information to
find the solutions that most clearly
meet their expectations.
And those expectations are rising. Customers
today can very easily use the
Internet to compare your products to
those of your competitors. As they face
intense margin pressures of their own,
customers are spending more time deeply
analyzing alternatives and synthesizing
their own approaches - ensuring that
the products they buy will meet their
growing needs.
The consequences of fleeting customer
attention, as companies with complex
sales cycles know all too well, include
lengthening sales cycles, stalled opportunities,
and quarters that bring unpleasant
surprises. The easy answer is to spend
more time with your customers and more
fully understand their needs - but, of
course, this is a vast oversimplification.
Salespeople have limited time. Managers
need to consider how best to allocate
that time to enable their reps to
help customers recognize the benefits
of company offerings and support the
firm in achieving more accurate revenue
predictions.
Most companies dealing with complex
sales cycles have limited visibility into
the pipeline and an incomplete understanding
of the end-to-end process
involved in selling their products.
According to Gartner Inc., "Through
2010, on average, enterprises will miss
the equivalent of 10% of total annual
sales in ‘lost opportunity' revenue that
could have been captured as a result of
better visibility on sales activities and
insight into target markets."1 In fact,
only through access to the right data can
companies begin to address the gaps.
Best Practices for Enhancing Pipeline Performance
Enabling Alignment and Ensuring Results
You can pursue a straightforward set of
actions to improve pipeline management.
These actions, which are best executed
when supported by a pipeline performance
management application, are as
follows.
Know Your Sales Process
In a complex sales cycle, it's important
to understand the discrete stages for
converting a lead to a sale, which will
vary in different markets. A complex
sales cycle might be one where multiple
stakeholders are involved, for instance,
and there is a significant risk of needs
and solutions changing during the sales
process. Examples of the stages of the
cycle include identifying a prospect's
specific set of needs, qualifying the
prospect to ensure that your products
match both needs and budget, and final
decision making. Understanding how to
advance the process from one stage to
the next is essential, allowing you to
anticipate when the prospect will want
additional information and when to take
action to move decision makers toward
a purchase.
For each of the sales stages, another
key is to anticipate the time necessary
to advance from one stage to the next.
This helps determine whether a specific
opportunity is on track or stalled. You
can also identify opportunities that seem
to be moving too quickly, perhaps indicating
that a customer is using your
efforts largely to gain leverage with
your competitors.
Achieve Real-Time Visibility into Opportunities
In any dynamic business environment,
sales opportunities will shift over time:
new opportunities will emerge, and
existing ones may decline in priority.
Achieving real-time visibility into these
opportunities lets you respond quickly
with appropriate resources. You need
to know the current profit potential of
each opportunity, the prospect's position
within the sales process, and the
up-to-date activity history.
Besides offering insight about specific
opportunities, good visibility can shed
light on the overall health of your pipeline.
A healthy pipeline should have a
balanced distribution of opportunities
across the sales stages, thereby
enhancing the chances of meeting targets.
Given timely visibility, management
can address an uneven distribution
before it has an adverse impact on
revenue and resource planning.
Establish a Rigorous Process to Plan and Monitor Performance
Clearly, understanding your sales process
and achieving visibility into opportunities
are necessary conditions for
improving pipeline performance. However,
performance can only truly improve
if this information is leveraged in the
context of your internal sales planning
and execution process.
As noted in Figure 1, management is
responsible for establishing revenue
targets by sales rep - the starting point
for the pipeline management process.
Management must also ensure that the
right reps are assigned to the right
accounts and that proper organizational
alignment is established.
Figure 1: Sales Pipeline Management Process Flow
Besides offering insight about specific opportunities,
good visibility can shed light on the overall health of
your pipeline. A healthy pipeline should have a balanced
distribution of opportunities across the sales
stages, thereby enhancing the chances of meeting
targets.
Alignment means that management and
sales staff are taking interrelated
actions to achieve company goals -
and that depends on metrics that go
deeper than simply high-level revenue
targets. Examples of such metrics
include sales targets, the number of
leads in the pipeline, the percentage of
reps who are meeting quotas, and pipeline
velocity. (Pipeline velocity refers to
the rate at which opportunities move
through the sales process, from leads
to booked revenue.) This information
should be provided to management as
well as to individual sales reps as
appropriate, thus facilitating aligned
actions.
Armed with this information, you can
determine the appropriate actions -
such as assigning a new rep, dropping
the opportunity, or contacting decision
makers directly to better understand
their needs. You can also take actions
when necessary to ensure a more consistent
distribution of opportunities
across sales stages. Finally, you can
initiate discussions to refine your
approach to pipeline management to
ensure that company resources are
spent wisely.
Merge Analytics and Action
With the appropriate foundation of visibility
and real-time data, companies can
be more proactive with their planning,
merging analytics with action. For
example, you can simulate opportunity
changes and pursue what-if scenarios
for closing pipeline gaps. You can trigger
the right actions to resolve anticipated
issues - ensuring that your sales
force is properly aligned across territories,
and that collaboration with marketing
enables identifying customers with
the highest propensity to buy. Through
these actions, you can keep stakeholders
fully informed and ensure that targets
are met.
An Integrated Approach
Superior End-to-End Pipeline Performance Management
With the appropriate
foundation of visibility
and real-time data,
companies can be
more proactive with
their planning, merging
analytics with action.
An information system that enables
pipeline performance management
starts with sales opportunity data,
which typically is managed using a
company's customer relationship management
(CRM) software. With the
CRM solution as the foundation, companies
can enhance pipeline performance
with a variety of CRM-related
processes. For example, call center
agents can be equipped with real-time
information that helps them communicate
with customers in support of sales
objectives. And marketing can execute
campaigns that use the CRM-based
opportunity data for targeting the right
prospects with offers that further the
sales team's goals.
Through its connection with CRM, you
can also link pipeline performance to a
broader set of company processes,
including establishing sales forecasts,
executing trade promotions, and developing
strategic plans. By continuously
innovating end-to-end processes, companies
can enhance sales pipeline performance
to achieve a sustainable
advantage.
Pipeline Performance Management
with SAP ® CRM
The pipeline performance management
features of the SAP ® Customer Relationship
Management (SAP CRM)
application provide sales professionals
and managers with functionality they
can use to analyze their pipeline, identify
opportunities, and simulate what-if
scenarios. Instantly, they can trigger
the right actions to resolve issues and
help reps meet targets. They can use
criteria tailored to specific business
processes to ensure that efforts concentrate
on opportunities that drive
higher profitability. They can save time
by quickly determining which lessvaluable
opportunities to abandon and
which high-value prospects to pursue.
The solution allows managers to track
performance based on a range of metrics
including churn rates, quotas, and
expected year-over-year growth. They
can view interactive real-time charts
encompassing targets achieved to date,
the pipeline filtered by sales stage, recent
changes in the pipeline, and more. SAP
CRM features simple-to-use navigation
through interactive analyses, allowing
managers to identify and follow up on
relevant opportunities - effectively
merging analytics and action into one
application.
SAP CRM is integrated with the full
array of SAP solutions covering enterprise
resource planning, supply chain
management, and many others. Thus,
through its incorporation into SAP
CRM - and its central position in the
lead-to-order process, in particular -
pipeline performance management
plays a key role in enhancing the performance
of processes throughout the
enterprise.
Find Out More
To learn more about how SAP can help
your company improve sales pipeline
performance through enhanced visibility,
call your SAP representative today or
visit us on the Web at
www.sap.com/crm.
CONTENT
- Overview
- Importance of Enhancing
Pipeline Performance
- Best Practices for Enhancing
Pipeline Performance
- Know Your Sales Process
- Achieve Real-Time Visibility into
Opportunities
- Establish a Rigorous Process to
Plan and Monitor Performance
-
- Merge Analytics and Action
- An Integrated Approach
Pipeline Performance Management
with SAP CRM
Find Out More
50 089 185 (08/04)
©2008 by SAP AG .
All rights reserved. SAP , R/3, xApps, xApp, SAP NetWeaver, Duet,
PartnerEdge, ByDesign, SAP Business ByDesign, and other SAP products
and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are
trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several
other countries all over the world. All other product and service names
mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Data contained
in this document serves informational purposes only. National product
specifications may vary.
These materials are subject to change without notice. These materials
are provided by SAP AG and its affiliated companies ("SAP Group") for
informational purposes only, without representation or warranty of any kind,
and SAP Group shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect
to
the materials. The only warranties for SAP Group products and services are
those that are set forth in the express warranty statements
accompanying
such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as
constituting an additional warranty.