4 Tips to Maintain a Healthy Sales Pipeline

How Sellers Should Think About Their Sales Pipeline

A healthy sales pipeline is one of the most powerful tools to help Account Executives, track, manage, and close their deals. But too often, sales pipelines are associated with tedious data entry rather than the powerful insights they can yield.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If Account Executives implement the four tips listed below, they will be able to keep their pipelines clean, so they can easily view and understand progress on deals and understand the most impactful actions they can take to move deals forward.

Let’s get started.

1. Fifteen Minutes of Pipeline a Day Keeps the Manager Away

Don’t let your pipeline maintenance pileup. Quick, frequent pipeline updates are the best way to stay up to date, give you the information you need to structure your days and weeks, and keep your manager off your back.

Best practice is to schedule 15 minutes at the start or the end of every day to comb through your activities for the day, qualify ongoing deals, and update your CRM. If that won’t work for you, then an hour at the end of the week can work too.

After your data is updated, you can perform a quick pipeline analysis (covered in Section 4), and plot out your day or week according to which deals in your pipeline need the most attention. 

2. Find Your Value

It’s easy to say to spend fifteen minutes a day on updating your pipeline data. But the truth is you won’t actually do it unless you find the value in doing it. And in truth, there’s nothing wrong with that. Why do something that’s not valuable to you?

That’s why we recommend harnessing the nature of human psychology and figuring out how to make your pipeline valuable to you. If you do that, updating it will become second nature.

So what information do you need to to structure your days and weeks effectively? And how can you structure your pipeline analysis to make sure it’s giving you that information? We’ll discuss the concept more in the next section. 

3. Pipeline Cleanliness is About More than Data, It’s About Actions

The person with the cleanest pipeline in the world won’t be the person with the most sales unless they actually act on the information that their pipeline is giving them.

Part of pipeline management is taking the necessary actions to move deals along or quickly qualifying them out so you can focus on other deals. And that’s one of the key benefits of good pipeline management: you can identify which deals need actions and which actions should be most effective, given your opportunities’ place in the sales cycle.

Modern pipeline management software makes this process even easier, visually flagging deals that are lagging or need urgent action and even recommending the next best action to take to move the deal forward.

Use your pipeline to organize your upcoming activities so you can continue to strengthen your ongoing deals and move them along the sales cycle. 

4. Qualify the Laggards

Deals that aren’t moving are likely dead. Consider reaching out one last time to see if they have any life, and if they don’t, don’t be afraid to disqualify it and free up your time and focus to bring in new deals with life. 

Don’t waste time on stagnant deals and don’t hold on hope because you’ve grown attached to the opportunity.

Read the data, read the room, and if the opportunity isn’t going anywhere move it out of your pipeline so you can focus on the deals that really matter.

Get Your Pipeline Under Control with Patri RevFit AI for Free

Want to easily visualize your pipeline health with the click of a button? Want to clean your pipeline in an intuitive platform rather than in your clunky CRM? 

Patri RevFit AI is a revenue intelligence platform that makes pipeline management intuitive, powerful, and proactive. Powered by machine learning, Patri RevFit AI automatically analyzes your opportunities and assesses their propensity to win, their relative fit for your company’s selling profile, their likely close date, and the most impactful next steps you can take to move the deal along. At a higher level, Patri RevFit AI will also predict your likely quota attainment and utilizing a a trained ChatGPT instance, provide intelligent insights and next steps for how to move your deal forward.

Patri RevFit AI visualizes the health of a user’s pipeline, including their likely quota attainment, their strongest and weakest deals, and AI-generated deal insights.

Patri RevFit AI helps users do the following:

• Clean your pipeline quickly and easily
• Quantify the health and winnability of each opportunity
• Identify low-probability opportunities and flag them for additional qualification
• Produce AI-generated next steps to help you move your deals toward closing
• Generate a visually appealing report that you and your manager can use to understand your progress on opportunities
• Predict likely close dates, helping salespeople make more accurate commitments
• Utilize machine learning to output predicted attainment for the quarter

Want to visualize your sales pipeline health with Patri RevFit AI?

Try RevFit AI for free or speak to a product expert if you want to learn more.

With instant AI-powered revenue intelligence for every team and every opportunity, you can identify the deals and actions that will make or break your quarter, refine your forecast, and focus resources solely on what will help you win.

Try Patri RevFit AI Free