Sales funnel is a sales process also called sales pipeline used by sales managers, business managers and other business decision makers involved in business development, sales and marketing.

The general idea behind the sales funnel is to simply create an organized and systematic process for sales development and business growth.

Organizing your company’s sales activities and selling steps from the beginning through the end is a creation of disciplined sales process that can be managed, organized and controlled.

The sales funnel allows everyone in your organization to be on the same page – it provides more organized reporting; it improves your sales meetings and improves the quality of your communication within your organization. A very well defined and organized sales funnel and sales process will lead to a better focus on your business growth and development.

The first step in developing a new sales funnel or improving your current sales funnel is mapping the typical sales and marketing process in your company. In general every company uses marketing, prospecting, cross-selling… (these are general sales and marketing processes and activities), but on the other side every company is unique in the way it uses these sales processes - so it is very important to develop a sales funnel / sales pipeline that really shows your sales funnel activities (your reality) instead of using general sales management activities and categories. Your sales funnel should be customized to your business.

You need to balance between developing too detailed sales funnel on one hand and developing a very general sales funnel on the other hand.

However, these are the sales funnel categories you should include in your sales pipeline in order to be able to manage and improve your sales in an effective and efficient way:

Your sales funnel should show the offering related to each entry in your funnel. Your offering is whatever your company market and sells such as product, service, event, experience…

You need to make a list of all offerings you sell – if you have many products and services try to categorize them.

Again you should think carefully how detailed or general you need to be on this one. The bottom line is that later on when you use your sales funnel you want to be able to drill down / filter the sales opportunities by product or service. If you are too general and you use very general product categories you might find yourself lacking information and on the other hand if your list of products and services is too long your reports might be too complex.

Your sales funnel / sales pipeline needs to be manageable, practical and easy to use.

For each entry or sales opportunity in your sales funnel you need to have a sales potential value which is an estimate of how much revenue or sales you expect to generate if you close a specific sales opportunity.

This is very important information because you are able to see the total sales potential of all sales opportunities in your funnel or the total of sales potential by product, sales rep, leads… at any time.

Time is money! Try to keep an accurate timeline as much as you can for your sales management plan - this is very important for your business success. Each sales opportunity has to have an expected close date (the sooner the better).

Probability in your sales funnel is the likelihood of closing a certain deal or sales opportunity.

This answers the question: How likely we are going to close this sales opportunity? While no one can know the exact probability it is a good approach to develop a skill to estimate probability.

Probability varies over time as you move your prospect through the sales funnel stages and steps – for example a sales opportunity that used to have a 50% probability now it can be at 90%.

This is very important. Since your company is unique and different from any other company it should have a sales process that reflects your reality: how you market and sell – what is your typical sales process.

Defining the real picture in your sales process will help you better manage your sales funnel and your reports will be practical and straight to the point.

The sales rep category includes the “sales rep” for each account – the entity who is in charge of this opportunity (this can be an individual or a company).

For example, in this sales pipeline category you need to include the companies, dealers, distributors, affiliates and others who sell and market your products and services.

Finally, you need to know who is bringing the business to your table and understand the effectiveness of your lead generation process.

This sales funnel category helps you understand, monitor and improve your lead generation process and really understand what works and what does not work for your business.

The lead category will include your lead generation channels such as advertising, website, referral, trade show, print media… depending on your marketing activities – be as specific as possible here because this is valuable information which can help you improve your marketing and sales management strategy and tactics and develop a better lead generation in the future.

Having all these sales funnel categories and tactics defined and used in your sales funnel makes a great sales management tool.

Your sales funnel is your most important sales management tool for business development and it will be part of your decision making, sales meetings and business reporting.

So now step back, invest some time and brain power and define your best sales funnel approach for your business – this is one of the best investments for your business development.

The Sales Funnel for Excel is the Sales Management Software you need to implement all these steps in developing and managing your sales funnel.

This product keeps you organize and automates the sales funnel reports for you so you can view your sales and business development performance and activities at any time by simply clicking a button in your Excel program.

You just need to enter each of your sales opportunities once with the information for the categories described above and this tool will take care of generating the sales funnel reports for you.

This is the only sales management software you need to manage your sales funnel effectively and efficiently!

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Sales Pipeline for Microsoft Excel