A sales pipeline is a great indicator of a company’s health. Assembled and managed correctly it can show you the money you are going to earn in coming months, the opportunities and client relationships you need to pay attention to, and the weaker areas of your business that need greater focus and attention.  It can flag critical shifts in strategy that might be required in your markets.

And a well managed pipeline can be used to drive active follow up of opportunities, pursuit of target clients and generation of revenue in a structured way so that outcomes are maximised and time wasted on ineffective marketing minimised in a firm.

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to define your pipeline:

1. Identify your target clients, that is, the clients that you plan to target and gain work from this year. The number of target clients your business has will depend on the size of your transactions, the scale of your business and the conversion ratios you need to win work.
2. Identify the leads that stem from these target clients. Every project, job or opportunity that might be available to your business from each target client on your listed at this stage. This is an unqualified list of every single lead you might choose to chase in the market. Write everything down – don’t omit, select or reduce at this stage of the process as this is the broadest part of the data-capture. When working in the property sector, one development client can have several leads for an architect, engineer or project manager at a time, record them all.
3. Qualify the opportunities or qualified leads that should be chased further by your firm. These are real opportunities for which a timeframe can be identified that can and should be explored further. It is your firm’s goal to understand them better and position your firm to be asked to quote or submit. At this point you can record estimated fee values and weight the chance of winning, and the expected date the project could commence, starting the process of building valuable data on which you can make future decisions.
4. Position yourself to convert opportunities into prospects. When you are asked to submit a fee, price or proposal for a project it shifts from being an opportunity to being a prospect. All prospects should have an estimated fee value, expected date of commencement, and percentage chance of winning associated with them so that your pipeline can be a valuable revenue projection tool.
5. Once a prospect has been submitted on, it moves down your pipeline to become a bid, waiting to be won, lost or qualified as dead.
6. Winning or losing is the endgame of your pipeline. Every job should be qualified, with the reasons for win, loss, or dead noted and captured for future analysis. After three, six and 12 months you will start to build a body of data that can help you to examine the trends in your business with more than intuition. Who is winning? Who is losing? Which sectors are stronger? Which need more attention? How many bids are you submitting per month and what are your success ratios? How long are bids taking to convert? What is unsuccessful bidding costing you? Are you bidding non-strategically into clients that are not targets? Why?

After one to two years you will also be able to see when peaks and troughs in activity occur (if they exist) and work harder to protect your business from them.

There are plenty of different software applications you can manage your pipeline in, but I recommend you get it started in excel rather than wait for a system to start the management process. If you need a simple template, drop me an email at Rebecca@stretchmarketing.com.au and I will send you one to get started with.

In closing, I also want you to consider what makes your pipeline work well. Perhaps you could offer some of your own tips on the blog. I’ll pick up here in the next article, sign up here to subscribe. 

We have all heard plenty of stories of organisations preparing budgets. Many of these stories relate to unrealistic budgets being forced onto various managers or organisations of which they have no hope of meeting. This scenario gives a bad name to what is actually an important management tool.

The use of a properly calculated and constructed budget is a great management tool to guide a manager to both improve income and expense control. Further, the budget is a realistic target for the manager or business owner to strive to achieve.

It is how we deal with the fact that these targets are sometimes not met that is the key issue. The budget outlines expectations generated earlier in the financial year and when these expectations are not met, the business operator can examine why something that was thought to occur did not occur. The reason why something did or did not happen as expected is the important fact. This information may go unaddressed if budgets are not set or if actual performance is not actively and consistently measured against the budget.

As an example, the budget may be set on the basis that the business plans to sell a specific number of units of a product during a specific month of the year. If this target is not met, the discussion can ensue on what can be done on an ongoing basis to ensure that the situation can be remedied. The variance from a budget and the reasons behind the variance are an important reality check to business operators.

A business owner can gain a tight grip on the gap between their hopes and expectations and the real performance of their business by carefully setting, monitoring and reviewing their budget. Businesses that make this an integral part of their monthly financial reporting find that the gap between expectations and actual performance narrows over time.

Increasingly businesses are setting shorter term budgets, quarter by quarter, and reviewing them as they go. In a more dynamic and rapidly changing environment, business planning cannot always be made years in advance. It is the business owners that embrace this environment and make effective use of management tools such as budgets that survive and thrive.

Abby Practice is starting the new financial year with a complimentary workshop on budgets and planning on Tuesday 3 July, at Suite 702, 90 George St, Hornsby from 12 to 2pm. Seats are strictly limited, so to reserve your spot click here to register. 

Offering a 30-day free trial and 30 percent monthly discount for packages starting in June, BPlan Live aims to be the solution for the 40 percent of Australian businesses currently operating without business plans.

Over 15 percent of new businesses do not survive their first year and 26 percent are forced to abandon ship within the first two years. A solid business plan, that’s time effective and cost effective, is the critical element to ensuring success.

“Too often businesses write up a business plan, throw it in the desk drawer and forget about it for the rest of the year. BPlan Live is all about creating a truly useful and relevant document that will help, not hinder, business management throughout the year,” BPlan Live Manager and Marketing Expert Adam Basheer said.

The tool aims to make planning as easy as possible for small businesses that might be put off by business jargon and the expense of traditional planning. It helps users recognise key issues to focus on for growth, creates a simple and effective plan to meet those goals in an easy-to-read dashboard and sends automatic reminders to help managers and staff stay focused.

“The ‘drag and drop’ examples are particularly useful for Sole Operators, the dashboard and reminders help SMEs identify priorities for each business stream and activities for each team member, franchisees can work from a common format, and business coaches can use the tool with their clients,” Basheer added.

Some key tips to remember while planning, according to BPlan Live, are:

1. Focus and prioritise the key issues that will get you to your business goals fastest.
2. Set realistic targets and time frames
3. Be specific about actions to be taken and those responsible