By Alistair Norman

Harnessing the Power of the e-Pipeline [SLIDESHARE]

Now that digital data is enabling marketing to gain greater insights into customer buying behaviour, the e-pipeline is a big part of businesses’ sales forecasts.

Want to know more than just the revenue values in your pipeline?

The e-pipeline can tell you so much more:

How your customers buy, not just how much
Where you need more resource to move them through the sales cycle
What lead nurturing activities are giving the best results
The shape and velocity of the deals going on.

To harness the power of the e-pipeline, marketing needs to:

Define the sales cycle stages
Establish when a lead becomes a qualified opportunity
Understand customer requirements and align solutions with them
Demonstrate how your solutions can add value.

Once a lead has been qualified and passed to sales, they have to:

Create the right proposal
Negotiate the right terms
Empower the customer to make the right decision.

To release the power of the e-pipeline, four key data attributes need to be added to your business analysis:

Net new opportunities
Conversion rates
Sales cycle length
Success profiles.

Through thorough research, businesses can use the power of the e-pipeline to:

Identify when and where prospects advance to the next stage of the cycle
See when and where others leave
Find out about landing pages that convert
Develop meaningful success profiles to duplicate for future activities
Improve the integrity of the pipeline.

If sales and marketing work together, they can make the e-pipeline more successful to deliver:

Improved YOY revenue performance
Higher numbers of sales-ready leads
Better conversion rates
Shorter sales cycles.

To find out more about content marketing, download our eGuide Marketing Director’s guide: How to enable the sales team with hot leads now!

The Author

Alistair Norman | Marketing Director

Alistair is responsible for the strategy, design and implementation of our Inbound and Content Marketing, with a focus on developing B2B and B2C markets.