5 Ways to Keep Your Sales Pipeline Full

by Guest Author | October 11/2012 | sales pipeline

Nothing happens until a sale is made. A sale puts all the other elements of your business into action and helps you to align your service and products accordingly.

While it would be great to have a magic spicket we can turn on, it’s more realistic to roll up your sleeves and get to work on the right things every day. Selling requires continual commitment to process and habits that produce a result. It is a cause and effect system. If you create circumstances for a sale to be made, your system will produce a continual pipeline of opportunities.

Here are 5 ways to keep your sales pipeline full:

1. Create valuable content which connects.

People are looking for answers and insights to solve their problems. If you create content that speaks to this pain, you’ll become a go to resource that’ll make people eager to work with you. It means understanding what the problems are and writing articles, creating podcasts and recording videos that get concrete on how to help.

2. Get found.

There are two ways selling happens. Either you call someone, or they call you. Wouldn’t you prefer the latter? Getting found involves a commitment to being indexed by the search engines and optimizing your content continually. Don’t just produce content — ensure that it is being found and ranked high in natural search. Start with the SEOMoz’s free guide to SEO in order to get your website on top of searches.

3. Share content.

Use a feed reader to stay tuned into your industry and get information that helps your customers. As you run across this information, share it with people one-on-one or broadcast it online with sites like Twitter. You can also use apps like Hootsuite and Buffer to schedule and systematize your sharing. Just be sure that your posts sound natural, otherwise you will be perceived more like a bot than a person.

4. Build your email list.

An email newsletter is a great sales tool that enables you to infiltrate targets in a coveted place – their inbox. Use your newsletter to send subscribers helpful content and passively showcase your business to keep people engaged and subscribed. An easy way to get started would be with using a service like MailChimp.

5. Create a high trust approach.

Every week, focus on loading your sales funnel with a few key prospects that you would like to invest in. You must come up with a high trust approach. This can be a gift, a marketing book or a personal handwritten note. It will typically cost you in time and money. Start small with a group of likely candidates that you want to invest in and grow the system each week as you gain confidence. It takes thought, design and intentionality.

About the author: Don Dalrymple is a business consultant with advice on leadership, productivity and marketing at his blog, www.dondalrymple.com. Don is the founder and president of AscendWorks, LLC, a marketing firm in Austin, TX that provides strategy, branding and marketing systems. Contact Don to get his ebook, What Is Marketing Today.

http://www.kgaction.com Dean Kaplan

I can see the benefit of sending out a newsletter via email, however, do you have any advice about how to get the target recipients to read it? With all the spam coming into all in boxes daily, it seems to be a big battle to get actual readers.
http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php#justinesmith Justine Smith

@Dean To get your target recipients to read your email, you’ve first got to make sure you’ve gone through the right process to secure them as subscribers. If you just decide one day to start emailing past/potential customers with your news and tips, that’s not going to fly and like you said, it’s total spam (and can be illegal in some cases).

Instead, use a service like MailChimp to create an email “opt-in box” you put on your website, so that way they are qualifying themselves by telling you “yes I’m interested in your news”.

From there, the content you create for your newsletter needs to be relevant to your customer’s needs in order for them to want to keep reading each time you send. This could be snippets of information you only give to clients and other insider advice you want to send their way.

Also, we have a great Content Marketing series coming out on our blog soon that delves even more into email tips.
http://www.ArtsyShark.com Carolyn Edlund

Great ideas Don! I’d like to suggest another way to bring in leads – through referrals. Not only with inbound links referring others to your website, but through asking for them.

I find that asking specifically for referrals of others who are interested in my services gets response, whereas people who are fans may not think to refer if they are never asked.
http://www.andrewareoff.com Andrew Areoff

2. Get Found.

This has got to be the most important factor. It’s amazing how many of my clients mention social media before they even look at good old search engines which are a far more powerful source of getting visits to your website and enquiries through the door.

Why? Because people searching on Google et al are actually looking for something (well not all, but the vast majority are). If you are visible, be it through natural search engine listings or paid adverts (ouch, expensive!) and people click through to your site, assuming your proposition is what they are looking for, there is a good change they’ll get in touch to start the ball rolling.

Social media, by contrast is just like television advertising – messages be it through ads. down the side or links in posts or invitations to like a page, are coming at you and you are passively observing, maybe clicking through if you are intrigued but it wasn’t what you were specifically searching for when you wanted to make a purchase or enquire about a service.

Sure, social media is great for awareness, building brands, creating and nurturing tribes and followers, but for raw enquiries and sales it doesn’t compare to the search engines.

5 Ways to Keep Your Sales Pipeline Full

Here are 5 ways to keep your sales pipeline full:

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