Pipeline management
To choose is to progress. The means available to an organisation to (eventually) acquire orders are limited. In other words, rarely there will be sufficient time, money or people to approach all interesting potential customers, to contact them and qualify them. By carefully considering what to do, the available means can be used in an optimal way.
Our approach is to see filling and maintaining the sales funnel as a resource discussion. After all, available resources are limited and can only be applied once.
Using a sales funnel starts when an organisation considers to pay attention to another organisation. The idea is to qualify it based on relevant criteria, such that the existence of a fit can be determined efficiently. The stages we discern here are: suspect, qualified prospect, hot prospect and customer.
With the corresponding relevant definitions:
- Suspect(S): an organisation worth pursuing for a specific proposition
- Qualified Prospect(QP): an organisation which has been contacted. For this organisation a particular proposition appears to be the basis for a business case (or building the complete business case is still in progress)
- Hot Prospect (HP): an organisation that is going to decide on a commercial proposal
In our methodology we will use the bandwidth model. This aids the sales funnel because it offers structured information regarding 3 important considerations in the resource discussion:
- For which suspects am I going to use my resources
- For which qualified prospects am I going to use my resources
- For which hot prospects am I going to use my resources
For each decision moment different classes of qualifications are used. Decisions are based on these qualifications and typically result in the choice where to use which resources.
To facilitate this process in the best way possible, we can support you with suspect-management software. In order to get more information on the subject, you can use our contact form.