White Paper

The Challenge of Sales Pipeline Management
Sales is a core business process, one that is essential to sustain a business. For the organization to succeed, its sales function must effectively manage the set of opportunities known as the sales pipeline. Indeed, expert observers and sales professionals regularly cite the sales pipeline as one of the most significant factors impacting the revenue performance of an organization; yet although it is regularly cited, the sales pipeline is rarely evaluated to see how it can be improved. Forward-looking businesses, however, understand that managing the sales pipeline skillfully is the key to maintaining and improving their performance and achieving their sales goals. Viewed in a broader context, sales pipeline management is a primary component of sales performance management, which is the endeavor of managing sales teams and operations to ensure that sales people expend their time and effort not just efficiently but effectively.

Sales pipeline management begins with the presales process and then manages all sales opportunities to ensure that they actively progress toward closing business. The term “pipeline management” describes what sales organiza- tions routinely discuss in sales review meetings and encompasses all sales opportunities that a company plans to close within a specific period of time. Activity in the pipeline changes constantly, making it challenging to get a complete understanding of the health of the sum total of all sales efforts at any given moment. To meet this challenge, organizations need a process supported by technology that provides the information and metrics people must have to achieve their sales performance targets. Ventana Research’s benchmark research on sales performance management shows that organizations take this challenge seriously: 79 percent of research participants said it is very important to improve sales operations and performance.

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