![Sales Pipeline Template - Leverage all your Won Opportunities](http://royalcdkeys.com/cdn/shop/articles/image6-1682626388994.jpg?v=1719562212)
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0375/3020/6345/t/47/assets/image6-1682624569996.jpg?v=1682624570)
Deciding the best project for our company may take time and effort. There are multiple tasks, and each is difficult to quantify and qualify. An easy way of identifying the prospects for our business is to optimize resources and efforts through a Sale Pipeline Template. This article gives you access to the most relevant aspects of sales pipelines and some free templates!
Sales Pipeline Template - Leverage all your Won Opportunities
What Is a Sales Pipeline?
A sales pipeline is a metaphor used in marketing or business administration to refer to all the sales phases. It’s how potential sales opportunities are qualified and selected to turn them into real opportunities. This graphical tool shows the different business opportunities and their costs in each sales process step.
How Many Stages Does a Sales Pipeline Have?
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0375/3020/6345/t/47/assets/image5-1682624650657.jpg?v=1682624651)
Most pipelines are divided into seven stages. Some salespeople prefer to organize their pipelines in 6 steps, but our model is better for collaborating with prospects and several business’ departments.
Prospecting / Lead Generation
This is the first stage where your business notices a potential customer. This client may be a person or another company. This stage involves all the essential activities to drive new business leads.
Lead Qualification
This is one of the most relevant sales pipeline stages since you qualify all the new leads brought for your sales team here. Remember that only some of the sales leads are right for your business.
Sales Meetings
Sales reps present the product that best fits the business's needs in meetings. Representatives also evaluate if the business opportunity is either a strong or weak opportunity. If it’s strong, the sales rep will send a proposal to the prospect.
Initiate Contact / Proposal
This is the phase of the pipeline where current deals have started. Here, representatives attempt to contact the prospect to create a relationship, understand their needs, and customize the service for the lead’s requirements.
Negotiations
This is the phase where the sales managers or representatives send a summary of what your business can offer to the prospect. In this document, the rep must establish how your business will help prospects meet their needs.
Closing
This is the stage of sales pipelines where the prospect and the representative discuss the price. Discussions in this stage may lead to an expansion or shrinking of the project and scope of work. The objective is to reach an agreement that benefits prospective customers and your business.
Retention
The sales funnel and the process continue after the agreement has been signed. Now comes the most crucial part of the relationship between your business and the prospect or client. This part involves exceptional customer service of your sales team members, considering sales data and any new services you can provide to the client.
What Should a Sales Pipeline Contain?
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0375/3020/6345/t/47/assets/image3-1682625708078.jpg?v=1682625708)
Regardless of the nature of your business, the sales pipeline template you’ll use should contain some custom fields and sections. Creating an excellent sales pipeline involves the following:
Basic Details
If you're using a free sales pipeline template based on spreadsheet software, you should allocate the two first columns for the deal name, contact name, and every detail of this person. You want to maintain a contract because your salesperson needs to contact the right people.
Make sure your sales pipeline management team knows to include all the basic details of all sales stages, no matter their size.
Sales Stages
An effective sales pipeline includes primary phases, such as booking a phone call or sending a proposal. Most detailed sales pipeline management template includes other steps and stages, such as contacting through different social media channels or qualifying a lead.
Some examples of what you can include are the following:
Leads Contacted: Prospects that your representatives or team have reached out to;
Proposals sent: The proposals your team has sent when the prospect has shown interest;
Terms negotiated: The terms of the contract have been negotiated;
Deal Size
An excellent sales pipeline spreadsheet template should consider a column for the size of the deals.
Do you know how exactly big a deal is?
At this point of the agreement, you should be able to put an exact number or quantity on this. Best sales pipelines are capable of calculating the size and the total number with exactitude.
If sales teams cannot do this, we recommend you use your average deal size pricing as a placeholder.
Win Probability
The sales process finishes once the prospect makes the purchase. The best sales pipeline templates consider a section to assign a probability of closing.
The further long deals are in the sales process, the better the chance they'll close.
For instance, prospects who are given a verbal yes as an answer to a proposal have a 90% probability of closing the deal.
Besides, depending on the type of services or products you provide, you'll likely change the probability of closing a deal. For example, if you offer a low-cost item, you'll have more likelihood of closing the deal than offering an entire enterprise solution.
Weighted Forecast
A significant advantage of creating a good pipeline template is that you can track sales and forecast revenue and future sales. Predicting and knowing how much income you'll receive in the following weeks or months will help you make better business decisions and adjust your current sales efforts and resources.
Forecasting uses the pipeline data that you've already filled in the spreadsheet to predict the project's estimated value and the project's total revenue.
Forecasts are automatically calculated by considering two key metrics: the size of the proposal and the probability of closing the deal.
Expected Close Date
Your funnel must have a closing date to make your small business come to fruition. This way, forecasting will be more accurate and useful. Establishing a closing date is difficult, even more so for a new business.
Either representatives or prospects need to pay more attention to the invested time to complete a project or proposal. Besides, the more stakeholders are involved in the process and the purchasing decision, the harder it is to calculate a date.
Businesses estimate a close date by reviewing past deals and checking how many days, weeks, or months they need to get a successful close. On the other hand, new businesses need to gain this experience, so they need to keep a target date in mind by considering all the factors in an organized way.
Contact
Sales experts know that contact is one of the essential pieces of information your spreadsheet or document must include. Ok, it's pretty straightforward, but you won't believe how many businesses and people forget to include it in the processes. So, keep contact details up to date.
Free Sales Pipeline Templates
Now, we're giving you valuable sales pipeline templates for all companies. Of course, you can analyze them and add other sections and columns if your project requires them.
Sales Pipeline Management Template
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0375/3020/6345/t/47/assets/image4-1682626124272.jpg?v=1682626125)
Thanks to this template, you can track any sales stage of your pipeline by entering all the data we've mentioned in the previous sections. This is a spreadsheet document through which you easily manage your pipeline, gauge revenue, and minimize loss.
This template allows you to easily track progress with native integrations, formulas, automated data, and rules.
This model is a particular Microsoft Excel template that facilitates the data entry process.
You can download this Sales Pipeline Management Template from Smartsheet.
Sales Hacker Pipeline Template
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0375/3020/6345/t/47/assets/image1-1682626198019.jpg?v=1682626199)
This straightforward template you can use online or download allows you to track the progress and view the pipeline and each quarter. With this pipeline template, you can easily understand the sales cycle, final sales goals, and close dates. Furthermore, it's a living document you can utilize to generate sales forecasts.
You can download this free sales hacker pipeline template from Saleshacker.
Sales Pipeline & Leads Tracking Template
![](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0375/3020/6345/t/47/assets/image2-1682626243936.jpg?v=1682626245)
As its name suggests, this template is perfect for tracking all deal stages of your funnel, capable of predicting won opportunities. You can track leads along with requirements, contact details, prospects, and the lead status.
You can also add other information, such as the size of the deal, the expected closing date, and the sales rep working on the deal.
You can edit or download this sales pipeline & leads tracking template for Google Sheets from Fuzen.
Next Steps
Getting more deals and much more revenue for your business should be one of the main sales goals of your company. To achieve this, sales pipelines are fundamental for learning the ability to implement any deal stage. Thanks to these tools, your business grows by completing a lot of leads efficiently.
Expand your horizon and gain critical knowledge by reading the other articles on RoyalCDKeys. In our blog, you'll find all you need about business’ templates, games, and the best templates to design a good strategy for your business.