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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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;

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.