Why Use Sales Pipelines?
Sales pipelines are a great way to visualise what’s going on in your sales process. You can keep an eye on your contacts and how well they’re doing; whether they’re responding to your marketing and how your selling is going. It’s a helpful tool for your whole team, as it is much easier to relay information across to different departments if you’ve all got it there in front of you.
You can read more about the benefits of sales pipelines here!
What's RAS Got To Do With It?
We’ve talked about the RAS (Reticular Activating System) before—it’s a function in our brains that helps us process the overwhelming amount of information we receive from the outside world. We use it to respond to what’s going on around us; whether a particular event is trivial or important. The RAS also helps our focus, telling our brain what we need to look out for so we can zero in on it easier.
In this way, the functions of the RAS are quite similar to how sales pipelines work: they help you filter down to the right people, the right time and the right information. As a result, they make your objectives clearer for you. With more control over your goals, the likelihood of completing them increases.
The Five-Rhyme Timeline to Organise Your Sales Pipelines
But sales pipelines also complement your RAS. Here’s how:
1. Centralise Your Sales Pipelines
Sales pipelines visualise all your contacts as they progress through different stages of your sales process. These hold numerous contacts, who can be taking numerous routes. But instead of having sales processes everywhere, you’ve got everything in one place. You’re not distracted by knowing your data is somewhere else; your RAS isn’t needing to trudge through so much, so you can see the bigger picture.
2. Prioritise Your Contacts
In the same way that the RAS can pick out a name and start identifying it extremely quickly, sales pipelines group your information based on contact and where they currently lie in the sales process. Your columns match your individual sales process, so they will determine where your contacts go; this makes it much easier to get straight to the information you need.
3. Address Your Prospects
The perk of having a sales pipeline that’s joined up with your CRM, like in popcorn, is that all the information you need—and then some—is available for you to access. Any notes, records of engagement with your marketing, and useful tags are accessible from your sales pipelines. That means when you’re attempting to progress that contact to the next column, you can see how to get there. The information is filtered for you, and sets your mind in the right direction. Plus, your RAS filters out of necessity; if you’ve got the right information in front of you already, it frees up space for your RAS to highlight information you might’ve otherwise missed!
4. Impress Your Prospects
Having all the information to hand will provide you with the confidence you’ll want to push the sale through. Nor will you have any distractions taking you away from the task at hand.
This is where your RAS comes into effect: you’ve shown what it needs to pick out, and when the time comes you’ll be much quicker at spotting or remembering it.
For example—you’re calling a prospect for the third time, and you’ve talked enough to get some personal knowledge on who the prospect is. Because you’re able to see exactly where the prospect is in the sales pipeline, you know you need to close the sale soon. But you also have tracking and scoring that feeds through to your pipeline; and this which lets you know they repeatedly visited to an article on your website. Then a related topic comes up in your conversation on the phone, and your brain pings the link to you. Mentioning that article relaxes the prospect further, helps you two to relate to one another, and sets the right condition for closing the sale.
5. Success In Your Sales Pipelines
The visual nature of sales pipelines allows you to visualise your progress—and your successes. Seeing prospects in the right column and a completed sale reinforces that feeling of triumph and reward! This is a great feeling in itself, of course, but it helps out your RAS too. It doesn’t need to filter information through about prospects that have made a sale (until you want to keep your customer retention going), so you’re able to focus easier, and keep your motivation up too.
Focus Your Behaviour For Your Sales Pipelines
Your RAS influences your behaviour; your sales pipelines should influence and be influenced by your behaviour. Mould your sales pipelines on it; sales processes don’t have to be cut and dry, and no two prospects are the same. If it takes 2 calls for a prospect to sign up, but another signs up after responding to your email marketing and a couple of articles, make sure you can accommodate for them. Having a routine sales process is all well and good, but it can’t replace knowing who your contacts are, and, thanks to a de-cluttered RAS, being able to cater to them to the best of your ability.
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