What is a pipeline? A pipelines is a visual representation of sales prospects and where they are in the purchasing process.
Why is it important to have a pipeline? This may seem like a basic question to some people, but for a lot of solopreneurs aren’t creating an adequate pipeline to make sure they have sales coming through.
You get a lead and a lead is somebody that’s raised their hand and said, “Hey, I’m interested. I know who you are.” You also know who they are, in terms of their name, email and phone number or at least two of those three. That is a lead. When they are scheduling an appointment or you are actually doing a sales consultation with them, they become a prospect at that point. They want to dive a little bit deeper. Then, those prospects become clients because you’re awesome at sales, right? That’s your basic pipeline.
You have three kind of segments: leads, prospects and clients. There are some distinct steps you need to take to make conversions happen when taking a lead into a prospect and a prospect into a client. If you have a lead, somebody that says, “Hey, I know who you are. Kind of interested,” you want to convert them into wanting to make an appointment with you. How do you do that? Call , email, or text them. You can even find them on Facebook and send them information. In today’s world, it takes multiple touches to get somebody to actually respond to you and go to that next step.
How many touches do you think it takes? When I’m building out a pipeline for my clients, I typically add in 10 steps or 10 touches to convert that lead into a prospect – someone that is interested in setting up an appointment. What are those 10 touches that you want to make? You don’t want to just say, “Hey, buy this from me,” or “Hey, schedule an appointment now.” You want to add value because the more value you add, the more that person is going to want to actually contact you and thank you or comment on how useful that information is, even if they don’t schedule an appointment at that time.
What are some of those value items that you can send?
- A video
- Articles that are related to what they’re doing
- Information on where they might be stuck
- Anything that you can think of that would add value to their life as it relates to what you do and what you’re trying to sell.
Think about making those 10 touches as valuable as possible. I bet that after five or six of those touches you’ll start to convert those leads into prospects who will book an appointment with you. Generally, anybody that goes all 10 touches and hasn’t responded to you is probably not a good fit You can drop those people from your prospect list and just keep giving them newsletters until they opt out of your newsletter list.
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