HOW TO: LEAD GENERATION

The Sales Pipeline in Salesforce

Running a business is full of surprises. Having a reliable gauge of how much business may be headed your way can be a huge help when it comes to revenue forecasting, planning for growth, and being ready for whatever’s around the corner. One tool for estimating incoming revenue is the sales pipeline.

Sales pipeline: A visual representation of where prospects are in your sales process. Sales pipelines give estimates of how much business your salespeople expect to close in a given week, month, or year. In turn, you can use pipeline to estimate how much revenue is coming into your business, and when.

Sales pipeline management tools not only give you a real-time view of your sales pipeline, they also let you filter the pipeline by team, rep, or territory for customized insights into your business. Pipeline management tools can also help you spot and troubleshoot problem spots in your sales process.

Salesforce offers customizable tools for creating dashboards, reports, and alerts to help with pipeline management.

Check out these resources to learn more about sales pipeline management in Salesforce.

Trailhead

Trailhead: Work as a Team to Build a Strong Pipeline
Learn how marketing and sales can work together to strengthen the sales pipeline. With marketing’s skills and sales’ insight as to what makes a great lead, the entire business will be in a great position to succeed.

Trailhead: Measure Sales Metrics That Matter
Use the power of Sales Cloud to create reports that reveal what’s in your sales pipeline, and what’s forecast to close this quarter. Salesforce can help you achieve better sales pipeline management.

Trailhead: Get Started with Reports and Dashboards for Sales Managers
Go hands-on with Salesforce Lightning Experience to get a bird’s-eye view of all of your reps’ activities and sales pipeline stages. From reports to dashboards, Salesforce gives you the tools to keep tabs on everything happening in your sales org.

Trailhead: Prospecting for Better Sales
Learn how strategic prospecting can help you improve your sales pipeline. Understand why our prospect pipeline is a key element of good pipeline marketing.

Trailhead: Sales Territories and Forecasting
Territory management is the bedrock of happy, high-performing teams. It dictates how teams are divided and who chases down which leads, and it helps shape everyone’s goals. Use Sales Cloud for pipeline management to create balanced territories and forecast sales effectively.

Salesforce Documentation

Official Documentation: Track Changes in Your Sales Pipeline
Check out this hands-on tutorial for using historical reports to monitor your company’s sales pipeline.

Official Documentation: How Do I Create a Report to Show a Historical Pipeline View?
View this step-by-step guide to using “As of” option reporting to create a snapshot of your pipeline.

Official Documentation: Calculating the Pipeline and Lifecycle Reports
Understand two different ways to view a marketing funnel — the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Lifecycle Report and the Pipeline Report — in B2B Marketing Analytics.

Trailblazer Community

Trailblazer Community: What Is Pipeline?
Understand how pipeline is represented inside of Salesforce.

Trailblazer Community: Watch Your Pipeline Change Over Time
Create a simple report to compare the total value of your pipeline today with its value yesterday. 

More Awesome Resources

Quotable Blog: Salesforce’s Inside Secret to Managing Sales Pipeline
What is opportunity management rigor (OMR), and why is it worth the time and effort to develop? Get the inside scoop on one of Salesforce’s secrets to success.

Salesforce Blog: 3 Best Practices for Sales Pipeline Management
Your sales process needs to be flexible enough for your sales reps to feel guided, but not constrained. Learn best practices for developing a great sales process without over-engineering it.

Salesforce Voice Blog: 3 Tips for Successfully Managing Your Sales Pipeline
Sixty-three percent of executives said that their organizations were ineffective at managing their sales pipelines. Get some tips for becoming an effective pipeline manager.

Video: Sales Pipeline Tracking: Learn More About Lightning Experience
Learn how design-led development led us to create our Lightning Experience with your top sales use cases and common CRM challenges in mind.

Video: Sales Pipeline Management: How to Use Sales Metrics to Drive Sales Performance
We did the research, you reap the benefits. Which sales metrics are the most important, which are management red herrings, and which are downright useless?

 

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The Sales Pipeline in Salesforce