The Key Components of a Well Designed Marketing and Sales Pipeline

It is purposefully designed 

For many growing businesses, processes evolved randomly rather than having been designed to fit their purpose. The marketing and sales pipeline is one that is particularly vulnerable to this chaos. Let’s find out why…

When a business starts up, its main objective is to get the cash in – find those prospects, nurture them, and get a sale. And marketing has the additional problem of dealing with people.

As every marketer can tell you, your marketing activities have to constantly change as you see how your audience engages and react (or doesn’t engage and doesn’t react) to them. 

To begin with, it’s hard to design your pipeline because you don’t know what marketing and sales techniques will work.

However, after a few weeks and months, you have that data. You can see what your prospects are responding to. You know how long they are taking to make decisions and what they want to be shown along the way.

Now you can start designing and building a sales pipeline that includes an integrated marketing funnel.

In the design phase, you will map out:

• The journey you think is best for your key target audience, which them from first becoming aware of your brand all the way through to being a loyal customer.
• The different routes clients may actually take through your marketing and sales funnel (remember that bit about dealing with human behaviour? People never totally do what is expected or wanted of them!) and checking that whatever journey they take, it still feels great and joined up for them.
• The level of customisation at each point, e.g. how much of your marketing and sales content is automated and set, based on the prospect’s behaviour as they move through your marketing and sales pipeline.
• Putting the right key performance indicators (KPI) in place for each key aspect of the journey, so you can quickly see how well your pipeline is performing and where any issues might be.

Purposefully designing your marketing and sales funnel like this means you can actively manage what is happening at each stage. 

Lots of people engaging with your top-level awareness content but choosing to ignore downloading gated material? Investigate!

Either you are initially attracting the wrong kind of people, or they are the right kind but you are stopping them from moving forward by gating content. 

Determine the issue, resolve it, and keep a smooth flow through the pipeline.

You can measure its effectiveness

When you design your marketing pipeline, you have to design into it the measurements and metrics that will let you know what is working and why.

Marketing is a complicated business. We’re always marketing to people and people are… tricky! 

A piece of marketing that worked last year might not this year. Something that your key audience wanted to know about at the Interest Stage last week is not relevant now the market has shifted. 

Here at The Marketing Spaces, we have seen just in 12 months how marketing we’ve used to great effect is now falling flat. Why? Because the market has changed, the circumstances that people are running their businesses in have changed – so our messages that resonated before aren’t quite hitting the mark now. 

But we could see this change happening and were able to make changes before we lost too much time and money.

How?  Because good marketers are always measuring the right things so they can see how effective their marketing is at different stages.

When we design marketing pipelines on our ‘Mastering Marketing-Design a successful

marketing pipeline’ course our Course Attendees must always include two type of measurements:

• ‘As you go along’ metrics for each marketing activity.
• A KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for each stage of the Buyers’ Journey.

The ‘As you go along’ metrics make sure that all of your individual marketing activities are on track. 

For example, you want your weekly newsletter to have at least a 40% open rate. If you send it and 24 hours later it’s only at 20% open rate, you know you need to change something as you go along before you send the next one out.

Then, we have one Key Performance Indicator for each stage of your pipeline, so we can see if that stage has been successful:

eg ‘At the ‘Considering’ stage of our marketing pipeline, we need 500 people to enquire about our services over 3 months to make our sales target of 100 in three months’.

If, by the end of 3 months you’ve only had 450 enquiries, then you know that, ultimately, your sales are going to be down.

For more about metrics, watch this mini-series of videos I recorded, ‘Metrics Unmuddled’ to really nail this important part of pipeline marketing.

Marketing, sales and account management seamlessly overlap

Your marketing funnel and sales pipeline should be designed and operated so that your key target segment feels like they are dealing with one organisation. 

This has to be built into the automated elements of marketing, such as emails, scheduled social media posts and paid ads, and also into the human element – your employees and how they are dealing with each customer.

This means that your marketing pipeline and sales funnel combination has to make sure that when the prospect goes from ‘Marketing Qualified Lead’ to ‘Sales Qualified Lead’ to ‘New Client’ to ‘Valued Client’, if they are being ‘handed over’ to different people in your business, it feels seamless to them. 

We’ve all been there while we wait for someone to look up the notes and figure out where the last person got to when dealing with us – it’s best to avoid this situation.

So, how can you make sure that marketing, sales, and account management seamlessly overlap?

First, decide internally who is looking after which part of the marketing and sales funnel. This very much depends on your business and who you have doing which role. The diagram shows some options for how this can be organised, bringing Account Management in too.

Once that decision has been made, bring everyone together as a team to go over it and discuss it. 

In particular, look for ‘grey’ areas where it’s unclear when that Prospect moves from Marketing to Sales or Sales to Account Management. Discuss how to handle this so that it still gives your prospect/client the best experience of your business. 

Get stuck into the detail. If Sales are looking after Marketing Qualified Leads moving them from Considering to Adopting, what marketing and sales material do they need to help support them? How will they get that?

How will Sales feedback to marketing the valuable customer intelligence they will glean through their conversations so that the marketing material can be adapted and improved? 

And finally, the key part here is to make sure one person has responsibility for the whole pipeline. Their role must include ensuring that sales, marketing and account management are working well together, as well as monitoring what is happening across the whole pipeline.

Your marketing tech stack allows you to grow

There are so many marketing and sales pipeline management options out there at all levels of budget, functionality and quality. The first piece of advice is to take your time choosing the right technology for your business.

When you want to grow your business, you need to set up your MarTech so that it allows you to grow. A crazy hodge-podge of mashed together apps, freebies and bodges won’t allow that growth – and it can also make for a lumpy user journey as you move people through the pipeline (rather than one that flows).

When it comes to choosing your marketing and sales tech stack, go back to your design. Start to look for the software that can best help you build and run the marketing and sales pipeline you have designed.

Then, as you start assessing the different options, there are three key considerations:

1. The quality of the experience
2. How many resources (budget and time) does your business needs to invest now – and in the future
3. That it can be built on as you scale and grow.

Let’s look at each in turn:

• The quality of the experience

This is split into two: what it feels like to set up and run your marketing and sales pipeline stages using the tech stack you’ve chosen and what it feels like to be going through it as a prospect and customer.

If you choose software that your marketing and sales experts dislike or which doesn’t allow them to do what they want to do, they will create workarounds. These workarounds will be known to them and them only – causing issues if they are on leave, off-sick or move jobs. 

If you choose a tech-stack that feels clunky and disjointed to your audience – your prospective and actual customers – then it can diminish your brand’s standing. 

In short, your people need to feel comfortable and confident that it gives them what they need while your prospects and clients are getting a great experience too.

• How many resources (budget and time) does your business needs to invest now – and in the future

Using marketing and sales technology to build your pipeline structure comes at an investment cost – now and in the future.

When costing out which option to choose, it’s wise to make sure you are looking at it from all angles.

Key things we advise people to consider are:

• Do the costs of your chosen tech rise after an introductory period?
• If you are choosing to join up different pieces of tech compared to choosing one ‘expensive’ piece of software or App, what is the overall price of the ‘different pieces’? Is it more or less than buying the one ‘big’ system?
• How much will it cost to set up your marketing and sales tech? 
• Who will set it up? What will it cost in terms of their time / wages / fees?
• Who will run it moving forwards? What will that cost in terms of time/wages/fees?

Sometimes, on balance, it can be better to go for what at first looks expensive. However, it can sometimes be better to choose a cheaper tech stack that you know team members can set up and run rather than have to pay for external support or training. You can make an informed decision.

There is no right or wrong approach – it is just considering it all and making the right choice for your company’s resources.

• That it can be built on as you scale and grow.

Make sure it is scalable. If you choose a marketing tech stack that can’t grow and flex as your company grows and flexes, then you will get frustrated. 

Assess if it meets your anticipated needs today, next month, in the next six months, the next 12 months, and the next 24 months.

Making this assessment now will save you a lot of time and hassle in the future when you want to be focussing on growth – not on rebuilding the tech that runs your marketing and sales pipeline.

To finish…

As you build and design your marketing and sales pipeline, which is essentially the journey that your audience goes on to become loyal customers (and the infrastructure around it), take time to ensure you have addressed these three key components.

This way, you have in place a pipeline that is going to support your business as it grows and is ready to scale.