B2B sales pipeline management process and best practices

Imagine a scenario where the total value of prospects in your pipeline is worth $400,000 or $500,000, but your sales target is $100,000. This means you have a fantastic pipeline coverage ratio of 4x or 5x.

While this ratio raises the odds of hitting your quota, effective pipeline management is what turns your coverage into revenue.

In B2B sales, a well-managed pipeline is the backbone of predictable growth. With proper pipeline management, sales leaders and C-level executives can:

• Forecast revenue growth outcomes
• Keep customer acquisition costs low
• Know how much pipeline coverage they need
• Track reps’ band find opportunities for improvement
• Understand why deals go cold and set up guardrails to mitigate it
• Reduce sluggish deal movement that clogs the pipeline and wastes resources

As these benefits show, to manage your B2B sales pipeline, you’ll need the right people, processes, and technology. The alignment of these variables creates predictability, reduces manual work, and makes selling easier.

Read on to learn about our best practices for B2B sales pipeline management so you can have a repeatable process that drives predictable growth.

What is sales pipeline management?

Sales pipeline management is the equipping of your sales team to move leads through various pipeline stages quickly. This definition is as simple and accurate as it gets. However, from our experience, several organizations struggle to manage their pipeline effectively.

As Yuriy Boyko, the head of account management at Belkins, puts it, poor pipeline management breeds low close rates and long sales cycles. Avoid these challenges by digging into our 8 best practices for effective B2B sales pipeline management.

8 best practices for B2B sales pipeline management

1. Organize all pipeline activities in a CRM

Whether you are a small team of 5 or a large team of 50+, we recommend having a CRM. According to a Freshworks survey of 600 professionals, only 73% of businesses use CRM software in 2024.

When businesses don’t use a CRM, they default to spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are not ideal for pipeline management for several reasons: 

• Limited collaboration. Real-time collaboration is challenging with spreadsheets.
• Poor scalability. As your pipeline grows, spreadsheets become increasingly cumbersome to manage. With hundreds or thousands of prospects, leads and deals in a spreadsheet will fall through the cracks.
• Poor data integrity. Manual data entry increases the risk of errors. The outcome is inaccurate forecasts, inconsistent reporting, and misguided decision-making.
• No automation. You can’t automate repetitive tasks with spreadsheets. This leads to wasted time and increases the odds of human error.
• Limited analytics and reporting. Advanced analytics, reporting, and pipeline visualization are limited in spreadsheets, making it hard to gain deep insights into pipeline performance or identify bottlenecks.
• Security risks. Sensitive data is often inadequately protected in spreadsheets, especially when shared externally. This creates security vulnerabilities and increases the risk of unauthorized access.
• No integration with sales tools. This leads to data silos, missed insights, and a fragmented view of your sales pipeline.

You overcome these drawbacks with a CRM.

A CRM serves as a command center for pipeline management, and there are 500+ of them today. They centralize all activities, from lead generation to closing deals, ensuring no task or lead falls through the cracks. The outcome is full visibility in all pipeline activities.

At Belkins, we use HubSpot, which has immensely helped us in countless ways, like storing contacts and organizing every stage of our pipeline. Without our CRM, scaling our lead generation and managing our pipeline would be impossible. Salesforce and Pipedrive are also helpful for automation, managing contacts, and tracking deals.

📚 Related post: How HubSpot & sales enablement drove Belkins’ 15% closing rate of outbound leads and $5M in new revenue

2. Ensure reps update their work on leads in the CRM

Some salespeople will cook up different reasons not to update their work in your CRM.

• Nobody reads the notes
• It takes too much time to enter all the details
• The CRM is complicated and slows me down
• I’d rather focus on selling than on data entry
• My notes are better organized in my system
• I don’t see the immediate value in updating the CRM
• How about the 8 p.m. calls or texts where clients ask about details/use cases? Who pays for the hours used in logging them in the CRM?

These reasons may seem valid (and sometimes they’re right). 

But here’s the thing:

When reps update the CRM, other reps can chime in and provide insights that propel the deal’s movement and help the account owner close the opportunity.

Conversely, neglecting CRM updates can negatively impact the entire team’s effectiveness. Failing to maintain accurate, up-to-date information creates blind spots in the sales process and can lead to missed follow-up opportunities or duplicated efforts. Even the tiniest details matter and give context about the current state of a lead.  

With consistent CRM updates, everyone gets a clear, real-time pipeline view. This makes it easier to track progress, identify trends, and let team members seamlessly pick up where others left off. The outcomes? Better collaboration, accurate forecasts, and a more efficient team. 

📚 Related post: How to organize sales leads into a well-structured system

3. Enforce the use of your sales process

According to Dreamdata, the average length of a B2B sales cycle is 6 months, with some deals extending beyond a year. Sales teams can’t manage deals that take time on a whim; as such, they need a sales process. 

Get your team a process for identifying opportunities. Should they use SPIN or Sandler? How about lead qualification? BANT (budget, authority, need, timing) or MEDDIC (metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identify pain, champion)? And closing the deal? The list goes on and on. 

With such a process, your team knows what happens at every pipeline stage. The process also outlines metrics for performance evaluation and increases efficiency through repeatable steps. For example, at Belkins, we don’t follow up on prospects forever. While there might be exceptions to the rule for larger deal sizes, our general process is this:

Similarly, we have processes for all our pipeline stages, including sales activities. The bummer is that when I spoke to Yuriy, he said not having a sales process is a common pipeline problem he continues to see after over a decade in sales.

When I pressed further, Yuriy mentioned 2 steps you can use to begin developing their process. If you have a CRM, the first step is to do a CRM audit.

With our list of priorities, our next step is the CRM setup or cleaning process. If there is no status on a deal, we put the status for the deal. No email sequence? We set up one. If there are multiple pipelines, we put them together and merge all the deals. As this process continues, patterns emerge like how many follow-ups you did, calls you made, customer objections and your best rebuttals, etc. 

Using this information, you can create and enforce the usage of your data-driven sales process. 

4. Share relevant content assets with leads

Relationships go cold without communication. 

And with competitors on the lookout to make new relationships, your best bet at retaining leads who are not ready to buy is to keep the lights on with relevant content. When you share relevant content, you must not always tie it to the sale of your product. Don’t talk to a lead just because of your deal in play. Use your content to connect as a human first and a salesperson second. Ensure the content is useful enough for the lead not to consider you a stranger. 

Such content isn’t just the easy-to-digest one-pager. They are your webinars, case studies, blog posts, reports, newsletters, videos, LinkedIn content, etc. Before sharing content, ensure it’s customized for the lead. For instance, our webinar about omnichannel outreach in the manufacturing sector will best serve those in that industry. 

While people from other industries can benefit, we can’t email someone in the cybersecurity industry to join this webinar.

This means your content is relevant for one-on-one communication with a lead if it’s customized and actionable. At Belkins, we take relevant content seriously because together they let us tell a cohesive story about how our solutions solve clients’ challenges. They also help differentiate ourselves from competitors.

5. Maintain alignment among all team members

According to Gartner, aligned teams are more effective and produce better outcomes. Yet, office politics, distributed teams, and other factors might prevent teams from working towards shared pipeline goals. As a team that generates millions in revenue, I knew Belkins must have experienced misalignment at some points.

Yuriy told me that Belkins prevents misalignment by using 3 steps. 

Step 1: Outline the responsibilities of every member involved

Detailing who handles specific tasks, followed by a call to summarize the action plan, is vital. In our process, the salesperson is accountable for the sales call and post-sales follow-up, while the sales development representative (SDR) moves the deal through different stages after the initial sales call. 

If something goes wrong at this stage, the SDR explains what happened and why, ensuring accountability is clear. This creates a sense of ownership and drives alignment across the pipeline.

Step 2: Communication and weekly calls

At Belkins, we maintain constant communication through Slack channels, where we track updates, share questions, and provide immediate responses. Our sales team is available almost 24/7, ensuring that when urgent issues arise, sales executives can reach out to the SDR via phone for quick discussions. 

Also, we hold weekly calls to review the pipeline, address concerns, and ensure everyone is aligned with our progress. This ongoing communication keeps our sales process on track, identifies bottlenecks, and helps in resolving issues quickly.

Step 3: Work in pairs

We pair each SDR with a sales executive (SE) to maintain alignment and accountability. These pairs support each other throughout the sales process. If something goes wrong or if there’s a risk of losing a deal, the SDR and SE identify and correct the issue. 

This peer-to-peer approach ensures that both parties work toward the same goal — securing the deal. Their constant collaboration creates a safety net, where each person not only focuses on their tasks but is also invested in helping their partner achieve success. 

By working as a team, they can address challenges quickly and ensure the deal progresses smoothly, fostering a more efficient and cohesive sales pipeline.

6. Monitor your sales pipeline metrics

Only 26% of companies monitor how leads convert from discovery to closed/won status. This isn’t hard to do once you have a CRM.

Beyond organizing your pipeline stages, CRMs offer robust analysis tools for managing and tracking your pipeline metrics. For example, having many leads stall at the proposal stage signals the need for an improved proposal process. If your leads are going cold in the negotiation stage, the CRM will let you know and you can diagnose the problem.

To illustrate, let’s say you sell a $10,000 product and want $100,000 in revenue. Your process might be simple and comprise lead generation, lead qualification, prospect engagement, appointment setting, negotiation, and deal closure. 

Now you may have generated sufficient leads but have a low lead qualification conversion rate. This might signal a need to refine your ideal customer profile to ensure only the most promising leads enter the pipeline.

As you move to prospect engagement, your CRM might reveal a drop in response rates, showing you can improve your messaging or outreach timing. Through each stage, monitoring these metrics lets you fine-tune your process, ensuring your pipeline stays on track to achieve your revenue target.

With CRM analytics, you can also forecast future sales by analyzing historical data, helping you set more accurate revenue goals.

7. Update your sales pipeline process

Market shifts, changes in buying power, and evolving customer needs are valid reasons for updating your sales pipeline process. 

An outdated pipeline process is a recipe for missed opportunities, inaccurate forecasts, and a chaotic workflow. So occasionally, you’ll need to review each stage in your process, asking questions like:

• Are the pipeline stages still relevant? 
• Is our lead qualification criteria effective?
• Do the stages align with current buyer behaviors and market trends?
• Are the activities in each stage relevant, excessive, or little?
• Can we shorten handoff times between SDRs and account executives?
• Do we need more pipeline reviews?
• Are reps clear on the next steps?

This will help you spot gaps and implement changes that make a difference. 

Some sales tools can also help you streamline the process and surface useful insights. For instance, Outreach lets you understand your buyer sentiments and Gong is great for pipeline inspection.

8. Automate your B2B sales pipeline

Automating your sales pipeline boosts efficiency and allows your sales team to focus more on selling and less on administrative work.

Email is the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about automation. But besides sequences and follow-ups, your team can automate reminders, lead scoring, data entry, etc.

For example, automated lead scoring tools can analyze prospect data to qualify leads faster. Similarly, any CRM worth its salt can help with email automation to prevent leads from going cold. Platforms like Outreach can analyze buyer sentiment, letting reps know the leads to prioritize. By eliminating manual tasks, your reps will have more time for impactful pipeline activities and opportunities to close more deals.

Streamlining sales pipeline management with Belkins

There are many moving parts required to manage a sales pipeline. At Belkins, we have 11 stages in our pipeline. As an organization of 300 professionals, we have enough qualified hands to see deals through. 

The situation might be different if your team is small and you need more time to focus on high-impact activities. It gets ugly if your sales team has a high turnover rate, which HubSpot puts at 35% per year. With these challenges and the high cost of hiring, outsourcing is a better alternative. And thankfully, this is where Belkins shines.

We specialize in streamlining your sales pipeline by managing prospecting, nurturing, and engagement activities. From lead generation to relationship-building, Belkins handles the time-consuming steps that keep your pipeline full and your prospects engaged — freeing up your team to focus on what matters most: closing deals.

Our processes have helped us serve 1,000+ clients, with over 80 case studies, and an average rating of 4.88 across G2, Clutch, and TrustRadius as proof of client satisfaction. If you need help from a proven team that can manage your pipeline and speed lead movement through the stages, talk to Belkins.

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