Sales pipeline management: How RevOps can help Sales create more pipeline

RevOps — or revenue operations — is a strategic business function that aligns sales, marketing,customer success, and any other revenue-generating teams to drive revenue growth and improve customer experiences.

At a high level, RevOps focuses on optimizing processes, data, and technology across the entire business including the customer lifecycle, from lead generation to customer retention and everything in between. By breaking down silos and fostering cross-departmental collaboration, RevOps ensures a unified approach to revenue generation and customer satisfaction, leading to increased sales efficiency, higher revenue, and better customer outcomes.

To optimize revenue, RevOps teams stay laser-focused on sales pipeline, a series of stages prospects go through until they convert into paying customers. At LeadIQ, these steps include prospecting, lead generation, discovery calls, handling objections, nurturing leads, making proposals, negotiating, closing, and post-sales engagement, but every business is different and may encompass different stages. 

The sales pipeline plays a critical role in revenue generation by providing sales teams with a structured process for managing and tracking opportunities, and more importantly by helping businesses understand what to expect. By effectively managing the pipeline, sales teams can identify and prioritize high-value prospects and target their efforts accordingly. They can also forecast revenue more accurately, allocate resources more efficiently, and ultimately increase revenue for the organization.

The power of purpose-built sales prospecting hubs

Since sales pipelines are so crucial to understanding business health, organizations need to do everything they can to optimize pipeline management.

To this end, more and more sales teams are deploying prospecting hubs like LeadIQ, which consolidate prospecting tools and help reps work more effectively. With a centralized tool like LeadIQ powering prospecting workflows, sales teams benefit from tech stack integration and consolidation. As a result, data is shared and synced across tools, and reps are able to use some tool functions within other tools. For example, LeadIQ job change signals and contact data can be shared back and forth between sales engagement platforms like Gong Engage, and LeadIQ Scribe can be used to generate messages in Outreach or Salesloft. 

With a prospecting hub at your disposal, reps can eliminate tab switching and tool hopping — reclaiming as much as 9% of their time while reducing context switching.

Which begs the question: How much ground could your team cover with that much more time?

In this piece, we examine the vital role RevOps plays in sales pipeline management, key metrics RevOps teams use to evaluate pipeline health, challenges associated with relying on too many prospecting tools, the benefits a unified Prospecting Hub can deliver, and what the future of RevOps looks like. 

What is the role of RevOps in sales pipeline management?

RevOps bridges the gap between sales strategy and execution by ensuring alignment across teams, improving data management, and optimizing prospecting workflows. 

By facilitating collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer success, RevOps keeps all teams on the same page, working together toward common goals. Such alignment is critical when it comes to maximizing the impact of sales efforts and ensuring consistency in messaging across touchpoints.

One of the key areas of focus for RevOps teams is data management and analytics. By centralizing data from different departments and systems, RevOps provides comprehensive insights into customer interactions, sales performance, and market trends. As a result, they can take a data-driven approach to decision-making and strategic planning, helping them craft more effective sales strategies.

At the same time, RevOps plays a key role in optimizing seller workflows and sales processes. By identifying inefficiencies and removing bottlenecks, RevOps streamlines operations, allowing sales teams to focus on the highest value activities and drive better results faster.

One way to do this is by building an integrated tech stack that enables RevOps to effectively manage data, automate repetitive workflows, and discover insights across the revenue cycle. For example, by connecting the team’s CRM system and sales automation tools to a purpose-built prospecting hub, RevOps can ensure that reps are always working off of accurate data — enabling them to prospect more efficiently every day. 

Key metrics RevOps uses to evaluate pipeline health

To measure pipeline health, RevOps relies on several key metrics to gauge performance and identify areas of improvement. These include:

• Pipeline coverage, which measures the ratio of potential revenue in the pipeline compared to sales targets indicating whether there are enough opportunities to meet goals.

• Conversion rates, which tracks the percentage of leads or prospects that progress through each stage of the sales process, highlighting sales efficiency and effectiveness in converting opportunities.

• Average deal size, which determines the average value of deals closed, providing insights into revenue potential and helping to set realistic sales targets.

• Sales velocity, which evaluates the time it takes to close deals from initial contact to final purchase, indicating how efficiently sales teams are operating and how accurate forecasts are.

• Win rate, which calculates the percentage of deals won out of the total number of opportunities, reflecting sales team effectiveness and competitiveness in the market.

• Lead response time, which measures the time it takes for sales reps to respond to leads or inquiries, impacting lead engagement and conversion rates.

• Customer acquisition cost, which assesses the costs associated with acquiring a new customer, helping to optimize marketing and sales investments for better ROI.

• Customer lifetime value, which estimates the total revenue a customer is expected to generate over their lifetimes, guiding customer acquisition and retention strategies.

• Churn rate, which tracks the percentage of customers who cancel their subscriptions or stop buying products, indicating customer satisfaction levels and the effectiveness of retention efforts.

By keeping their fingers on the pulse of these metrics, RevOps can figure out what’s working and what isn’t, using that data to continuously improve processes.

The challenges of prospecting without a centralized system

While it’s certainly possible to prospect without a centralized prospecting hub, teams simply won’t be able to move as fast as they otherwise could.

Lacking a centralized system, reps are slowed down by tool fragmentation and end up using multiple disconnected platforms for prospecting, which adds inefficiencies to workflows and creates data silos. As a result, data doesn’t sync across systems, causing discrepancies while preventing reps from seeing the complete picture of each prospect.

Without a consolidated stack, reps need to constantly jump between tools and tabs to gather prospect data. Not only does this waste valuable time, it also diminishes productivity; one report, for example, found that 45% of workers say context switching makes them less productive while 43% say it causes fatigue. 

Such suboptimal workflows pose the biggest threats to sellers with a large number of accounts, who may find it challenging to prioritize and target prospects effectively — causing them to miss opportunities, which lowers conversion rates.

Additionally, fragmented tool stacks also mean sellers don’t have easy access to historical data and contact information. This further impedes prospecting efforts, since reps can’t swiftly leverage past interactions or track prospect engagement over time. 

Unfortunately, this lack of insight into behaviors, interactions, and preferences makes it that much harder to personalize outreach and build meaningful relationships — which ultimately hurts all of the metrics we talked about earlier. 

How an integrated sales tech stack helps with prospecting and pipeline building

Instead of cobbling tools together, teams are best off deploying a centralized prospecting hub that integrates with the larger sales tech stack.

With an integrated tech stack and prospecting hub, reps get access to robust contact data that’s enriched and continuously validated, and they can also easily track job changes and even write personalized emails harnessing the power of AI.

For the best results, teams should look for a prospecting hub that plays nicely with the other tools you use everyday — including CRMs (e.g., Salesforce and HubSpot), sales engagement software (e.g., Gong, Outreach, and Salesloft), and LinkedIn Sales Navigator — which is exactly how we designed LeadIQ.  

Keep data in sync across the entire prospecting stack

With an integrated tech stack, teams can rest comfortably knowing that data remains synchronized across the entire stack, eliminating discrepancies and ensuring data consistency. This synchronization prevents data silos and inaccuracies that often occur when reps use disconnected tools. By maintaining data integrity, sales teams can trust the information they access, leading to more informed decision-making and more accurate forecasting. 

What’s more, a synchronized prospecting stack facilitates seamless collaboration between team members, as everyone has access to the same up-to-date information. Add it all up, and keeping data in sync with a centralizing platform streamlines operations, enhances productivity, and improves the overall effectiveness of prospecting efforts.

Streamline prospecting efficiency

Since the right prospecting hub will work inside the tools you’re already using, prospecting efficiency improves as each part of the sales tech stack works seamlessly together. This enables reps to navigate prospecting tasks faster — without wasting time toggling between tabs and losing productivity to dreaded context switching.

This seamless integration enhances productivity by providing a smooth workflow and reducing friction in the prospecting process. In turn, sales teams can focus more on engaging with prospects and less on navigating between systems — ultimately leading to increased effectiveness and higher conversion rates.

Gain deep insights into utilization and pipeline creation

With data flowing seamlessly across your stack, RevOps teams can easily surface valuable insights into the team’s impact on pipeline creation. 

Through robust analytics and intuitive real-time dashboards, RevOps can track key metrics like lead generation rates, pipeline velocity, and conversion rates to understand team performance better. By analyzing these metrics, RevOps can identify additional areas of improvement and optimize strategies and processes accordingly. 

As an added bonus, sales managers can monitor the same dashboards in real time, providing timely coaching and support to improve team performance and bringing the organization that much closer to exceeding sales goals.

Future trends in RevOps and prospecting

As technology continues to evolve, so too will the way RevOps empowers sales teams to reach their full potential. 

Today’s leading RevOps teams are keeping their eyes on emerging tech, and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in particular. After all, these technologies can revolutionize prospecting processes by automating repetitive tasks, analyzing vast amounts of data rapidly, surfacing actionable insights across reams of data, and even helping reps personalize outreach at scale.

On top of this, AI-powered tools can also enhance lead scoring, allowing sales teams to prioritize high-quality prospects and allocate resources more effectively. Further, machine learning algorithms can identify patterns and trends in prospect behavior, supporting more robust personalized and targeted outreach strategies. 

Beyond this, some teams are even utilizing AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants to streamline prospect interactions, providing instant responses and support throughout the buyer’s journey by answering questions as they come in, 24 hours a day. 

As AI and ML continue to evolve, we can expect to see even greater integration into RevOps and prospecting workflows, leading to even more operational efficiency — and faster revenue growth. 

Does your team have the best sales pipeline management tools?

By increasing cross-departmental alignment, optimizing prospecting workflows, shattering data silos, and equipping reps with the tools they need to close more deals, RevOps has the power to transform the way organizations operate.

In a world that moves faster every day, RevOps must stay focused on the prize: managing the sales pipeline effectively and accelerating pipeline growth.

If your sales team is still relying on fragmented tools to power prospecting workflows, they simply can’t keep pace with the best oiled sales machines — which translates into missed opportunities, slower sales velocity, and lower win rates.

Is your sales tech stack as efficient as it could be? It never hurts to evaluate your current prospecting tools to see where you might be lacking.

To find out why LeadIQ is the ideal prospecting hub for sales and go-to-market teams at SaaS organizations, schedule a demo today to learn how you can bake even more efficiency into your team’s prospecting workflows.

Feeling more adventurous? Get started with LeadIQ today for free.