Great sales organizations close 30-40% of their deals, basically working with 60-70% process waste. No other business function could survive these levels of waste. Reducing waste is no longer a dream. The market is pushing hard to get an agile sales process.

In a post-pandemic world full of uncertainty, selling complex million-dollar projects can be a frustrating and long-term issue. The new B2B digital buyer has more alternatives. However, in an effort to avoid buying solutions that won’t fit their very specific and challenging needs, the number of alternatives is delaying his decision. Helping our customers make the best decisions in a sales process is a key success factor, but it can not happen if we continue to focus only on closing a sale instead of understanding actual needs.

Traditional pipelines in CRMs are only built to measure financial KPIs and put pressure on closing instead of understanding the actual root cause of the customers’ problems. This can lead to slower results and stress.

Reducing waste and increasing close rates are crucial for businesses. Taking Lean principles to sales can resolve this problem and has brought amazing results to the sales process.

Increasing close rates up to 80% and avoiding 70% waste is one of the greatest wishes in all sales operations. To achieve this, it is necessary to prepare and commit to any task and communicate with customers by identifying and understanding the current pains being experienced by their organizations, departments, and personnel.

The B2B Sales Pipeline has been designed and has long been proven to follow specific steps to deliver value by providing a deep understanding of customer issues and working together with them to develop optimal solutions. By pointing out the Qualification and Exploration phases, we deliver higher results, as well as lifetime value customers, especially in a digital environment.

This Leaner Pipeline template in Kanban Zone will enable you and your team to incorporate an agile sales process by following clearly defined criteria and steps that will identify critical pains in leads and the most efficient way to move forward.

It is important to enable this template with an open mindset and have the willingness to collaborate with customers and sales teams, but especially not rushing any step to get all the relevant information you may need for building successful proposals. We suggest you start by using this template to enable a prioritization process within the sales team to classify and define the best timely approach for important leads. Preparation and understanding are extremely important. It is important to ensure there is a consensus regarding specific KPIs: current customer critical pain points and status of leads.

The first 3 stages will give you and your team the opportunity to prepare for any contact with prospects. The relevant stages are Scouting, Contact, and Meeting Preparation. It is quite important to understand your prospects’ business models, and their core business, but especially have more empathic conversations. Customers love to talk to someone that is familiar with their business.

The Qualification/Exploration phase is the most important stage. Here you will have the opportunity to get a deeper understanding of your customers, not by selling, but by mapping their situation, wishes, and especially their needs. We highly recommend using a digital board solution if you have virtual meetings and share in real-time your overall understanding of customer issues to enable transparency with your customers.

After following all the meeting criteria with your prospects, make sure to focus on building leaner proposals with the most critical pains identified and explain detailed solutions to your customers. This will allow you to adapt and move forward on what they want.

Remember, customers do not want to merely buy a product solution, they want their problems resolved.