Sales Pipeline

What drives the sales pipeline and performance?

The Sales Pipeline is a critical early warning system for future opportunities and growth, as well as problem areas. By defining pipeline metrics, you can monitor and manage business trends and make positive functional changes where needed.

The Sales Pipeline should also tie into production and purchasing plans. This way, operations can more effectively manage its processes, make proactive changes to production schedules, and limit reactive purchases due to short-term shortages.

With the Sales Pipeline decision area, you can set planning goals and scorecarding metrics for elements such as:

  • Pipeline ratio (%)
  • Pipeline revenue ($)
  • Sales orders and conversions (% and #)
  • Cancelled order count (#)
  • Active and inactive customers (#)
  • Inquiries ($ and #)
  • New customers and lost business (# and %)

Most importantly, you can analyze these goals and metrics by a number of dimensions to find the hidden gems in the data:

  • Industry
  • Billing customer
  • Time (year, quarter, month, week)
  • Market segment (macro & micro)
  • Brand and Product line
  • Sales territory and Sales channel

Using the Sales Pipeline decision area

You set targets based on your goals and metrics in Sales Pipeline. You monitor your success by looking at how you measure up against your targets. Further, you dive into your results to find the hidden gems.
  • Pipeline revenue ($) : Are we maximizing revenue in some sales territories over others?
  • Inquiries ($ and #) : Why do only 10 percent of customer visits lead to inquiries? What would it take to increase this ratio to 20 percent?
  • Lost business count (#) : Why are some orders lost?
 
Performance Management for Sales Page:1 2 3 4 5 6
 

Additional Resources:


The Performance Manager Book
Book
This book, Proven Strategies for Turning Information into Higher Business Performance uncovers 42 information sweet spots. Understand these areas, and you can drive performance excellence.
Read Now
Cognos Performance Manager
Online Demo
See how plans, financial reports, and scorecards can help you manage performance across all data sources.
Performance Manager Book Abstract
Abstract
The Performance Manager, Proven Strategies for Turning Information into Higher Business Performance Book.
 
I'm interested in better performance— my next steps
 
Sales
Reporting and Performance Management
Online Demo
See reporting as part of managing performance for every department.
Become your business accelerator.
Book
Download the Sales chapter of the Performance Manager book.
Ventana Research - 2007 Performance Management Vendor and Product Scorecard
Article
Cognos ranked as a leading vendor for Performance Management in latest PM Scorecard
The Performance Manager Book
Book
Find out the proven strategies for turning information into real insight for performance management.
Contact Sales