Want to boost sales and improve customer experience? Align your sales pipeline with the buyer’s journey.
Here’s the key: Structure your pipeline around how buyers make decisions. This approach helps you:
- Deliver the right information at the right time.
- Focus on prospects who are ready to buy.
- Increase conversion rates by matching buyer readiness.
- Stand out by prioritizing customer needs.
For example:
- Urbest doubled conversion rates in 3 months by focusing on targeted content and account-based marketing (ABM).
- Reinvently generated $200K in 10 months by blending social selling with ABM.
How to do it:
- Build detailed customer profiles to understand their needs and challenges.
- Align pipeline stages with buyer actions:
- Awareness: Share educational content.
- Consideration: Provide case studies and solutions.
- Decision: Present proposals and ROI details.
- Implementation: Outline onboarding steps.
- Set clear milestones for moving buyers through each stage.
When sales and marketing work together, your pipeline becomes more efficient, customer-focused, and ready to drive growth.
Is Your Sales Process Built for You or Your Buyer?
Key Concepts: Buyer’s Journey and Sales Pipeline
Connecting the stages of a buyer’s decision-making process to your sales pipeline creates a smoother experience for potential customers and helps generate consistent revenue. Matching these two frameworks allows you to:
- Coordinate sales and marketing teams around common goals
- Focus on engaging top-priority prospects effectively
- Provide meaningful value during every interaction
- Increase conversion rates and improve revenue consistency
Let’s take a closer look at the buyer’s journey stages and how they align with specific steps in the sales pipeline.
How to Match Your Pipeline to Buyer Decisions
Build Clear Customer Profiles
Start by creating detailed customer profiles that outline their needs, challenges, and decision-making criteria. This helps align your sales pipeline with their buying behavior. For instance, Urbest managed to double its sales conversations in just three months, with 60% of its deals driven by content and account-based marketing (ABM) [1].
Once you have these profiles, connect each step in your pipeline to specific buyer actions.
Connect Pipeline Steps to Buyer Steps
Aligning your pipeline stages with buyer actions allows you to track progress and ensure your process matches how buyers make decisions. Here’s how you can structure it:
- Awareness Stage: Share educational content and establish thought leadership.
- Consideration Stage: Provide solution-focused materials like case studies.
- Decision Stage: Offer detailed proposals and ROI breakdowns.
- Implementation Stage: Outline onboarding steps and set success metrics.
This approach ensures each stage of your pipeline supports the buyer’s journey effectively.
Set Clear Stage Requirements
Once you’ve mapped your stages, establish clear criteria for moving buyers from one stage to the next. Use specific milestones to guide these transitions:
- Awareness: When the buyer identifies a need, provide educational resources.
- Consideration: As the buyer explores solutions, share targeted content.
- Decision: When the buyer evaluates options, present a proposal and ROI details.
- Implementation: Once the buyer commits, execute the onboarding plan.
A great example of this in action is Reinvently. By creating a tailored outbound process that blended social selling with ABM, they achieved impressive results:
- Generated $200,000 in revenue within 10 months.
- Increased sales-qualified leads by 200%.
- Boosted social platform engagement by 293% [3].
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Tips for Customer-Focused Pipeline Design
Strengthen Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing
Make sure sales and marketing are on the same page when it comes to goals, messaging, and processes. This creates a smooth experience for buyers as they move from awareness to consideration and, finally, to making a decision.
"Misalignment hurts everyone. It kills culture, your bottom line, and most importantly, your customer experience."
- LuckBoosters.com
Use tools and automation to support this alignment and make it easier to scale your customer-focused pipeline.
How Expert Help Improves Pipeline Design
Once you’ve refined your pipeline steps, bringing in specialized consultants can help you maintain momentum and scale effectively. When internal teams hit their capacity, outside expertise can push your progress forward.
Consultants start by evaluating your team, processes, and technology to identify any weaknesses. From there, they create a customized 6–12-month plan based on your market, customer needs, and objectives. Along the way, they fine-tune your pipeline to align with buyer behavior, sidestep common challenges, and deliver measurable results.
Conclusion
Shape your sales pipeline to match the buyer’s journey by focusing on personalized, targeted strategies that reduce friction, deliver value at every step, and help drive growth [1].
To get the most out of your aligned pipeline:
- Bring sales and marketing together with shared goals, metrics, and processes that focus on the buyer.
- Regularly review pipeline performance, adjust stages to meet changing buyer needs, and rely on data to guide improvements.
When internal resources are stretched thin, consider tapping into external expertise to maintain alignment and support growth.