Sales Pipeline Management with AiSDR: Features, Benefits, & Best Practices
A robust pipeline is essential for any business that wants to grow quickly. Check out how AiSDR helps with sales pipeline management
A robust pipeline is essential for any business that wants to consistently – and rapidly – grow.
Sales pipeline management is so vital that 72% of sales managers set up multiple meetings each month to review the company’s pipeline with their sales reps.
This is because sales teams are under more pressure than ever before to execute their company’s strategy and reach sales targets.
But ensuring the pipeline flows smoothly is easier said than done.
SDRs and other sales reps are constantly forced to make compromises as they juggle responsibilities, such as whether or not to spend 20-30 minutes on a personalized email or use a one-size-fits-all template for a massive blast.
That’s where AI sales assistants like AiSDR come in. They can handle the routine SDR tasks and high-volume sales pipeline duties so that your sales team has the freedom to tackle urgent, value-added projects.
In the end, everyone’s happy, and your sales pipeline runs as expected.
But before you subscribe to your own AI assistant, here’s a closer look at how a sales AI like AiSDR can help with sales pipeline management.
What is a sales pipeline?
In simple terms, a sales pipeline is a visual representation of the flow and volume of a company’s potential sales deals at any given moment.
When you look at it, you get a snapshot of the company’s sales, which includes:
- Overall sales process
- Prospects
- Deal sizes
- Revenue targets
- Locations of prospects in the process
Think of a sales pipeline as being similar to a roadmap that also shows you how far along the road prospects are.
What is sales pipeline management?
Sales pipeline management describes the process of tracking prospects as they move through each stage of your sales pipeline. In addition to monitoring progress, pipeline management entails:
- Identifying bottlenecks as (or before) they appear
- Allocating sales resources
- Measuring pipeline performance
- Measuring progress towards quota
- Stopping pipeline leakage
Effective pipeline management should help your sales team run like a well-oiled machine that spends more time on high-value projects and less on tedious admin work.
Key benefits of AiSDR for sales pipeline management
AiSDR helps sales teams by collecting insights into how leads respond to your emails. It further automates conversations and speaks with your prospects in your voice.
Buyer intent tracking
AiSDR uses a prospect’s buyer intent to create tailored content that resonates. You can also use external data such as recent LinkedIn activity and HubSpot data to further enrich your messaging.
Using your lead qualification guidelines and intent data, AiSDR prospects and pursues potential customers who fit what you’re offering. All messages are then personalized based on where the lead is at in their sales journey, and any leads who show interest will be flagged for your attention.
In-depth customer conversations
What makes AiSDR one of the 3 best virtual SDR agents on the market is its most detailed and flexible AI sales configuration. Not only does this keep content created by the AI in line with your company’s tone and voice, but it helps emails and texts sound like you wrote them.
On top of that, follow-ups are contextualized and maintain the flow of the conversation. The language used is crisp, concise, and to the point. At the same time, the AI SDR answers questions, addresses concerns, and even handles referrals.
Best practices for sales pipeline management
Generally speaking, there’s no correct one-size-fits-all approach to managing sales pipelines. But the end of the day, what’s most important is that your pipeline is full and flowing.
Here are some best practices to help keep your sales pipeline in full running order.
Monitor your sales metrics
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
This still holds true when it comes to sales pipelines. To make improvements where they matter, you need to measure and track relevant metrics, such as the percentage of qualified leads, the number of deals in the pipeline, and the conversion rate.
And you need a holistic picture that accurately reflects your pipeline’s performance. This means bringing together the most relevant metrics to your business and organizing them in a way that makes them easy to interpret.
Streamline your sales process
Develop a standardized sales process that you can easily repeat and scale. By following consistent steps, you can remove unnecessary tasks and finetune and speed up your workflow. Adding useful pipeline management tools for every stage makes the process even more efficient.
Constantly improve the sales process
Just because you standardize your process doesn’t mean you’re setting it in stone. You still need to consistently review, update, and make improvements where necessary. As your company grows, your sales process has to evolve to keep up. You can check sales rep performance, customer reviews, and sales KPIs to assess the health of your pipeline.
Keep your lead score updated
Make sure your teams don’t get too caught up with bringing countless leads into your sales funnel only to clutter it. Help them focus on high-quality leads by giving them the tools to update lead scoring quickly.
Consistently follow up with prospects
Consistent follow-ups are a key ingredient for closing a deal. But it’s also time-consuming. Certain tools like AI sales assistants make this easier by automating the follow-up process. This prevents leads from slipping through cracks due to a bad day or from simply letting it slip your mind.
Home in on high-value opportunities with a unified strategy
To make the most out of opportunities, you should make sure your teams are aligned. This means your marketing, sales, and support teams must work together to provide high-value leads with the best point-of-sale and onboarding experience.
AiSDR features for sales pipeline management
Pipeline management is a time-consuming and resource-intensive process that can be simplified with the right tech, such as an AI SDR.
Adaptability to your business
AiSDR only needs a link to your website or landing page to gather information, craft a sales persona, and sell your offerings to your ideal customers.
Once you’ve specified your target audience, AiSDR hyper-personalizes emails according to their buyer intent and other lead data. What’s more, AiSDR helps ramp up your daily outgoing volume, giving you more freedom to experiment with outbound approaches and nail down your product-market fit.
Quick customer segmentation
AiSDR’s Lead Discovery engine gives you access to real-time, verified contact information for more than 700 million professionals and 35 million companies worldwide. You can hunt for fresh leads and double down on your current audience with the help of 10+ filters, including industry, location, and recent funding.
Native HubSpot integration
AiSDR’s native two-way integration with HubSpot unlocks a new level of automated email outreach.
Aside from automatically syncing your active and static HubSpot lists, AiSDR can also add new leads to campaigns based on their sales journey and intent. This empowers sales reps to follow up with demo requests, nurture inbound prospects, flag leads that need extra nurturing, and work on converting free trial customers into paying clients.
What’s even cooler is that AiSDR handles this on full auto-pilot, so all the sales reps have to do is click “Launch campaign” and show up when a lead books a meeting.
Opportunities for sales pipeline management using AiSDR
In a perfect world, every sales pipeline runs as mightily as the Mississippi. Unfortunately, in the real world, every sales pipeline has some room for growth and improvement.
Here are some opportunities you can pursue when it comes to sales pipeline management.
Lead qualification
AiSDR can sort through leads for you, allowing you to focus on the most promising ones. Simply connect the pipeline management tool with your spreadsheet, contact form, ZoomInfo, or HubSpot account, specify your qualification and scoring criteria, and let AiSDR handle the rest.
The AI sales assistant will then let you know which leads are qualified and which aren’t.
Lead nurturing
Nowadays, if you want to successfully push your leads along the customer journey, you need to abandon general templates.
The more time has passed, the less effective templates have become. They used to be a good way of adding a basic level of personalization, but they don’t get the job done anymore. (That being said, templates are a handy way of training AI SDRs about your writing style.)
For best results, emails should have deep personalization based on social media data, behavioral triggers, and any other reliable sources of data.
This is why every email and text message crafted by AiSDR uses a lead’s HubSpot and LinkedIn data to tailor content.
And because every message is 100% unique, templated nurturing sequences become a relic of the past. Instead, AiSDR adjusts nurturing emails to make every sales material more resonant for the receiving lead. As a result, your conversion rates and engagement grow.
Cold outbound
AiSDR works not only on inbound requests, but also on cold outbound.
To make sure your emails land in inboxes (and not spam), AiSDR:
- Automates mailbox warm-up and cooldown
- Triple checks every lead for possible bounces
- Includes unsubscribe links and other mandatory elements
- Avoids sending more than 50 cold emails in a day per mailbox
- Scales outgoing volume by using multiple mailboxes to send campaign emails
- Schedules multiple follow-ups per lead in advance
- Pauses (and resumes) outreach according to out-of-office auto-replies
AiSDR handles all these tasks on auto-pilot, freeing your sales team to focus on high-value opportunities. To top it off, AiSDR sales assistant replies to every lead response with the goal of getting them to book a meeting.
Market research
AiSDR allows you to conveniently set up and launch a specialized outreach campaign that attempts to gather data and insights about your target audience. The AI sales assistant proceeds to manage meaningful conversations with recipients at scale. This includes sending surveys and running interviews.
The greater amount of data collected makes it easier for you to pinpoint your ideal customer’s exact pains and problems, as well as validate your hypothesis.
Grow your pipeline more effectively with AiSDR
AiSDR helps you build a steady stream of new prospects so that your calendar is filled with meetings. Every message sent by the AI sales assistant is hyper-personalized with the intent of selling your product or service without becoming overly aggressive or salesy.
The cherry on top?
AiSDR engages 100% of your leads while preventing possible deals from slipping through any cracks in your sales pipeline. This degree of automation minimizes pipeline leakage and saves your team from becoming spread too thin trying to manage follow-ups.
