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Well-defined sales pipeline stages allow reps to track their deals and nurture their prospect from lead to customer. Whether you’re just getting started in B2B sales management, want to improve your team’s performance with repeatable, proven practices, or anything in between, you need a sales pipeline in place.
In this post, I’ve assembled a step-by-step guide to help you create a blueprint for your sales pipeline stages. After all, when it comes to sales, following a well-defined process is more effective than winging it and trying to engineer your sales pipeline stages while your team looks to you for leadership.
Let’s explore the B2B sales pipeline stages below and review some common scenarios that indicate it’s time to move a step forward towards a closed deal.
Table of Contents
- The 7 Sales Pipeline Stages
- 1. Lead Generation
- 2. Lead Nurturing
- 3. Marketing Qualified
- 4. Sales Accepted
- 5. Sales Qualified
- 6. Closed Deal
- 7. Post-Sales
The 7 Sales Pipeline Stages
- Lead Generation
- Lead Nurturing
- Marketing Qualified Lead
- Sales Accepted Lead
- Sales Qualified Lead
- Closed Deal
- Post-Sale
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1. Lead Generation
The lead generation (aka lead qualification) stage of your B2B sales pipeline is likely packed with prospects like:
- Event attendees.
- Website collateral downloaders.
- Campaign responders.
- Email newsletter subscribers.
- Social media followers.
- SaaS trial subscribers.
- Partner referrals.
- Consultants, research analysts, and influencers.
- Public demo audiences.
Finding ways to identify these species in the wild is key to becoming a high-performing sales professional. Like most sales careers, my experience has involved connecting with prospects ranging from hot prospects to cold tire-kickers and everything in between. I used a range of lead qualification techniques such as the BANT and CHAMP frameworks.
When I worked for IBM, prospects in the lead generation stage fulfilled on or more of these criteria:
- Were in decision-making or decision-influencing roles.
- Had expressed an interest in speaking to someone.
- Had interacted with a campaign asset like a landing page.
- Attended a webinar.
- Seemed to have some pain points Big Blue could solve.
If I called the prospect and they confirmed their interest in working with us, but didn’t have a defined timeframe, need, or budget, I would shift that lead to the Lead Nurturing stage.
If a customer met BANT requirements and was eager to meet with an IBM industry or solution specialist, I often qualified the prospect as a marketing qualified lead, and asked the senior salesperson to “take ownership” of an opportunity so it could be tracked against a marketing campaign.
2. Lead Nurturing
Creating a comprehensive customer profile is critical to getting the prospect into the right lead nurturing stream based on:
- Their role in the decision-making process.
- Their industry.
- The scale and immediacy of the project.
- The customer’s ability to use their own staff for the project relative to their need for consulting, premium support, or a customer success manager.
- Which solution tier would best serve the prospect at onboarding.
- What their long-term needs would be for tier upgrades or add-ons.
In a competitive sales pursuit, automated nurturing activities shouldn’t feel automated (even when they are). It’s easy to lose a prospect to a competitor in the nurturing stage if you don’t demonstrate you value the opportunity to do business with them, or if your nurturing messages aren’t personalized to their needs.
The relationship hasn’t had a chance to take root, and objections over matters like pricing, features, and contract terms could lead to lost deals.
Using lead scoring in the HubSpot CRM is a good way to determine whether it’s time to push the lead further along the pipeline. Other indicators are:
- Repeated website visits.
- Rapid response times to sales outreach.
- Requests for trials or ROI-related content.
Using the right tools to recognize this kind of prospect behavior is critical to understanding that a prospect is eager to do business with your company and to acting on that interest.
Pro tip: I used my company’s CRM for documenting calls, emails, and meetings for many years. Visibility on when a prospect opens a proposal, opens an email, or clicks on a call-to-action is a great trigger for a follow-up call.
3. Marketing Qualified
You might be wondering: If a salesperson is already nurturing a lead, how is it only marketing qualified now? Well, account development reps (ADRs) and sales development reps (SDRs) are often given a set of questions to determine if a lead meets their company’s definition of an MQL.
This sales pipeline stage may work for companies with ADR and SDR teams before sending to a more senior sales rep in stage 4.
For decades, salespeople have called for better quality leads from their marketing counterparts. Yet (as I mentioned above) sales teams gather vital market intelligence during the lead-nurturing stage to personalize marketing campaign messaging, content, and offers. It is a testament to how much sales pipelines have changed that sales qualified leads (SQLs) and MQLs have shifted down the pipeline.
In a perfect world, a salesperson would only do outreach to SQLs that are deemed ready to make a purchase. Yet in reality, few salespeople consider themselves order takers, and there is usually a lot of work left to do to motivate SQLs to order your products and contract your services.
Free Sales Metrics Calculator
A free, interactive template to calculate your sales KPIs.
- Average Deal Size
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- And more!
Download Free
All fields are required.
4. Sales Accepted
In my experience, this sales pipeline stage is determined when a lead becomes a tracked opportunity, and an account executive takes ownership of closing the deal.
Once a rep completes their qualification process and a prospect expresses an interest in speaking to a solution specialist, a lead may be routed automatically for follow-up in a platform like HubSpot CRM based on lead scoring.
When I was an SDR many years ago, it could be challenging to get senior sales reps to formally accept leads until they felt there was a high probability the deal would close. Thankfully, CRM platforms and sales practices have evolved since then. Lead scoring and workflows often accept leads on a sales rep’s behalf if the lead score is high enough.
When the Sales Accepted pipeline stage is used, it tends to be fairly short-term, while the field salesperson:
- Validates the lead information and ensures it meets lead quality criteria.
- Rejects the lead if it doesn’t meet the criteria to maintain sales pipeline hygiene.
- Contacts the prospect and provides feedback to improve lead quality.
- Qualifies the lead and shifts it to the next stage.
5. Sales Qualified
The name of this sales stage tells most of the story: it’s when sales engagement begins, and the prospect is giving strong signals of purchase intent.
Sales qualified leads are tracked in the forecast, and marketing provides lead nurturing support with content assets, case studies, and testimonials. Negotiating price, deliverables, and contract terms is a topic worthy of its own article, but suffice it to say that sales managers should be ready to put their experience to the test and help their reps close deals with confidence and consistency.
6. Closed Deal
The rush of receiving a signed contract or purchase order in your inbox (and the commission payment that follows) is a powerful sales motivator. The relationship transforms from at this point from hunter to farmer.
Each closed deal is a learning opportunity for the next — not to mention the possibility of follow-on sales — and ideally, a testimonial, case study, or reference-worthy client to accelerate future opportunities through the sales pipeline.
Pro tip: Salespeople need to listen and watch for buying signals to know when to ask for the customer’s business. It is better to drop subtle hints or trial close questions along the way than to wait so long to close the deal that you miss out entirely.
7. Post-Sales
A smooth handoff to onboarding teams or customer success managers is vital to a lasting customer relationship.
It’s more important than ever for companies to provide a smooth onboarding process, which doesn’t make the customer feel like they need to restate everything they discussed with the sales specialist.
A salesperson can help their customer success counterpart to learn what to focus on, and what sensitive topics to avoid to ensure a positive onboarding experience.
I recommend having systems and processes in place for tracking things like:
- A new customer’s top business priorities for acquiring your solution.
- Pain points that were identified during discovery.
- Any milestone dates that are important to the customer’s conditions of satisfaction.
How do your sales pipeline stages compare?
Your company’s sales pipeline may differ from the stage names listed above, and you may have fewer (or more) in your process. However you apply this information, keep in mind that a repeatable, systematic approach to sales can help a sales rep know:
- What questions to ask
- What buying signals to watch out for.
- When to move a lead forward (or backward) in the pipeline.
Here’s a question I think it’s important to ask yourself: Does your sales pipeline resemble how you do business today? If your pipeline needs some tweaking, take the time to iterate and ensure your processes, systems, and people are aligned.
Free Sales Metrics Calculator
A free, interactive template to calculate your sales KPIs.
- Average Deal Size
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- And more!
Download Free
All fields are required.
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