How to Perform

a Sales Pipeline
Audit
Why should I perform a sales
pipeline audit?
From predicting future results to accurate forecasting, a pipeline audit is
an important initiative for sales leaders to undertake. The data captured
from this exercise surfaces trends and reveals gaps that helps leaders make
decisions that impact their company’s sales process.

Boost your sales pipeline with Crunchbase Enterprise.

Pipeline auditing brings sales managers and executives confidence that they
understand their current sales scenario at a granular and eagle-eye level,
and therefore can address gaps or build upon strong points.

Lacking visibility into what’s going on in your pipeline can lead to an

ineffective sales strategy and little to no stakeholder alignment.

How to Perform a Sales Pipeline Audit 2

How often should I audit my
pipeline?
Pipeline audits are designed to spot trends, both positive and negative. As is
the case with trends, they take time to form so doing a pipeline audit every
day wouldn’t be effective. Likewise, auditing once a year could allow issues
to go uncorrected simply because they weren’t identified.

Find a happy medium for your organization. Allow a few weeks or months,
enough time for trends to materialize, but not so long that if an issue goes
unaddressed the whole time that it’s detrimental to the company.

Many sales organizations utilize sales periods for tracking quotas and
conducting regular sales reviews. This is typically a good place to start.
For your next sales period review, do a pipeline audit first and discuss your
findings with the salespeople. Continue this practice for the next couple
of review periods, determine if that time frame makes sense for your
organization and, if necessary, adjust accordingly.

Utilize a CRM
The first step is having a sophisticated system that tracks where leads
are in your sales cycle. Excel spreadsheets work fine for young or smaller
businesses, but eventually, a CRM will become critical to efficiency.

These systems often have lead scoring and reporting capabilities that will
prove helpful in this audit process.

How to Perform a Sales Pipeline Audit 3

What is your sales cycle?
The next step is to understand the different stages in your sales cycle. A
typical pipeline process will have around five steps:
1. Initial contact
2. Lead qualification
3. Demo/presentation/meeting
4. Proposal
5. Closed

The goal here is to have just enough steps to capture critical milestones in the
sales cycle. You may have underlying stages, or sub-stages, that you also track.
However, they should be grouped within one of the broader stage values.

How to Perform a Sales Pipeline Audit 4

Conversion and close rates
The goal of any stage should be to either disqualify a lead or move it on to
the next stage. The rate at which leads move from one stage to another
is a good indicator of how effective your sales strategy, or salesperson
performance, is at that stage.

In evaluating conversion rates, you may also want to include metrics on how
long leads stay in a particular stage and compare that to the conversion
rates to determine the role that time plays in this equation.

Lead scoring
Another metric that helps perform this pipeline audit is the idea of lead
scoring or ranking. This is a calculation that applies a certain score for
prospects that uses their budget, readiness to purchase, the overall need for
the solution and their authority to sign a contract in order to determine leads
that are more or less likely to close.

You may also decide to include factors like industry, geography or number of
employees in this calculation.

How to Perform a Sales Pipeline Audit 5

I’ve done a pipeline audit,
now what?
So you’ve ended your sales period, conducted a pipeline audit, identified
some areas for improvement. Now it’s time to take action. Here are a few
things that you may need to do next.

Log everything
One thing that doing a sales pipeline audit will uncover is how much
salespeople are engaging with your CRM, or whatever organizational
structure is in place. For optimal tracking, it’s critical that salespeople enter
as much as information about ongoing deals as possible.

If a salesperson only updates her information when a deal is closed, it’s

pretty hard to track or analyze anything that leads up to that. Contrarily, if a
salesperson updates the system for every touchpoint, each of these changes
can be tracked and analyzed during a pipeline audit.

Adding the idea of a pipeline audit to your sales organization will also likely
include adjusting salesperson behavior, especially if the current culture isn’t
to share every update, even the undesirable ones.

How to Perform a Sales Pipeline Audit 6

Give feedback on system
requirements
You may find out during a pipeline audit that your system isn’t telling you the
information that you need it to. Document these improvements and share
them with your sales executives, business development team and IT.

For instance, let’s say your system timestamps when a deal is created and
again when it closes. You find out during your pipeline audit, though, that
you also need to see timestamps on the other stages of your sales cycle, like
when a proposal was sent. You’d like to analyze the amount of time between
sending the proposal and closing the deal as won or lost. Share these types
of updates with the necessary people and get them on the system roadmap.

Get comfortable with your data

Another goal of the pipeline audit is to refine your forecasting abilities. If the
information in the pipeline is incomplete or inaccurate, then sales projections
can also become inaccurate. The more familiar you are with your data,
your customers and your prospects, the better you’ll become at identifying
things like willingness to purchase, spend potential and overall value to your
company.

This will then make your forecasts more accurate, your sales goals more
realistic and your sales outlook, in general, more clear.

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About Crunchbase
Crunchbase is the leading platform for professionals to discover innovative
companies, connect with the people behind them, and pursue new
opportunities. Over 55 million professionals—including entrepreneurs,
investors, market researchers, and salespeople—trust Crunchbase to inform
their business decisions. And companies all over the world rely on us to
power their applications, making over a billion calls to our API each year.

Crunchbase Enterprise
for Sales Teams
Crunchbase Enterprise is built for teams. It enables you to add actionable
data to your CRM or database giving your team the private company
information they need to spot opportunities and make more informed
decisions.

From SaaSOptics significantly reducing its prospecting time within the first
month of use to a business services company increasing its average deal
size by 67%, sales teams use Crunchbase Enterprise to close more deals.

How to Perform a Sales Pipeline Audit 8