The Vidyard Team
A strong sales pipeline lets you plan and forecast more accurately. Learn how to build a robust sales pipeline in 4 steps.
Does your sales pipeline feel more like drinking from a straw rather than a steady stream? Don’t worry—this is a solvable problem.
Your sales pipeline offers an estimate of how much business your salespeople expect to close in a specific week, month, or year. This estimate, in turn, helps with sales forecasting, planning for growth, and preparing for whatever’s around the corner.
But how exactly do you go about building (and maintaining) a sales pipeline in the first place? And why is video so important to that process?
We’ll break it all down below.
- Contents
- What is a sales pipeline?
- How to build a sales pipeline from scratch
- What are the benefits of a sales pipeline?
- Why sales pipeline management is important
- 5 important sales pipeline metrics to track
- How to calculate your sales pipeline
- Improving your sales pipeline with a CRM and sales tools
- How Vidyard can help build your sales pipeline
- A “good sales pipeline” is a process
What is a sales pipeline?
A company’s sales pipeline is a visual representation of how many prospects you have and where each of them are in the sales cycle.
It’s more than just another B2B sales buzzword. It’s a critical part of long-term sales team success.
Without having a clear and actionable view into where prospects are within the sales cycle, you can’t increase sales velocity, upsell/cross-sell, or have any real path to predictable revenue growth.
Establishing a strong sales pipeline is also a great way to gain visibility into the successes and failures of your sales efforts. You can also more accurately predict future revenue and spot resource or skill shortfalls to build up those areas on your team or sales materials.
How to build a sales pipeline from scratch
Are you just building out your sales team? Constructing a whole new go-to-market team? Launching a shiny new product?
If you’ve found that your pipeline is stagnant, or you’re nervous about growing pipeline for a new product or service line, you need to pay special attention to the way you approach it—even if you already have a robust set of sales processes.
Here are four easy steps to start building your sales pipeline:
- Step 1: Design your sales cycle
- Step 2: Identify your ideal customers and target accounts
- Step 3: Find internal contacts at those target accounts
- Step 4: Move qualified leads through the sales cycle
Let’s take a closer look at each step of the sales pipeline building process below.
Step 1: Design your sales cycle
A sales cycle is the buyer journey you create, from awareness and education to negotiation and sale.
A “sales cycle” and a “sales pipeline” are two distinctly different things.
- Sales cycle: The series of defined steps and criteria that a seller-buyer combo must fulfill in order to progress down the sales funnel.
- Sales pipeline: A visualization of the value of the potential details contained within each step of the sales cycle. It’s a calculated estimate of how much revenue your team can close in a specific week, month, or year.
The most important step in building a sales pipeline is clearly defining your lead qualification criteria for prospects to move from one step to the next. This could include responding positively to a cold outbound email, fitting certain lead criteria, such as team size or budget, or asking for a proposal.
The typical sales cycle is seven steps long, and looks something like this:
1. Prospecting and initial outreach
To start, your reps should find and connect with interested buyers via cold outreach, video prospecting, or by following up on inbound leads.
2. Lead qualification
The first discovery meeting is all about digging deep into the prospect’s pain points and demonstrating exactly how your product can eliminate them. Your top priority is getting to know the prospect’s pains, showing them how your product can make their life easier, and figuring out if they’re qualified.
Once you have clear indicators that they are qualified, you should establish next steps like scheduling a full product demo or bringing in other members of the buying committee. Sending over educational resources and case studies after the call can also be helpful in keeping prospects engaged.
If they’re not qualified, don’t sweat it. They may have a need for your solution in the future.
3. Sales pitch, product demo, and education
Next, you’ll want to educate your decision-makers on all the features you offer, especially those that solve the particular pains you identified during discovery. While sales processes can be standardized, each buying committee is unique. So while one prospective customer may just need a single demo, others will need 3-4 demos, security reviews, and maybe even meeting them in-person to close the deal.
During this step of the process, it’s all about ensuring the prospect is actually interested in your solution. Deals can often stall in this stage. Some ways to push prospects further down the funnel include following up with personalized video demos that can be shared with the buying committee, sharing in-depth product marketing materials and case studies, or making introductions to existing customers who can vouch for your product or service. At the end of the day, your goal is to arm the prospect with all the information they need to feel confident in making a purchase.
4. Objection handling
Objection handling is a natural part of selling. Your reps will have to overcome these hesitations in order to put the buyer at ease and earn their trust.
To do this successfully, reps need to think critically about how a buyer’s internalized objections may be coloring conversations. Some traditional objections include uncertainty about the return on investment (ROI), competing priorities, and total cost.
Once you’ve identified the objection, you’ll want to handle it with care. Remember, the best salespeople ally themselves with buyers and demonstrate empathy for potential concerns.
Video is a powerful tool at this step of the sales cycle, because you can quickly and effectively talk through complex topics or demonstrate parts of your product that would otherwise be hard to explain over email. Perhaps you want to walk them through the setup of an important integration or show them how easy it is to provision new users from the admin portal. You can record the video and send it along without calling another live call.
5. Send a proposal
At this point, if the prospect is ready to see a proposal, you’ll want to make sure you’ve checked the following boxes with them:
- Clear outline of their requirements and budget expectations
- Clear expectations of what the proposal will cover
Video is a great tool to introduce or walk buyers through the sales proposal. Quick videos can clarify the scope and proactively answer buyers’ questions, all in a format that can be easily shared with other stakeholders.
6. Close the deal
Finally, everyone’s favorite part! Once you’ve sent the proposal, it’s important to stay engaged until your prospect has signed on the dotted line. You never want to drop the ball in the final minutes of the fourth quarter—so make sure your reps clearly define the criteria that must be met as they inch toward the finish line.
After you send the contract, you might get nervous if you don’t hear back immediately. That’s okay. Contracts usually have to be reviewed by a handful of people, including lawyers, before signing—which always takes longer than hoped it would.
A great way to stay connected while not looking desperate during this final stage is to send a personalized video expressing your excitement and letting them know what to expect for next steps once the deal is signed.
7. Follow up and get referrals
Great customer relationships don’t end when you ring the bell. There are still opportunities for your team to provide top-class service and engagement.
Here are four ways to nurture that relationship, drive retention, and turn your customers into your biggest advocates:
- Deliver a seamless onboarding experience by setting the right expectations and providing a dedicated point of contact to guide the customer through the process
- Share news about recently launched product features or invite them to swing by your company’s booth if you know you’ll both be attending an event. You can use Vidyard to send these communications via AI Avatar videos. You can send the same video link to your entire account list—Vidyard takes care of automatically personalizing the video for each viewer.
- Build a feedback loop that gathers customers’ comments, which your team can use to further improve the experience
- When asking for referrals, try strategically timing your requests after big wins by offering incentives or creating a referral program that makes it worth their time
Learn how video boosts your results at every stage of your sales process. Read the Guide Step 2: Identify your ideal customers and target accounts
Whether you’re launching a new product/service or are just getting started building your sales pipeline, you should be thinking about who you plan to sell to—aka your buyer persona or ideal customer profile (ICP).
Characteristics of your ideal sales targets might include their existing tech stack, company size, or industry. While we all want to believe our product is the best thing since sliced bread, boiling the ocean is never a good sales strategy. Focus your efforts on a specific niche, and if you catch a straggler outside that criteria, maybe you can learn from them to expand into a new area next.
Step 3: Find internal contacts at those target accounts
Salespeople don’t talk to companies—they talk to humans. That’s why locating specific internal contacts, gatekeepers, and those with decision-making power within a company is important. Get their contact information including names and titles—and even more importantly, do your research.
Don’t overlook how video can help you build human relationships while prospecting. A 30-second intro video can build an authentic connection from the very first touch.
Vidyard’s Video Sales Agent makes it easy to create and send these kinds of personalized introductions at scale. With a one-time workflow setup triggered by buyer actions like downloading content from your website, our Video Sales Agent can automatically connect with prospects using your AI Avatar. Watch this 3-minute video to learn more. 
Step 4: Move qualified leads through the sales cycle
This step in building a sales pipeline is about steadily moving sales opportunities through the funnel—ideally increasing sales velocity with every quarter. To create a repeatable streamlined process, you need to know (and double down) on what’s resonating, while always keeping the buyer’s needs and questions front and center.
What are the benefits of a sales pipeline?
A well-defined sales cycle is the greatest indicator of year-over-year revenue growth. There’s a 15% difference in revenue growth between companies with a formal and defined sales process versus those without one.
If that isn’t enough proof of the benefits of a healthy sales pipeline, here’s an in-depth look into some of the other top benefits of building a sales pipeline.
1. Gain greater visibility into sales efforts
Without actionable visibility into what’s happening in the sales process, you’re basically setting your sales team up for failure. By defining the different stages of the sales cycle and the likelihood to close, you can gain visibility into the value of your sales pipeline and estimate when you’ll achieve this revenue.
2. Identify ways to improve every deal
While there are ways to improve your overall sales pipeline, there are also opportunities for learnings within each deal. For example, by taking a look at the specific actions that led to marquee closed deals, you can uncover a certain piece of marketing material that really resonated or a specific product walkthrough was used across multiple winning conversations. This helps teams in the micro, while building an overall healthy pipeline helps the business in the macro.
3. Gain more potential buyers
While defining your ideal customer profile is part of building a sales pipeline, you should always be refining it by uncovering potential new common threads or traits in your best customers. If you’re analyzing similarities between customers, you can then more easily identify them once a new lead comes in—or, even better, create a target list of accounts for cold emailing or cold calling based on these newly uncovered traits.
Why sales pipeline management is important
Once your sales pipeline is fully defined, the next step is sales pipeline management. This is the process of tracking and optimizing revenue-generating sales activities to streamline the entire process.
Here are a few best practices for sales pipeline management.
- Automate tasks with tech: Make sure your team is spending their time wisely. Consider exploring the latest AI sales agents to automate basic tasks like CRM updates. For example, Vidyard’s Video Sales Agent automates the creation and delivery of one-to-one personalized videos, triggered by specific buyer actions as they’re logged in your sales tools.
- Work backwards to predict revenue: To know how many companies you need in each stage of the funnel to hit your revenue goals, sales leaders can work backwards by comparing their overall revenue goals and timelines with the value of the current companies in each step of the process. There are only so many levers—you either need to add more to the top of the funnel, or close existing deals faster to clear the funnel out… or a bit of both.
- Work on the deficits: While you should always double down on what’s working, it can be equally as important to take a magnifying glass on deals your team lost, especially those near the end of the process. If you start to see the same things happening in a future deal, develop clear actions that sales reps can take to get things back on track.
What does a good sales pipeline look like?
You might think you’re crushing it…but are your sales goals calibrated correctly? Are you setting the bar too low? Or too high?
It can be hard to know, especially when just starting to build out the stages of a sales pipeline or when launching a new product.
The most simple analysis of sales pipeline health is this: It should look like a funnel. The top, where leads enter, should be wide. The bottom, where deals close, should be narrow.
If your sales pipeline is a little misshapen, here are some changes to consider:
- Wide at the top: Your lead generation is bloated, meaning that too many leads are coming into the funnel. Your reps might not have enough time to chase every lead. Alternatively, those leads may not be qualified enough to make it through the middle and bottom stages, meaning that marketing needs to adjust messaging and/or targeting.
- Wide in the middle: Deals are stalling mid-funnel, and it’s creating a bottleneck. This has knock-on effects for your entire sales pipeline. If your team is spending too much time and effort trying to push those stuck deals along, make sure that they’re equipped with sales enablement material to build trust with prospects.
- Wide at the bottom: You need to spend more hands-on effort to guide those almost-done deals across the finish line. The finish line is between you and a competitor. Did they mention any other companies in the sales process? Have material ready to discuss you versus them, pricing, and the immediate value you can create for them.
5 important sales pipeline metrics to track
Many new sales leaders forget to see the forest for the trees when it comes to determining which sales pipeline metrics to track. You only have so much time to analyze the data in your weekly workflow. So which sales pipeline metrics should sales leaders focus on the most?
- Total number of qualified leads: This is how many new leads are entering your pipeline. When you apply other formulas to this metric (like the sales pipeline value calculation in the next section), you can use your total number of qualified leads as a basis for sales forecasting.
- MQL to SQL conversion rate: The number of marketing qualified leads converting into sales qualified leads. Low MQL to SQL conversion rate? Put your head together with your marketing team to see how to target better leads.
- Average deal cycle length: This is how long it takes for a lead to pass all the way through your sales cycle to become a closed deal that moves on to onboarding. Knowing your average deal cycle length lets you spot when deals are moving slower than they should be. You can take action to get them moving.
- Close rate: The number of prospects that are ultimately converting into deals. Close rate too low? Explore ways to increase conversions. Close rate out of this world? It seems like that would be a good thing, but it could actually be a sign that your team is inking deals that are bad for revenue. They might cost you later when they quickly churn or require a lot of handholding. Learn more about the importance of your close rate.
- Average deal size: The average value of each deal you close. When you know your average deal size, you can spot large deals (i.e. ones worth prioritizing) and small deals (i.e. ones worth dropping if they prove too troublesome).
Learn more about all the sales metrics you should be tracking.
How to calculate your sales pipeline
Once you’re tracking the sales pipeline metrics outlined in the previous section, you can start using those metrics to calculate performance throughout the stages of the sales pipeline. Here are two formulas worth keeping on top of to calculate the value of your sales pipeline.
How to calculate sales pipeline value
Your sales pipeline value isn’t complicated. It’s just an expression of the value of the opportunities in your pipeline.
Here’s how to calculate it:
(Number of deals in your sales pipeline) x (Your average deal size)
If you can accurately calculate your sales pipeline value, you can confidently set sales goals for this month, this quarter, or this year.
How to calculate sales pipeline velocity
Sales pipeline velocity expresses how quickly leads move through your pipeline. If you know your pipeline velocity, you can spot which opportunities are taking too long to close. They might need help, or they might need to be dropped in order to focus on better-quality deals.
Here’s how to calculate it:
(Number of deals in your pipeline) x (Your average win rate) x (Your average deal size) / (The average length of your sales cycle, in days)
Tracking and calculating sales pipeline metrics manually can be a pain in the neck. That’s where your customer relationship management (CRM) tool and its built-in features come in.
Every CRM software has the basics—but these days, they also usually have advanced analytics and sales pipeline management features that can also help you spot and troubleshoot problem areas in your sales process.
If you’re a smaller company, you might consider CRMs like HubSpot or Pipedrive. Teams that are growing or expanding into new markets or product lines might consider a more robust platform like Salesforce.
If you already have a CRM in place, are you utilizing all of its latest and greatest features?
A tool is only as good as its user. So make sure you’re taking advantage of the add-ons that come with most CRMs—specifically the ones that are designed to improve sales pipeline, such as analytics, automatic updates, notetaking, reminders, and data on what’s bringing in the best leads.
How Vidyard can help build your sales pipeline
A powerful suite of sales tools is just as important to pipeline success as your CRM.
Vidyard’s AI-powered video selling platform amps up the pipeline by helping you engage more buyers, more effectively, throughout your entire sales process. And with the scalable personalization that Video Sales Agent unlocks, you’ll be closing more deals in no time.
Here are three ways you can use Vidyard to fuel your pipeline:
- Automatically create and send personalized, AI-generated videos based on buyers’ behaviors, such as downloading a whitepaper or booking a demo
- Track buyer engagement with video content so your reps can prioritize hot leads and re-engage cold ones
- Maintain a human touch with minimal effort, so every buyer feels valued while every sales rep can spend more time on the most important conversations
Create your own true-to-you AI avatar, then generate full videos with just an AI prompt. Learn More A “good sales pipeline” is a process
Remember that to drive the best results, sales should be considered a process. Like any good process, it should always be adapting and evolving.
Be sure to take time each month to iron out what’s been working and what hasn’t. Where does your pipeline get clogged? Do you need to change up your tactics or add a team member? What feedback have you heard from customers about the process? Stay fluid and flexible to maximize your team, pipeline, and revenue.
The tips, tools, and advice in this guide are a great way to help you kickstart your pipeline building. By getting the foundations right, you can then expand into optimizing lead nurturing, invest in lead scoring, and find ways to decrease sales cycle length.
This post was originally published on June 11, 2019. It was updated on March 31, 2025.
