Pipeline Management Best Practice for Professional Service Firms

Businesses that offer professional services must acquire and nurture a steady supply of targeted leads. Pipeline management for architects, accountancy firms, bookkeepers, solicitors, consultants, and other professional services is essential to ensure customer satisfaction and business growth.

In this guide, we will be sharing some practical pipeline management guidelines for professional services.

Follow Up Consistently 

Following up with prospects and existing customers is a crucial element of pipeline management. Research indicates that it usually takes several calls or other forms of contact to sign up a new client. Likewise, contacting previous customers is essential for keeping them onboard or upselling them for additional services. 

Segment Lead Generation

Professional services often target several distinct customer segments. For example, solicitors may offer services related to housing, intellectual property rights, personal injuries, and other areas. You may also offer multiple services. A marketing agency may offer paid advertising management, SEO, social media marketing, and other services.

Segmentation helps provide each customer base with the information and service that best suits their needs. You can create distinct ads, emails, web pages, video channels, and other content for each type of customer.

Keep Your Sales Pipeline Clean

A clean pipeline is well organised and free of dead leads. While following up is important in pipeline management, it's also necessary to remove leads that are unlikely to produce sales. Leads can be considered dead if they specifically tell you not to contact them or if you are unable to contact them (e.g. invalid email or phone number).

Track KPIs

The only way to know how your business's pipeline is performing is to consistently track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The real power of KPIs is that they let you observe which actions yield the best results.

Examples include:

• Conversion rates for particular marketing tactics such as paid ads, email campaigns, or webinars.
• Lead-to-close rate - The number of sales you make relative to the number of leads.
• Number of new customers signed up per month, quarter, or year.
• Average time to convert a prospect into a customer.
• Customer turnover rate - Also known as customer attrition or churn, this measures how many customers a business has lost within a certain period.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - The total revenue you can expect to gain from the average customer.

Provide Useful Content

As a professional business, one of your goals is to position yourself as an authority in your industry. Whether your area of expertise is law, marketing, accounting, or another field, you can build your authority by sharing educational content. Content also helps you drive targeted traffic to your blog and other platforms.  

Consider what type of information is most valuable for your customers and prospects. Sharing articles, blog posts, videos, social media posts, and other quality content is one of the best ways to generate a steady supply of leads.  

Automate Pipeline Management With a CRM

As your business grows, it becomes less efficient to manually manage your pipeline. Using a CRM (customer relationship management) allows you to automate many tasks such as contact management, customer service, tracking sales analytics, sales forecasting, and more. A CRM goes well beyond what you can do with a spreadsheet program such as Excel. It lets you track and manage all of your sales operations.

Outsource Pipeline Management

While a tool such as a CRM certainly enhances your sales process and tracking capabilities, many busy professionals can benefit by outsourcing pipeline management. Outsourcing saves you time and can help your business grow faster, as tasks such as lead generation and follow-ups are handled by experts. 

Hello Hello offers a wide range of services to help businesses generate leads and manage every aspect of their sales operations, including call campaigns, prospecting, public relations, conversion optimisation, and CRM management. To find out more about our services or to arrange a consultation, contact us!