Sales Management for Start-ups and SMEs

Chapter 11 Pipeline and opportunity management How can we best manage this most essential of sales tasks?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003449614-11

Pipeline management: The beating heart of sales management

Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities, begins with the quote, “It was the best of times and the worst of times”. Pipeline management meetings can be like this. I have sat in on numerous sales meetings, where each sales representative anxiously explains what they expect to sell, moving slowly around the table from person to person, like a kind of creeping death. Predictions are often nothing more than wish lists, fuelled by the pressure of the sales manager to ‘lay out a good stall’. These meetings can be pointless, stressful, dull and quite ...