B2B Sales Pipeline: Guide for Closing More Deals

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the standard 7-stage B2B sales pipeline and provide you with best practices for each stage.

We’ll also provide you with the metrics to track for success to keep your sales team accountable.

What Is The B2B Sales Pipeline?

The B2B sales pipeline outlines the different stages a potential client of your company goes through – from prospecting and outreach to negotiation and closing.

The sales pipeline provides sales teams with clarity and visibility over the buyer journey to better manage leads, forecast revenue, and optimize each stage of the pipeline to close more deals.

➡️ A maintained and consistent sales pipeline ensures that no sales-qualified leads (SQLs) are overlooked and that there’s predictable growth for the business.

Before we begin with the stages of the B2B sales pipeline, we need to discuss the differences between the sales pipeline, the sales funnel, and the sales process.

Sales Pipeline vs. Sales Funnel vs. Sales Process: What Is The Difference

The difference between the sales pipeline and the sales funnel is that the sales pipeline refers to the specific stages taken by the sales team to convert leads into customers, while the sales funnel is the customer journey from awareness to purchase.

And the sales process is the overall strategy, methodology, and documentation on how your sales team should be moving your leads through the pipeline.

Source: Soco.

Put simply, the sales funnel is the customer journey from the client side, while the sales pipeline is the sales process from the salesperson side.

The 7 Standard Stages Of The B2B Sales Pipeline

The stages of the B2B sales pipeline are:

• Prospecting: Identifying potential clients for your organization and doing some initial research before contacting them.
• Qualification & Outreach: Contacting the prospects, qualifying them with a lead scoring system, and asking them to schedule a meeting.
• Initial Meeting(s): Learning more about your customers’ problems and presenting different solutions. Answering questions and tackling common objections.
• Proposal: Presenting a proposal with a tailored solution and pricing model.
• Negotiation & Final Proposal: Negotiating the final price and answering price-related objections. Getting buy-in from every decision-maker.
• Closing: Finishing the deal by sending a contract and following up on them.
• Retention: Providing a good onboarding experience for your new clients to retain them as clients. Asking for referrals when they are seeing positive results.

Let’s go over each one of them in more detail with actionable B2B sales tips on how to improve on each stage: 👇

#1: Prospecting

The first stage of the sales pipeline is the prospecting stage where you are identifying and researching potential clients.

The goal at this stage is to find buyers that align with your ideal customer persona (ICP). 

In this stage, your goal is to pre-qualify potential buyers before you can reach out to them.

Pre-qualifying can include researching their company, industry, revenue, and their job title.

➡️ You then want to create a targeted list of prospects to focus on and prioritize when you are doing outreach.

Prospecting Tips

• Be as rigid as possible when evaluating possible leads. You want the sales team to focus on ideal fits who will have the budget and need for your solution.
• To make your sales process easier, you can use SDR platforms like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and ZoomInfo to find key decision-makers that you can contact.
• Open your prospects’ LinkedIn accounts and try to find as much relevant information about them as possible. Try to gauge their challenges, goals, and current pain points, although it wouldn’t be as visible if they were not actively posting on the platform.

#2: Qualification & Outreach

The next stage in the B2B sales pipeline is lead qualification, which involves assessing the quality and business opportunities of each prospect on your list.

Your goal is to find out if they are going to be a good fit for your solution and if they’ll have the budget to afford it.

After you’ve established what leads you should prioritize, the next step is to reach out to them and introduce your solution.

You can reach out to your leads via phone calls, emails, or social media platforms like LinkedIn. The medium of outreach usually depends on the industry.

During the outreach, you want to continue qualifying your prospects to find out more about their pain points and struggles.

Different types of leads

There are different types of leads, such as:

• Inbound leads: These are leads that you receive from your website, social media channels, or email who are looking to book a meeting with you.
• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): These are the leads that have shown an interest in your company’s solution.
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): These are leads who have moved down in the sales funnel and are moving towards the purchasing stage with a clear intent to buy a solution like yours.
• Warm leads: These are the leads who know about your solution (e.g., from downloading an e-book) but have not requested a meeting.
• Referral leads: These are leads that you received from your current customers who are interested in your solution.

Qualification & Outreaching Tips

➡️ You can use a lead-scoring system to prioritize leads based on attributes, such as their company’s size, job title, revenue, and level of engagement with your company.

For example, your sales team can first reach out to the leads that have decision-making power in their organization, such as CEOs and CMOs, and leads in large enterprises.

Source: Encharge.

As for outreach, you want to carefully consider how you are going to reach out to your prospective B2B clients.

There are some industries where clients are not going to be checking their emails and LinkedIn, since they are always busy.

These are the kinds of leads that you are better off phoning or trying to meet at an event.

As for other leads, if they are active on LinkedIn, you’re better off sending them a LinkedIn InMail with your offer.

➡️ Your goal in the outreach phase is to try and schedule a meeting with your target high-value leads to learn more about your solution.

#3: Initial Meeting(s)

Now that you’ve got your lead interested in your solution and in a call with you, the next step is to start uncovering their needs.

The initial meeting is all about your customers (and not about your solution):

• What are your prospects struggling with?
• What solutions have they tried so far to deal with this problem?
• Where do they want to go in terms of results?

After listening to their story, salespeople then establish a new possible reality with their solution or outline a few possible approaches to tackling the problem.

💡 Think of it like going to a doctor – the doctor wouldn’t outright start recommending you medications. 

They’ll listen to your concerns and then offer a course of action or possible courses of action that you can choose from. 

During this process, it’s important to verify that this prospect is the right fit for your organization.

Even if they operate in a large organization and they seem to be the decision-makers, they might not have funding available for your solution, or they might be looking for a cheaper alternative.

At the end of the conversation, sales development representatives will usually craft a solution for the prospect and answer a few questions and objections.

• If the client is not interested in the proposed solution or does not have a budget for it, this is the time when salespeople usually drop the lead off and move on to the next.
• Alternatively, if the prospect is still interested in the solution, salespeople move them to the next phase – the proposal stage.

What Are The Different Kinds Of Initial Meetings?

There are 2 kinds of an initial meeting, depending on the industry and the buyers’ readiness to buy:

• Connect call: A short, 15-minute introductory meeting where the sales team is connecting with the lead to better understand their situation and build rapport. If they qualify for their solution, they offer a discovery call to the prospect.
• Discovery call: A longer, 30-45-minute conversation, or an in-person meeting, that aims to dive deeper into possible solutions to their problems, timelines, and establishing expertise with the client.

➡️ In more complex B2B deals, there might be multiple meetings with different stakeholders.

Initial Meeting Tips

You can use sales room software like Arrows (our tool) during your meetings with prospects to create a personalized room for your prospect and consolidate all of your sales collateral in one place.

Move beyond generic content with a personalized buying experience that addresses your leads’ unique needs and goals.

Arrows sales rooms let you equip champions with perfectly packaged information they can confidently share with their internal teams.

Here are some of the core features of Arrows sales rooms to help you close more high-ticket deals:

• Engagement activity sync back into your HubSpot account in real-time, including creating and associating new contacts discovered with the deal in the CRM.
• Real-time alerts of when tasks are completed or when your clients ask questions in the sales funnel.

• Resource sharing: Unify all resources and data about each prospect.
• Next meeting sync: A component that stays up-to-date in real-time based on your next scheduled meeting in the CRM.
• Tracking buyer engagement to see which prospects view the sales rooms in real-time.

💡 Our users are achieving a 44% higher win rate with our digital sales rooms than the average win rate for deals over the last 12 months.

Your sales team can control the narrative, build momentum, and secure more deals.

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To help you personalize the sales rooms to your leads, Arrows lets you customize the room’s content based on your prospect’s needs and HubSpot data.

❗Note: Arrows was built for teams that run on HubSpot.

Apart from using digital sales rooms, here are a few other tips for meetings with prospects:

• Be prepared with social proof: You can show case studies of other brands that had similar problems as your leads and how your organization resolved them.
• Build rapport: You want to start building relationships with your prospects on a personal level. This can be done by in-person meetings or by sending them personalized gifts.
• Identify if the lead is the key decision-maker in their organization. If they are not, you should ask if you can schedule a meeting with the decision-maker of their company.
• Engage in active listening: Your sales team should not be going into meetings to discuss how awesome your product is, but rather to listen to prospects and provide them with tailored solutions.

#4: Proposal

After your prospects have shown interest in your solution and you have gone through a few back-and-forth meetings with their stakeholders, it’s time for the proposal.

Depending on your industry, you can approach the proposal in 2 ways:

• A solution presentation: This is a pitch deck that outlines your solution in greater detail and then outlines a timeline for finishing up the project, followed by a pricing slide.
• A document with detailed pricing information and cost breakdown: This is a document, usually in a PDF file, that outlines the cost breakdown of your solution.

At this stage, salespeople craft persuasive visuals and add success stories to demonstrate the potential impact of using their solution.

➡️ It’s important to send the proposal to the key decision-maker of the company or to add them to the conversation during your solution presentation.

Proposal Tips

You can use sales proposal software like Nusii which offers templates for different types of industries and solutions.

For example, if you are a marketing agency, you can build proposals for video production or social media management services.

You can also customize the proposals with your branding and logo to be more professional.

➡️ Another crucial tip is to come prepared to answer common objections and concerns from your clients regarding your offer and solution.

The sales expert Mary Hazeldine proposes an interesting approach: Building your pitch with their objections in mind.

The sales leader recommends addressing questions in your proposal, such as ‘’what’s the risk here’’ and ‘’why should I trust you on this idea’’ so you can tackle objections before they arise.

#5: Negotiation & Final Proposal

Pricing objections are a natural part of the selling process, and your sales team will most likely be asked about discounts and possible reductions in the price.

The negotiation phase is also when the prospective client might want to step back and consult your proposed contract with their legal team regarding contractual obligations.

At this stage, you want to regularly check in with your prospect to figure out the next steps and when you can hear back from them.

➡️ There could be last-minute concerns about the deal too. If you have not identified all of the decision-makers in the process, you might find out that there are roadblocks you did not know about.

Since B2B sales deals are complex, it might take weeks after your proposal to get an answer back from your clients.

Your prospect and their boss will most likely be focusing on the cost and will be running a cost-benefit analysis on your proposal while you’re waiting for a response.

Negotiation Tips

To make the negotiation process easier, you can address problems early on regarding your product or offer and get on board as many decision-makers as possible to your proposal.

This is why, to speed up the process, you can:

• Provide your prospects with ROI calculators that outline how much money they can make or save from incorporating your solution.
• Provide discounts for signing for a longer period of time to have a higher chance of securing the deal.
• Offer a tailored plan that is more expensive in the beginning and then more affordable to alleviate price concerns.

#6: Closing

The final stage of the B2B sales pipeline is to close the deal by getting a verbal and then written agreement.

It’s important to understand that even if your sales team gets a verbal agreement, you have not closed the deal until the contract is signed.

➡️ It can also be the case that the company is undergoing a rough financial year and, even though you got their verbal agreement on the deal, can be looking to reduce the deal size.

After you’ve got the final decision-maker to sign the contract, you can begin onboarding the client, delivering on your promises.

In the scenario that your client ends up declining the deal completely in the end, your sales team needs to identify why that has happened.

You can ask the clients for extensive feedback and to figure out why the deal has fallen through in the end.

It could be an understandable reason, such as not being able to come to a good price point that works for all parties involved, or that they went with a competitor.

💡 If your team loses a deal at the last stage, you can still follow up on your leads every now and then and stay top-of-mind in case they need you in the future.

Closing Tips

If the price was the issue with your initial proposals, you can send an interactive pricing table so your clients can customize their pricing.

If you have a sales proposal software like Proposify in your sales tech stack, you can alleviate pricing concerns by enabling your customers to choose the pricing model that works for them.

Your clients can also eliminate costs from your proposal, such as the implementation fee (e.g., they have the technical know-how to do it).

Apart from interactive pricing tables, you can leverage scarcity to your advantage, such as using a limited-time offer for their organization.

#7: Retention

The final stage of the sales pipeline is the retention phase where your team needs to ensure maximum buyer value from their purchase.

This is the time when the client is taken over by the customer success team who will help them implement the solution and start work on the account.

But it is not over yet for your sales team:

• The account (deal size) can be grown by the sales team after your clients see initial results. For example, you can upsell them to a higher plan.
• Your sales team can also ask for referrals from satisfied customers when they are just seeing results and are satisfied with your solution.

Retention Tips

We believe that how you onboard your new clients plays a major role in retaining them in the long run.

You can use new client onboarding software like Arrows to automate your onboarding process in HubSpot.

Arrows onboarding plans help you create client-facing onboarding plans that attach to your HubSpot deals, tickets, and custom objects.

Our post-sales platform gives your sales team shared visibility into onboarding progress and an easy-to-follow path to success for your new customers.

Arrows’ best-in-class HubSpot integration makes it possible to keep all your new client onboarding out of the platform.

The software is designed to let your customers access their onboarding plans and complete their assigned tasks.

💡 Arrows is rated the #1 App for Customer Success in the HubSpot Marketplace.

How Do Arrows Onboarding Plans Work?

Each plan has tasks that are grouped into phases. Our tool guides your new clients to the next task they need to complete.

You can take your customers to a focused view of each task, which has different task types (from inserting a Google Doc to scheduling a meeting).

Our software then syncs 50+ data points with your HubSpot property, enabling your customer success team to run and keep track of your entire onboarding process inside HubSpot.

Each deal is connected to an Arrows plan powered by our data, which is synced in real-time to your HubSpot platform. 

There, you can trigger automation and get live reports.

What is different about Arrows? The platform combines workflow automation with a simple UI embedded in HubSpot. 

Our tool aims to keep prospects engaged and focused on the deal.

By providing onboarding checklists for your users to complete, you can reduce the onboarding time and increase your team’s capacity.

Here’s why customer success teams choose Arrows onboarding plans:

• Onboard your new customers faster: Keep your new clients on task with clear, easy-to-follow plans personalized to them.
• Increase your team’s capacity: Enable your sales and customer success teams to work out of HubSpot instead of jumping between tools.
• Track progress: Monitor every step of your user’s onboarding journey, from adding their brand’s guidelines to scheduling the initial audit.
• Deep HubSpot integration, which helps you keep your entire team working in HubSpot without creating new inboxes.

Our tool makes it easy for your customers to perform tasks such as uploading files and filling out form fields. The data then syncs back to HubSpot.

Your team will also get access to Arrows onboarding insights, which will help your team uncover insights from your customer onboarding process.

With Arrows onboarding insights, your customer success team will be able to uncover:

• How are plans performing over time for your new clients?
• How long does it take to complete the first task?
• Which tasks are taking too long to complete?
• Where are your customers getting stuck the most?

Interested in trying Arrows out for free? You can connect with HubSpot right away and test out our platform.

Not ready to sign up, yet? Request a demo to receive a walkthrough of Arrows to see how it connects to your sales and onboarding process inside HubSpot. 

Metrics of Success For Your B2B Sales Pipeline

Here are the 5 key metrics of success for your B2B sales pipeline to keep your sales team accountable and improve your performance:

• New high-value leads gained: This metric measures the performance of your prospecting and outreach efforts to find out how many high-quality leads you have generated for your organization.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): This metric evaluates how much it costs, on average, to attract a new client for your organization. You can also measure that metric for different channels of growth.
• Deal win rate: This is the percentage of deals closed compared to the total number of high-value leads gained. This shows your sales team’s effectiveness in converting interested leads.
• Average deal size: This represents the average number of revenue that you generate from each deal. This shows how effective are your salespeople in cross-selling and up-selling different products and services.
• Sales cycle length: This is the time, on average, that it takes for your sales team to close our deals. The shorter that time, the better.

Optimize Your B2B Sales Pipeline With Arrows Sales Rooms & Onboarding Plans

Our digital sales rooms help sales teams close more deals by keeping prospective clients engaged with mutual action plans, resource sharing and milestone tracking.

Arrows also offers purpose-built onboarding plans and client portals that help you manage the entire client lifecycle out of one platform, instead of jumping between tools.

If you’re a sales leader looking for a B2B sales solution that offers:

• Effective buyer engagement tracking to help you see which leads are viewing the sales rooms in real-time and insights into buyer intent.
• A best-in-class HubSpot integration, which is available for all pricing tiers and lets you sync 50+ real-time data points.
• Other presale features, such as real-time alerts, buyer engagement tracking, and next meeting sync.

Then you can start with Arrows sales rooms for free.

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