Why Kanban is the Ultimate Choice for Sales Pipeline Management

The sales process is a set of pre-defined and repeatable steps that salespeople need to execute to move leads from a prospect stage to a deal stage and finally close deals to convert them. The best sales organizations have built standardized sales processes and keep optimizing them for the best results. These teams and their salesperson deliver far superior results in converting more deals, driving higher revenue, and executing their work in an automated and efficient manner.

The sales process can be very complex, inconsistent at times, and catering to varied buyer personas with different needs and custom requirements. This is more true for low-volume and highly complex sales journeys. B2B sale is an ideal example where lengthy sales processes involve detailed requirement gathering, demos and presentations, multiple quotations and revisions, negotiations, contracting documents and approvals, solution implementation, and much more. Managing and tracking such processes have been a concern for teams using the classic table or list view in the CRM dashboard.

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Kanban boards for tracking sales deals have been gaining popularity of late. They are a very effective way to manage the overall sales pipeline for user and admin managers. With a Visual framework and a very structured method to track deals, the Kanban board gives a better visual representation for users to process key information and take decisions and actions. Small business teams find Kanban board dashboards extremely useful for managing the sales pipeline and other project management programs which involve deep collaboration.

Key benefits of Kanban Board for Sales teams:

Better Visibility: The most recognizable feature of a Kanban board and the key differentiator is the visualization of the deal board. It makes pipeline management extremely simple, yet effective by helping keep track of all the deals with necessary details. Salespeople can track a high volume of deals in a single screen getting useful information about the deals without actually going into the details of each deal. Using tags and color coding schemes, managing pipelines can become more effective.

Better Decision-making: With the Kanban sales pipeline, teams have quick and easy access to useful information about the health of the sales pipeline. They are in a better situation in a single view to make important decisions like upcoming tasks, dealing with aging, missed sales activities, and much more.

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Sharper Focus: Teams can customize their sales pipeline to keep razor focus on important deals and allocate effort and time to these high-priority deals. Using the multiple pipelines for specific stakeholder teams like marketing, sales, and customer experience, each team can sharply focus on their respective workstreams.

Better Team Collaboration: A Kanban pipeline board helps better collaboration across team functions and managers. Using the board is highly effective during review meetings by getting quick updates, and insights without requiring too much preparation for the review. Managers in real-time can share their notes and keep track of key deals with their team reps. Salespeople can tag cross-functional teams to progress deals to keep them flowing seamlessly and take necessary actions at every sales stage.

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Save Precious Time: Sales representatives are generally short of time or to put it in a better way they are always short of quality time to engage with their prospects and customers. This is predominantly due to the high amount of administrative work involved given their sales SOP. A Kanban-style pipeline helps them save a long duration of meeting preparation time.  Managers, in turn also find this very useful to sharp and brief discussions without much to and fro. A clear meeting takeaway is clear action items for the overall group

Enhanced Forecasting: Tracking historical trends of deal movement in the Kanban board helps the team build fairly effective forecasting models for the sales pipeline. Teams can now easily compute the sales forecast, factoring in weighted pipeline indexes. Sales forecasting comes in very handy for managers and leaders to keep track of quarterly targets and achievement quotas for sales reps. Team members are able to keep a close tab on their pipeline health and track their progress toward the sales targets.

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Higher Adoption: One of the biggest reasons for the poor adoption of sales CRM in sales teams is a clumsy interface in legacy systems. Even updating a deal involves multiple clicks, thus hampering proactive usage among teams. With a modern visually appealing dashboard and drag-and-drop feature, the salespeople can update leads and deals in a matter of few clicks without going into the detailed view. Likewise, a single view gives them key action items for the day, important reminders, an aging deal list, and much more.

Overall, a Kanban board enhances sales pipeline management by providing transparency, nudging higher accountability within the sales team, and enabling data-driven decision-making. The Kanban board view provides ample flexibility to teams to tailor the board to their needs and use cases. Collaboration is another significant value that the Kanban-based sales pipeline board provides to teams using it and helps every member get aligned to the organization's objectives and focus on core priorities. It enables sales teams to be more proactive, responsive, and effective in achieving their sales goals.

We are of the view that small businesses adopting a Kanban view to manage their sales pipeline in their CRM is extremely valuable. With limited resources and bandwidth business owners or sales leaders have to rally the teams towards the business goals. This Kanban board pipeline management will facilitate them in achieving the organization's objectives.