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Operations Consulting

Sales Orgnizations

Small to medium-sized companies often do not establish procedures for business development, instead relying on their existing contacts. Or people in such companies may assume that because they know people in high places that this will solve any business-development problems and that somehow new financial transactions will come to them. Such thinking can have significant ramifications if one cannot exploit those relationships, which very often remain personal or weak. Such a situation may result in no new sales in the pipeline..

Impact on Global Economy

The "pipeline" refers to flow of potential clients which a company has started developing. Business-development staff assign to each potential client in the pipeline a percent chance of success, with projected sales-volumes attached. Planners can use the weighted average of all the potential clients in the pipeline to project staffing to manage the new activity when finalized. Enterprises usually support pipelines with some kind of CRM (customer relationship management) tool or CRM-database, either web-based (such as the salesforce.com software-as-a-service solution) or an in-house system. Sometimes business development specialists manage and analyze the data to produce sales management information.