In this article you will find the following topics:
😁 What can I do with Pipelines? ….
….. you’ve spent time thinking about how to manage your business’s opportunities. And now you’ve got the best and easiest way of pulling everything together using our pipelines!
You’ll add stages to describe where opportunities are in the sales cycle and even defined sales actions within those stages; you might also want to assign a probability of closure (weighting) and an expected velocity.
You can even create an easy-to-follow methodology for your team including your best practices and suggestions using the Activities checklist - as well as define what information users need to ask for (and when), using the sales action fields.
NOTE: Business & Enterprise Tiers customers can create and edit multiple custom Pipelines ⤵
🤔 Where do I start?
When you sign up for Pipeliner, we always give you a default pipeline with some logical sales steps already there. If these work for you ‘as is’, you can start using it straight away.
You’ll most likely, however, want to use your own terminology though — and it’s a great way to get buy-in from your team if they see the terminology and a process they’re already familiar with using ⤵
🤷 When would I need more than one pipeline?
Each pipeline represents a different process so you would add additional pipelines for each separate process that you use within your business. Some examples that we use ourselves are:
Direct Sales pipeline — this is built around our standard, internal sales process
Implementation pipeline — this is a post-sales process for working with our customers on their Pipeliner projects
Customer Success pipeline — this one lets us keep track our ongoing customer success outreach
You don’t need to add a separate pipeline for each business area (you can use Units for your teams, departments, business areas etc) and you don’t need separate pipelines for different users (you can easily track opportunities by their owner).
🔑 Key Terminology You Need To Understand
➡️ Pipeline Stage
An individual stage or milestone that opportunities move through on their journey through your process. Each step is represented visually as a column in the Opportunities menu in the App.
➰ Probability of Closure
This probability is applied to the value of the Opportunity as the Weighting. You’ll see the sum of the Weighted values in the Weighted Target in the Opportunities menu.
🏃🏾Velocity
Velocity is set in days and is the maximum number of days that you expect an ‘average’ opportunity to spend in each sales stage. Opportunities that are hanging around longer than the expected velocity are flagged as Overdue in the pipeline view in the Opportunities menu and in the Navigator Dashboard to make it super easy for you to identify them ⤵
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☎️ Sales Activities
Be your sales teams’ coach even when you’re not there! The Sales Activities Checklist is where you set up your easy-to-follow guide to help your users manage opportunities effectively at each stage ⤵
📄 Sales Stage Documents
Add resources to each sales step to help back up the sales process. Users access them directly from the pipeline view ⤵
🤝 Sales Action Fields
Sales action fields are about capturing the right information … at the right time. So in the example below, in order to move an Opportunity into a sales stage named Proposal, the user has to confirm that the approval process and budget have been discussed and confirmed ⤵
Set these up in the Opportunity Fields & Forms area.
✅ Got it! Where next?
We’ve got lots of resources to help you get set up. Try these next...