There has been much written about marketing funnels and sales pipelines, and the number of stages or milestones these should have. The larger the company, the more stages you would have, as you can assign resources to manage fewer milestones each.
The smaller companies do not have this luxury. In some cases, such as ours, its likely that one person might manage the whole funnel or pipeline. In such scenarios, it makes sense to have lesser number of stages. This is fine if you are selling a simple product or service with short sales cycles. If your sales cycle is longer you need more sophisticated stages.
To start with, its easier to assume three key stages, these being:
- Acquisition Pipeline
- Conversion Pipeline
- Service or Delivery Pipeline
In Acquisition Pipeline, you move prospects from first identifying to sales ready state. In Conversion Pipeline, you turn sales ready contacts to actual price paying customers. In final pipeline, you deliver products and/or services as agreed with the customers.
The beauty of UnifiedVU Platform is that you can now arrange above three Pipelines into Views, without cluttering your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.
To create above:
- Create a new Space: In this case, Sales Pipeline.
- Rename the Home page to Acquisition Pipeline.
- Add two more Pages: Conversation Pipeline and Delivery Pipeline.
- Add respective CRM Milestone App from AppStore three times to Acquisition Pipeline Page.
- Select Milestone for each of the App instance.
- Now you are ready to manage the pipeline and close sales faster.
It is also worth considering adding two further Pipelines, these being:
- Upselling Pipeline
- Lost or Deferred Pipeline
Selling more products and/or services to an existing customer still have stages to follow. As a sales person, its never a good a practise to give up on a prospect if they buy from a competitor or simply refuse to go ahead with a sale. The ability to create and manage separate Views on UnifiedVU to track these forgotten stages will help you to turn around your losses to wins.
Support: Sales Pipeline Views are available for Salesforce and CapsuleCRM. Do let us know if you like similar for your CRM. The ^ on the right hand of an opportunity allows you to move the opportunity to any milestone without the need to visit your CRM.