Creating an Effective Sales Process with Pipedrive
Pipedrive is an excellent sales tool that is used by our team to keep track of leads that go through our sales pipeline. We love Pipedrive because their system allows us to customize and structure our sales pipeline in a way that supports our process, and their statistics dashboard provides us with useful reports and information in a user-friendly manner.
Above Image: An example sales pipeline that has been customized to support this example company.
In addition to a customizable pipeline, Pipedrive also has great options available for creating customer profiles. These customer profiles come with fields to input information like the Name of the Organization, Website URL, Contact Name, Phone Number, Email Address, Deal Age, and Date Created. When a contact has been created, Pipedrive then allows you to schedule events like phone calls, reminders to send an estimate, follow up emails, or send a contract. Once the deal has been created and the related activities have been scheduled, it is important to then organize the lead into a stage.
Our Sales Pipeline
The first stage in our sales pipeline is pretty straightforward, as it is simply titled New Lead. A lead will remain in this stage until a member of our sales team reaches out to the client, and moves the lead from the New Lead stage into Contact Made.
Leads that are in the Contact Made stage have been contacted by a sales consultant, and will remain in this stage briefly, as it is used to separate active leads from those who have sent an inquiry, but have not yet responded. Leads who have not responded will remain in this stage until we receive a response. If a client responds and provides more information about their project, they are then moved from the Contact Made stage to the Qualified stage.
The Qualified stage includes clients who have submitted their request for our services, and have responded to our message or phone call. In this stage, we should now have a clear understanding of a client’s needs, and will begin to put together an approach and custom tailored estimate for their project. Our sales team will then meet with the rest of the Border7 team to discuss the current situation, needs of the business, technical requirements, expectations, goals, timeline, and budget for the project. During this meeting, we work to build an approach that fits the client’s unique requirements, and once completed, our sales team will format this approach into an estimate and send it to the client. Once the estimate has been sent, we then move the lead from the Qualified stage to Estimate Sent.
The Estimate Sent stage lets us know that these leads have received an estimate, and we are waiting to hear back from them. Clients that respond saying that they have questions, or would like to have their estimate updated will then be moved into the Negotiating stage. This lets our team know that the lead acknowledged that they have received the estimate, and are interested in keeping the conversation going.
The Negotiating stage is helpful to our team, as it lets us know which leads are more likely to move forward with us. Once we receive confirmation from a lead that they are ready to move forward with either a Statement of Work, or a Maintenance Project (depending on their needs and requirements), our sales team will begin formatting the necessary documents, and will send these over to the client to review. We then move the lead from this stage over to Documents Sent stage.
Once a client has agreed to move forward with the project, and has signed the documents, we move them over to the Documents Signed stage. This stage lets our team know that we have a new client that has signed on, and that we need to go ahead and prepare the invoice for the deposit, or hours of maintenance. After the invoice has been sent and payment has been received, we can then mark the lead as “Won.”
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