How to build a sales pipeline using CRM?
Learn about some key points from these six important steps 📒:
1. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and define sales pipeline stages.
⚠ Warning: do not confuse the sales pipeline with a sales funnel.
A sales pipeline is the journey from leads to the customer’s status. It’s related to the actions that sales reps take on every lead to move them across stages. Here are some quick tips before building them:
Tips 💡
- Understand the customer buying process about your product/service: What are the key touchpoints from a customer’s point of view?
- Understand the flow and the onboarding of your product/service then align it with customers’ buying process.
- Understand the flow and settings of your CRM: Using Pipedrive*, they provide a Lost/and Won button ( so you don’t need a stage for this status) while in Hubspot you need to create a stage called Lost / Won.
Examples 🎩
- For Pipedrive*
Qualified > Meeting held > Proposal Sent > Terms accepted > Ready to buy
Lead in > Contact Made > Needs defined > Proposal Made > Negotiation started
- For Hubspot
Qualified > Presentation Scheduled >Needs Defined > Contract Sent> Closed Won > Closed Lost
2. Understand what you want to achieve and define sales funnel goals.
While the sales pipeline is a set of actions, sales funnel allows measuring the main conversion rates between the stages. It helps you meet the targets by tracking your sales objectives.
Tips 💡
- Take the big picture: understanding the behavior along the sales pipeline to set real metrics for your team.
- Using Pipedrive you’ll find a feature that allows creating company goals and gives insights about your team progress. The same with Hubspot CRM.
Examples 🎩
Goal type: Deals Won
Expected outcome: 30 deals
Duration: 5/2 to 30/11
Interval: Monthly
Assigned to: whole team/ sales rep
Pipeline: Inside Sales
3. Define the deals rotting period and do not forget about them.
This feature is based on the duration a deal remains idle in a specific stage. Be aware of who has been wasting away in your pipeline for too long. It’s important to keep prospects in your active pipeline if they will close within your normal sales cycle. By the way, do you know your sales cycle?
Tips 💡
- Set the feature to keep your salesforce on the move and get notified when they got rotten.
- Communication is essential to determine how likely the prospect is to close in the near future.
- Track and check the reason for inactivity.
- To learn how to set up using Pipedrive, go here.
4. Tag the reason and learn with your lost deal
Understanding the circumstance is such important as qualifying the deal. This feature you can find in some CRM and helps you understand a deal’s history.
Tips 💡
- By collecting this info you can explore some trends that might occur in your sales process and identify some events related to them.
- Tracking a lead’s behavior will help sales and marketing to channel efforts/strategies.
- To learn how to set up using Pipedrive, go here. The same with Hubspot, here.
5. Meet your numbers and set real metrics
Not every deal will move to the next stage, right?! A pipeline needs to flow and meeting conversion rates between stages is important to set expectations.
Tips 💡
- Accordingly, Pipedrive, If your stage-to-stage conversion rate is 50% then “enough deals” is based on a ratio of 8:4:2:1 for each stage.
- Learn about sales performance and set metrics for your process. You can check reports from Pipedrive here and discover your whole pipeline performance. The same with Hubspot here.
And the most important thing…🙂
6. Meet your team and engage them to keep improving
Meet your team, learn about their sales style and performance and focus on key sales activities aligned with their role. it’s important to give employees a sense of ownership over their tasks.
Tips 💡
- Provide training. Using CRM demands some efforts to explore it fully.
- Set expectations. Be clear about their roles and company goals.
- Provide feedback. Also, you can use real-time tools for their performance status.
- You can explore a different approach using sales gamification and have all the things above.
➕ BONUS ➕
Give a try for free at Gamifier.co — the sales gamification tool for Pipedrive and Hubspot users.
