Combine Pipelines

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***** Contact management software, sales automation software, CRM software

Combine Pipelines

From time to time it may be valuable to combine two or more pipelines together. For example, one way for marketing to distribute leads is in a pipeline. The recipient sales rep would merge the lead pipeline into his sales-in-progress pipeline. A second example - although the Sales Data Center does it automatically - a sales manager can manually combine sales pipelines from his respective territories into a consolidated pipeline.

Consolidating sales pipelines is started by choosing Pipelines --> Combine.

Source Pipelines

Use the Add, Remove, and Remove All buttons of the Combine Sales Pipelines form to build the list of pipelines that you wish to combine. The pipelines can be selected from your personal computer, Outlook attachments, or your Pocket PC. The files are combined when you press the "OK" button.

Destination Pipeline

You may have the files combined into the current pipeline, or into a new pipeline window.

Opportunity Sales Ownership

Each sales opportunity has a 'sales owner' property. (See Sales Owner in the Getting Started --> Concepts documentation). When combining sales pipelines, you may elect to allow the existing sales owner in the sales opportunity to remain in place, or to make yourself the sales owner of the opportunities being combined.

Two practical examples. In the first, a sales rep has been sent a pipeline of leads from a trade show. He would want to combine those leads into his current pipeline and take sales ownership of the leads. In a second example, a sales manager is rolling up various territory pipelines. The manager would probably want to leave the sales owners intact to allow reporting on individual efforts within the combined pipeline.

Duplicate Opportunities

Each sales opportunity has a very unique record identifier that is automatically assigned when the sales opportunity is created. When sales opportunities are being combined and two or more have the same record identifier, the program assumes they are duplicate sales opportunities. If the "No duplicates" option is selected, then the 'last modified' sales opportunity is assumed to have the most current information and any previous versions are discarded. If the "keep duplicates" option is selected, then new record identifiers are assigned to the duplicate records and they are added to the pipeline.

Two practical examples. In the first, a sales rep has keeps his pipeline on both his desktop computer and also on his Pocket PC using the Pocket Sales Manager. The pipelines have become somewhat out of synch because an opportunity was added to the pipeline in the desktop computer and a different one has been added to the pipeline on the Pocket PC. Combining these two pipelines and not allowing duplicates insures that both new opportunities (as well as the latest versions of all of the other opportunities) are in the combined pipeline.

In the second example, a manufacturer might distribute the same pipeline of leads to a number of independent dealers in an area. Since more than one dealer follows up on the same lead, when getting pipelines back from the dealers and rolling them up, it is very possible - even likely - that the same lead could appear more than once. Checking the "keep duplicates" would allow the duplicate opportunities to be combined by assigning a new record identifier to the duplicated opportunities.

Warning: It is possible to lose some information when combining pipelines and not allowing duplicates. In the first example above, assume that on Monday morning copies of same pipeline exists on the sales rep's desktop computer and Pocket PC. On Tuesday the sales rep speaks to the client on the phone, and updates the sales opportunity on his desktop computer. The sales rep then takes his Pocket PC on a sales call to the client on Wednesday but unfortunately did not copy the latest pipeline from his desktop computer to his Pocket PC. After the meeting, the sales rep updates the sales opportunity, and returns to the office and combines the sales pipelines on his desktop computer and his Pocket PC using the 'no duplicates' option. The information from the Pocket PC's Wednesday meeting is the latest information so it is kept and the information from the desktop version's Tuesday call is discarded.

Save

Pressing the Save button initiates the process of combining pipelines.

Cancel

Pressing Cancel ends the process without combining any of the pipelines. No changes are made or saved.

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