Creating And Saving A Sales Pipeline

***** Software On Sailboats Desktop Sales Manager v6
***** Contact management software, sales automation software, CRM software

Your sales opportunities - or deals, or leads or however you think of them - will be stored by this program in a file on your computer. Since we are sales professionals and not necessarily computer technologists, it is a little more comfortable for us to think of this collection of sales opportunities as our sales pipeline. The reality is, of course, that these sales opportunities are stored in a file on your computer - in fact it's an XML file (for the hard core technologists there in the back of the crowd...). If you create a sales pipeline and name it "Southwest Region" it will be saved on you computer in a file called "Southwest Region.XML".

Remember, the type of information that gets collected into your sales pipeline is completely dependent on the template that you are using, so you may want to become familiar with templates...

Creating A New Sales Pipeline

To enter a new sales opportunity into a pipeline, if the program is not open, start the program.

If there was no sales pipeline saved from the last time you were using the program, then a new pipeline is automatically created (see? this is easy...).

You may also create a new opportunity using the File -> Create Pipeline menus or PIPELINES--> NEW PIPELINE

When a new sales pipeline is created, at the top of the opportunity list the pipeline name is "New [XXXXX]" where XXXXX is the current time. Also, at the very top of the program, since this new pipeline is the "currently selected" pipeline, the pipeline's name is displayed.

Saving Sales Opportunities In The Sales Pipeline

With your new sales pipeline open, you could go about your business of entering in sales opportunities.

At some point, you will want to save your opportunities into a file on your computer. In the example above, your sales pipeline file is currently named "New [9:46 AM]" - not exactly a poetic or relevant name!

To save your currently open sales pipeline:

Choose File -> Save from the menu or...

If the Pipeline toolbar is displayed, you may choose "Save"

You will be asked for a file name for your sales pipeline. Enter the file name (like "Southwest Region") and press Save.

Your sales pipeline has now been saved as a file on your computer called "Southwest Region.XML"

Software On Sailboats