Pipelines and Zen

****** Software On Sailboats Pocket Sales Manager
****** Keywords: CRM software, mobile crm

Pipelines and Zen

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Pipelines and Zen
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There is a certain Zen to running a successful sales territory. A part of that Zen is how you think and organize yourself to address the challenges that arise.

The Pocket Sales Manager helps you track, manage, and organize your sales Opportunities. One of the first ways you will organize them is to collect related sales Opportunities into a single file - a sales Pipeline. The Pocket Sales Manager can help you manage more than one Pipeline. How many sales Pipelines you create and what you put in them is up to you, but below are some ideas on how you might use Pipelines.

One revolution, one Texas Ranger ....If you are a sales rep who works for an employer, reports to a sales manager, etc, you may choose to put all your "work in progress" sales Opportunities into a single Pipeline. It affords you and your sales team a single glance at everything that is going on. You can use the Navigator to visually organize your sales Opportunities within a Pipeline.

Once is not enough ...If your job demands that you act like more than one sales rep, you may choose to organize into more than one sales Pipeline. Sales reps who work for large organizations with multiple product lines may need this approach to fully satisfy each product line. Sales reps who handle several geographic territories could use this approach. Sales reps who handle both direct and indirect/channels business may want to use more than one Pipeline. Independent sales reps sell for more than one company are ideal for this approach as well. Even sales reps who handle different types of customers (Commercial, Government,Enterprise, Resellers, etc) may choose to use different Pipelines for each type of customer. Remember, each of these problems can also be handled within a single sales Pipeline by a field like Product, Territory, Principal, Customer Type, etc. Organizing sales Opportunities into separate Pipelines offers an alternative approach that may handle the more extreme or demanding requirements.

Lead on, McDuff ...A sales lead is a sales Opportunity. It is a sales Opportunity we don't know a lot about yet - an undeveloped sales Opportunity. You may choose to use a field like Stage to differentiate leads and more developed Opportunities within a sales Pipeline. However, if you have a business model that sees lots of leads you may loose sight of some of your more important Opportunities in the clutter of leads. The solution may be to keep a sales Pipeline for leads and another for your more developed "work in progress" sales Opportunities.

Learn from your past ...Whether we win, lose, or draw, all sales Opportunities eventually come to a close. The client makes their decision or elects not to decide, or postpones the decision. In any of these events, the sales Opportunity passes out of our area of daily interest. You may use a field like Probability to track wins and losses ( 0% - Lost, 100% - Win). You may also choose to use the Template Manager and add your own field to track the reason for the win or loss. But at some point you will probably want to get the sales Opportunity out of your "work in progress" Pipelines to reduce the visual clutter and allow you to focus on the sales Opportunities that are still in play. Of course you can simply delete the sales Opportunity from your Pipeline. But analyzing our wins and losses over time can help our future sales performance. You may choose to keep a historical Pipeline of sales wins and another for sales losses, or even a combined single win/loss Pipeline. Just cut the wins or losses from your current Pipeline and paste them into the win/loss Pipeline.

One final suggestion on Pipelines is to start simple and get more sophisticated as you go. You can use a field to organize information within a Pipeline. If you find that your system of fields and Pipelines is working against you - can't see enough information at once or you are seeing way too much - then step back and rethink your approach.