Pre-qualification pipeline
What would be your thoughts on using a pipeline to pre-qualify leads?
Pre-qualification would include:
- Validate contact information
- Validate that the service request match the company offering
- Location (covered area)
- Urgency
When leads does not qualify a reason would be provided.
When leads does qualify, a workflow could bring them in the sale pipeline where a more in depth lead needs analysis would be made...
Comments
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Hi @Paul !
You can definitely use our Workflow Automations to automatically progress your leads into a certain stage or mark them as lost depending on whether they've been qualified or not.
Even better than that, you can also use resources like Leadbooster to do that qualification automatically for you, check them out here:
See the full catalogue of Lead Qualification features we've got here. 🚀
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Hi Paul,
I understand what you mean - we only add a deal if we have confidence we will progress to pricing, proposal and presentation.
However there is a 'pre-deal status' when you are still qualifying the prospect with activity, however its not at deal stage.
Having a pre-deal stage enables visibility above a simple 'contact'. If you move a contact straight to deal stage it may be premature with the risk of losing a deal, when its not actually a deal!
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Hi @James Pogson,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts here!
The main concern we have it to gather stats on the disqualification of a prospect (not service fit, outside of covered area, rough price range, attitude). Since a custom field cannot be created on lead and we do not like the idea of using Pipedrive labels for that purpose, we though using a pipeline would be the way to go but with no experience on Pipedrive we are confuse.
These stats are used to learn about our customer need evolution.
It sounds like you want to avoid bad deal statistics to show a better conversion rate. I would not care to have a low conversion rate on a pre-qualification pipeline. What do you think?
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Yes, I agree, pre-qual is so important to avoid leading the prospect down the line only to learn their budgets and our proposals are not aligned and yes we also use Pipedrive to 'roughly' monitor lead-conversion metrics, so a lead becomes a 'deal' once we share costs etc.
I like the idea of a pre-qual pipeline, but I'm not sure it can be created in Pipedrive - maybe @Inês Batata can show us the way?
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It seems that we have similar sale process where an interested prospect becomes someone to spend more time on (deal) through closer sale process.
When searching for these interested prospects there is a lot of data that can be used to build business intelligence. Since Pipedrive prevents the creation of custom field on leads, I thought converting a lead to a deal (under a pre-qualification pipeline) when you get a first contact would allow to gather structure data in many customer fields like disqualification reason, current provider/competitor, actual budget spend, actual dissatisfaction with current provider...
So the pre-qualification pipeline would allow this data gathering and if the prospect qualifies a workflow could bring him in the "sale" pipeline where a more in depth analysis of a possible deal would be made.
What do you think?
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I came to this community searching for distinction between leads and contacts. After reading your dialogue, I wonder if we are not already doing something "right" by adding all to Contacts and only creating deals when we have had a trigger. In our case (we sell high-end luxury European organic mattress), it's when a contact communicates with us indicating their interest. I will be checking out some of the automation options for lead qualification further.
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Hi @Denise M Pummer .
Thanks for sharing your journey Denise. The distinction between leads and contacts is still obscure for me.
In my mind a person is a person no matter the level of business you have with him/her. A person has a name and some contact information at minimum even though they could be fake. Of course, the more you develop a relation the more you know about this person.
The only requirement is to be able to filter person according to the level of business you have with them even if it is nothing. Also, the person you have done business with could be consider a lead on a different product or service for which he/she might not even qualify.
I wish I better understand the mindset between Pipedrive Leads and Contacts to learn quicker the best way to set my business within it.
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Paul said:
It seems that we have similar sale process where an interested prospect becomes someone to spend more time on (deal) through closer sale process.
When searching for these interested prospects there is a lot of data that can be used to build business intelligence. Since Pipedrive prevents the creation of custom field on leads, I thought converting a lead to a deal (under a pre-qualification pipeline) when you get a first contact would allow to gather structure data in many customer fields like disqualification reason, current provider/competitor, actual budget spend, actual dissatisfaction with current provider...
So the pre-qualification pipeline would allow this data gathering and if the prospect qualifies a workflow could bring him in the "sale" pipeline where a more in depth analysis of a possible deal would be made.
What do you think?
Yes, I'm with you Paul.
I've never used Leads in Pipedrive. I prefer to create a new prospect as a 'Contact' and add profile details, notes and activities, then convert into a Deal if it feels right.
If I was Pipedrive I would 'build out' the Leads feature into a Pre-Qual pipeline and if we feel it triggers into a deal, then change status to Deal ;-)
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James Pogson said:
Yes, I agree, pre-qual is so important to avoid leading the prospect down the line only to learn their budgets and our proposals are not aligned and yes we also use Pipedrive to 'roughly' monitor lead-conversion metrics, so a lead becomes a 'deal' once we share costs etc.
I like the idea of a pre-qual pipeline, but I'm not sure it can be created in Pipedrive - maybe @Inês Batata can show us the way?
Hi @James Pogson !
Before we introduced the concept of Leads a significant number of our users were doing just that: using a separate pipeline or even just a specific stage in a pipeline to store what were not exactly deals yet.
This is still feasible, of course, but when deciding keep in mind that all deals in a pipeline will count as such for statistics and reports, which can skew them. That's why we introduced the concept of Leads and are working to make it possible to convert Deals into Leads too, to make the classification more accurate. It will also be possible to filter and label Leads in more ways in the future.
I'd like to understand your idea a little better. Were you thinking of a pipeline similar to the one we have for Deals, but for Leads? Is this something that Lead labels can't help you with? Thanks in advance.
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James Pogson said:
Yes, I agree, pre-qual is so important to avoid leading the prospect down the line only to learn their budgets and our proposals are not aligned and yes we also use Pipedrive to 'roughly' monitor lead-conversion metrics, so a lead becomes a 'deal' once we share costs etc.
I like the idea of a pre-qual pipeline, but I'm not sure it can be created in Pipedrive - maybe @Inês Batata can show us the way?
Hi @Inês Batata
When engaging with prospects/leads you will disqualify most of them. It seems that Pipeline believes this step is not important enough to provide custom fields to gather valuable data to build business intelligence. The only mechanisms are one size fit all buckets named Label and Note fields.
- Let's you want to learn from what makes leads to be disqualified. You have to duplicate disqualification reasons from your pipelines to the labels. This expose users to confusion on which fields to use (label or reason or both). Also the business evolve disqualification reasons might change and you are expose to forget to adjust labels. At the moment we use 11 disqualifications reasons.
- Let's you disqualify a prospect for not liking your price range. You might be interest in gathering data about his budget range. Build labels does not make sense. The is no interest of having this information as a person tag/label/paper wall. This is information for later when making data analysis.
- You might want to gather information on products or services you do not offer and where you miss opportunities.
- You might want to save the name of competitors you loose business to.
- You might to save data about the leads role in the sale process: Decision maker, shopper, payer, influencer, 3rd party
- Your business might decide to retract for some reason that are very important to remember.
- You might want to save information about where the prospect learn about your business through old school marketing (new paper, which classified add, which flyer...). And a very important one like REFERRAL name.
- ...
The are just few examples where possible 50-100 labels or more would be required and where a lead could end up with 5-10.
I see a label has a tag person. I have not attended to an event where people have more than 1 as far as I can remember. This said this tag can hold 2 information: Name and Product/Section/Status like VIP, Executive, Diamond. In Pipedrive I would probably use label like "VIP", "Never again!", "Hot", "Cold". Possibly no more than 10 total. Labels that help make the best quick tactical decision. Not to hold statistical information. 1-3 label should be sufficient per person. Pipedrive seems to fit this rule by not showing more than 3 labels (+sign is displayed to the rest) for which the importance/order of visibility can be set anyway when you have more than 3 labels.
I see note fields has an unstructured bucket to write a story/details/discussion/requirements/instructions/meeting action items something you want to remember before engaging with someone.
In conclusion, it seems label and note fields have a very limited power to build Business intelligence. The only option seems to move prospects through a pipeline which unfortunately seems to affect statistics.
How Pipedrive could evolve to help in building more business intelligence?
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James Pogson said:
Yes, I agree, pre-qual is so important to avoid leading the prospect down the line only to learn their budgets and our proposals are not aligned and yes we also use Pipedrive to 'roughly' monitor lead-conversion metrics, so a lead becomes a 'deal' once we share costs etc.
I like the idea of a pre-qual pipeline, but I'm not sure it can be created in Pipedrive - maybe @Inês Batata can show us the way?
Hi @Paul , thank you for your detailed feedback! This type of feedback is very valuable for us.
I completely understand where you're coming from. Right now Leads are still under development and we are working on building more nuance and flexibility into it. A lot of the aspects you mentioned could be solved using custom fields and lost/disqualified reasons, for example, so that that information could be reflected in statistics and reports.
I have forwarded your suggestion to our team for consideration.
Do stay tuned for more developments on this feature and join our Research and Beta Testing channel to be the first to know what we're working on and the chance to try out early versions of new and improved features.
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James Pogson said:
Yes, I agree, pre-qual is so important to avoid leading the prospect down the line only to learn their budgets and our proposals are not aligned and yes we also use Pipedrive to 'roughly' monitor lead-conversion metrics, so a lead becomes a 'deal' once we share costs etc.
I like the idea of a pre-qual pipeline, but I'm not sure it can be created in Pipedrive - maybe @Inês Batata can show us the way?
Hi @Inês Batata .
Thank you for considering my feedback and for the Research program tips.
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this is a very helpful thread! @Paul thank you for taking the time to describe in detail, this has served my needs today.
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Hi,
I think, my question falls under this topic although I have a different perspective.
In our case, our Deals pipelines starts with a stage "Proposal made" and for qualification of our leads we aim to use labels - cold / warm (for MQL) and hot (SQL). What puzzles me is, that PD suggests these labels by default, but it also suggests to start the deal pipeline with "Lead In" stage followed by "Contact Made" and so on. It seems to me that both principles exclude each other.
What is the current best precise then for pre-qualification? Lead labels or Deal stages?
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