Seeking Advice - Organizing/Naming Pipelines

Andrew Moment
Andrew Moment Member Posts: 1 VERIFIED MEMBER
edited July 2022 in Sales CRM #1

Pipedrive community,

I am looking for advice on best practices regarding organizing/setting up Pipelines. I am taking over leading our sales team and the previous manager was not using Pipedrive to its full capacity. We sell digital marketing services (Web Development, SEO, Social Media, Ads, Etc.). 

Here's our current setup: Right now we have our pipelines set up by the source of the lead. For example, if a lead is a referral, we have a referral pipeline. If the lead came from email outreach, we have an email outreach pipeline, and so on. We have a team of 3 and this has led to cluttered pipelines and confusion at times where everything is at. 

I'm looking for some best practices/advice on best organizing. Is it better to have Pipelines by service? Or by salesperson? Or is doing it by source a good way, but we just condense the number of sources we have as pipelines. Another thought was if there were different pipelines for say, dormant leads (follow-up in 6 months, etc) or hot, warm, cold leads? Any help would be much appreciated. I am interested in how others are using it. 

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Answers

  • Brad Krause_13404
    Brad Krause_13404 Member Posts: 366 VERIFIED MEMBER
    100 Comments 5 Up Votes
    edited March 2021 #2

    You do not want a sales person to have to look into multiple pipelines. We have 1 pipeline for 'SALES' and 1 pipeline for SERVICE which we are just rolling out. Service is short for customer service. Its for zero dollar deals that the sales people (which manage existing business) place those zero dollar deals into for production to follow up on and remedy. In your case it may be technical support that needs to follow up and remedy the issue. We are a landscape company. Service pipeline will mostly be used for contract landscape maintenance client issues. 

    Create a custom deal details field to track the SOURCE of the lead. Not a seperate pipeline. 

    I would not create a separate pipeline for different sales people. You can easily create filters to filter to a specific sales person.

    IMO There is rarely a need to have more than 1 pipeline and should be avoided whenever possible. 

    For a short time we had a seperate pipeline for each division. Landscape maintenance, landscape construction, Snow & Ice. We changed that to use the Deal LABEL field instead and consolidated the pipelines to 1 called SALES. much better! The deals are color coded based on label for which high level division the deal is associated by using the deal label field. 

    If you do not use the products feature (we don't) create a custom deal details field for the product or service being sold or proposed for that specific deal. We call ours Service. Short for 'service type'

    If you want to track which type of 'vertical' you are selling to then that would probably be a custom Organization details field. For us it's 'Property Type':  Apartment, Condominium, Residential, Office, Retail, etc.

    For us every property gets its own organization. So if a property management company has 10 properties around town they want proposals for we don't just create 10 deals under the single organization. We create 10 organizations with the naming scheme: XYZ Company (property name) then we also have a record for their corporate office: XYZ Company (Corporate)

    This allows us to have on site specific people associated with the site organisation record and corporate people associated with the corporate office record. 

    It creates a bit of complexity when creating deals for corporate people for specific sites when entering but it works and works much better than the alternative. People located at the corporate organization CAN be associated with deals at the site organizations. 

    Building out pipedrive has been a journey over the past 2 years. I have enjoyed very much solving the problems and keeping things as simple and streamlined as possible. It's a fun challenge. 

    SALES Pipeline Stages: Opportunity, Proposal, Review, Presented

    Support type activity is assigned to the estimator and deal is automatically moved to proposal stage. When estimator marks the support activity as done the deal automatically moves to the review stage. Sales person sends proposal and moves it to presented stage. I had an automation to automatically create a follow up activity in 1 week but I removed that because with estimate revisions it was way too messy. 

    Service Pipeline Stages: Received, Reviewed, Scheduled, Completed

    Customer service sales rep cretas a zero dollar deal and saves it in the service pipeline. Production supervisor reviews it and asks any necessary questions. When they understand what needs to be done they move it to the reviewed stage. They create a Job due activity assigned to them self for when they expect the work to be done and add the CSR as a guest. the deal moves to the scheduled stage. When they mark the job due activity as done it moves to the completed stage. The CSR is notified by email its complete. They review it and if satisfied mark the deal as won. 

    All service deals are labeled with a custom deal details field 'service type': Issue 

    That's the same service type field mentioned above that defines what service/product the deal relates to. 

     

  • MC
    MC Member Posts: 82 VERIFIED MEMBER
    10 Comments First Anniversary 5 Likes 5 Up Votes
    #3

    @Andrew Moment which pipeline stage names did you end up going with?

    For anyone else researching this topic, these links might help:

    Sales Pipeline (Deal) Stages

    I would add that sales pipeline stages (at the start of the process) would differ markedly for an agency that primarily uses outbound lead gen vs one that generates inbound leads.

    That's one of the reasons I like how Pipedrive CRM separates out Leads from Deals in the UI, because then the stages in Deals can be the same whether the opportunity started via an inbound lead or one generated by outbound activities.

    Hope that helps!

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