CONVERT CLIENTS
Convert clients by automating a seamless journey from lead to prospect to paying client.
PLAY SNAPSHOT
The Sales Pipeline Play helps you track all of your deals as they progress through your sales process. The sales pipeline is a digital representation of all your sales opportunities and where they are in your sales process at any given time.
As individual deals move through the sales pipeline, automations can be used to send messages and create tasks for your team based on where the deal is in the sales process and what needs to happen next.
Automating repetitive parts of your sales pipeline prevents deals from falling through the cracks and frees up your sales team to spend more time on sales calls. It also helps you forecast sales for the next week, month, or quarter.
This play is ideal for businesses with a consultative sales process where some (or all) of your deals take a little longer to close and need to be kept track of. It can also be used for service fulfillment stages.
Pro tip
This play is only as powerful as you choose to make it. Don’t be afraid to add in automation at any stage to ensure the process is moving as efficiently as possible.
QUICK-START GUIDE
What you’ll need
Pipeline stages
Stage automation
Daily pipeline management
Effort Level
Processes
Pipeline
management
Daily use
Pipeline stages
These are the steps in your sales process. You can customize the stages however you need to, but the most common ones are New Lead, Qualifying, Quoted, Negotiating, Closed Won and Closed Lost.
Stage automation
Automation in your sales pipeline is triggered when moving a deal into or out of one of your sales stages. You can have automations that add or remove tags, create and assign tasks, send emails or texts, or send notifications of the deal’s progress to internal stakeholders.
Daily pipeline management
You’ll also need a process for daily review of where your deals have progressed (or not) in your sales pipeline.
Pipeline management is how you stay on top of important data such as if:
Managing your sales pipeline daily allows you to analyze your workflow, forecast potential revenue, regulate lead flow, and avoid pinch points in your sales process
Pro tip
You may want to have multiple pipelines running at the same time, such as for different salespeople or sales processes, or for service tickets or fulfillment processes.
IN-DEPTH ACTION PLAN
How to set up the play
Below is a step-by-step plan to execute this play like a pro, including:
Step 1: Create your pipeline stages
The first step is to map out your sales ideal process, breaking it down into stages that make sense to you. If you need somewhere to begin, start with:
One way to think about dividing your pipeline stages is by what you want to be able to see at a glance. For example, you might want to see everyone who:
Another way to think about it is by ending every stage at a critical decision/action point in the sales process. For example, when a lead:
See where we're going with this? Add all the stages that you need in order to get a complete, at-a-glance picture of where your deals are in your sales process.
Checkpoints to launch
Analyze your sales process and break it down into stages
Set up your stages in the pipeline section of your CRM
Step 2: Set up your stage automation
Your sales team’s time is best utilized talking to leads, not sending emails. Automate all the repetitive tasks and communications in between human interactions and you’ll free up your team to close more leads without having to hire more sales staff.
Some automations will only be seen internally by your team, like a reminder to make a call or send a quote, and others will be external, like an email to a prospect reminding them to pay an invoice.
One example is automatically generating a task to send a quote when a deal is moved into the quoting stage, and an email that follows up on the quote a few days after the quote is sent.
Another example is scheduling a task to follow up on a contract a certain number of days after a deal is moved into the Contract Sent stage, unless the deal has moved into the Contract Signed stage by then.
Checkpoints to launch
Write the copy for any automated communication that will happen throughout your stages (emails, texts, etc.)
Assign automation to stages that require communication or tasks
Set up tags to use for reporting when a contact completes each stage
Publish and test all automations
Pro tip
Automate adding a “status” tag to the deal when it is moved into a stage, and have that tag automatically removed when the deal is moved out of the stage. This allows you to easily find contacts based on the sales stage their deal is in and set up reporting that gives you a real-time view of how many leads are in each stage.
Step 3: Daily pipeline management
Your deals are progressing on a daily, and sometimes hourly basis, so you need to create a habit for managing your sales pipeline. In this step, you’ll design your process for staying on top of everything.
Daily pipeline management is important for a few reasons:
Here are a few ways you can make sure this critical work gets done:
After about 3 weeks, managing the pipeline will become natural, but in the beginning, you’ll have to be really intentional about it.
Checkpoints to launch
Create a strategy to make time (and reminders) every day for pipeline management.
Stick to it!
Assess how well it’s working and adjust your process if needed.
MEASURING SUCCESS
Primary metric: Number of wins
To track the success of your sales pipeline play in your CRM, look at these stats:
The ultimate test of how well your sales pipeline is working is how many leads make it to your last stage. To get your overall conversion rate, compare the number of contacts who have that final tag with the number who entered the first stage.
However, you’ll also want to run reports to see which stages have the lowest conversion rate. This will tell you where to focus on improving your sales process — either the process itself, or how you have automation set up for that stage.
Ready to get started building this play so you can convert more leads? Sign up for a free trial of Keap, then watch this replay as the Keap Academy experts show you how to leverage the power of sales pipeline automation.
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