How to Customize Your Sales Pipeline

With BigContacts you can keep track of potential sales for your clients and prospects. The Sales Pipeline will help you to track and convert more opportunities into sales.

This article will show you how you can build a custom sales pipeline that is suited for your sales process.

1. Go to the "Admin" tab and locate the "Manage Modules" section.
2. Here you will select the"Customize Pipeline" link

   

3. You can also access it directly via the "gear" icon in the top right corner, and selecting Customize Pipeline.
   

4. You can also access it by clicking on the Sales Pipeline link in the left sidebar menu and clicking on the Customize button.

   

Step #1: Customize your Pipeline "Sales Stages"

Before customizing any aspect of your sales module we strongly encourage you to take out a piece of paper and first outline your entire sales process. This will help to prevent mistakes in setting up your module and will ultimately save you time.

In this first step you will want to outline your overall "sales process". In other words, if you were to look at your entire sales process from the moment you receive a lead to the moment you close them there are distinct "stages" that you can identify in your sales process. It is these "sales stages" that you will first enter in this section to build the framework of your Sales Pipeline.

Sales Pipeline definitions:

• Stage: Here you will create the name for each stage of your sales process.  
     Examples:   ( Initial Meeting, Proposal Meeting, Decision Pending, Closed/ Pending Billing)
• Confidence: The confidence level is the probability that this opportunity at this stage in your sales process will result in a sale. 
     Example:  Let's say that of all the prospects that make it to the  "Proposal Meeting"€ stage 3 in 10 will close.  That being the case your confidence level for this stage would be 30% (3/10)
• Sales Cycle: This number represents the average number of days before an opportunity results in a sale from this stage. 
     Example:  Let's say that it typically takes 30 days to close from the "Proposal Meeting" stage.  You would then enter 30 days in the "sales cycle" field.

IMPORTANT NOTE:  

In addition to customizing your sales pipeline stages, you can also choose to automate tasks and emails for each sales stage. For example, you may want to have the system periodically remind the sales rep to follow up on an opportunity while it is in a certain sales stage. You may also want to have the system automatically send emails to stay top of mind during the sales process. This would be what is known as "drip marketing". Both tasks, as well as emails, can optionally be added to your sales pipeline/process to automate some of your sales processes and ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. Ultimately, this will lead to increased sales conversion rates.

Step #2: Customize/Add your "Products" and "Services" 

When tracking your sales opportunities, you have the ability to be as detailed as you want in terms of your products and services. Most programs will allow you to create an opportunity and will simply track a total value for this opportunity.

With your BigContacts sales module, you have the ability to track opportunities all the way down to the individual line item. For example, you may have an opportunity that has four different products or services inside of that opportunity. You contract this level of detail if you would like. In order to track this level of detail, you will want to first add your products and services to the sales module.  Below is a screenshot to show you exactly where you can customize this. 

In here you will see where you can create general categories and then add products/services under these various categories.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• You will want to set a default/standard price for each of your products and/or services. This is simply a "default" price. Please note that when you're creating opportunity you will be able to change the pricing to adjust to the specific deal that you are working on.
• If you wish to track commissions for your individual reps you will want to make sure and enter a commission rate. You will see that there are two commission fields. The first one is labeled "Upfront Commissions Rate". And the other is "Recurring Commission Rate". They are just as they indicate. The first one indicates the commissions that you would receive upon the sale and the other indicates commissions that you would receive overtime. Below this recurring section, you will be able to determine when these recurring commissions start and how frequently they occur.
  
  If you DO NOT track "commissions" but rather would simply like to track total "revenue" you would want to enter "100%" in the "Upfront Commission Rate" field and leave the "Recurring Commission Rate" field blank.

Step #3: Create Commissions Split (optional)

There are two reasons you may want to utilize the Commission Splits feature.

1) When you create a Sales Opportunity the opportunity is assigned to you.  There may be times when you want to create an opportunity on a record that is not assigned to you and you want the opportunity to be assigned to the person who is assigned to the contact.

2) There may also be times where you have multiple people on your team working on a given opportunity. If you wish to track the commissions for these opportunities and split them between multiple team members then you can use the "commission splits"€ feature in the "Sales module."

Congratulations!!

Customized and ready to use. For your convenience, we have included links to articles that will show you how to add your first opportunity as well as how you can view a report on your sales pipeline. Please let us know if we can answer any questions for you as you get started with this great module.