Sales pipeline
Deals as tickets in a sales project, with a pipeline workflow, a board and the deal fields.
A sales project is a project of the Sales kind whose tickets are deals. A deal has everything a ticket has, a workflow, a board, history, comments, files, watchers, custom fields, time and the agents' tools, so the pipeline needs nothing of its own, and the people in it are the contacts and companies of the CRM.
Note
An administrator can switch the sales pipeline off for a workspace (Modules and features). If you do not see it in yours, it is switched off there: ask an administrator if you need it.
Starting a sales project
An administrator creates a project and chooses the kind Sales (see Creating and archiving projects). It gets one ticket type, Deal, on the Sales pipeline workflow, and a kanban board over the pipeline's stages, one column each. The stages are:
| Stage | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Qualified | The deal is worth working on. Every new deal starts here. |
| Proposal | A proposal or quote has gone to the company. |
| Negotiation | Terms are being agreed. |
| Won | The company bought; the deal is done. |
| Lost | The company did not buy; the deal is done, with a reason. |
Every stage can be reached from every other, so a card moves wherever the conversation goes; Reopen takes a won or lost deal back to Qualified. Give the people who work the pipeline the Sales role in the project, which lets them create, edit and move deals, and a CRM role for the contacts and companies: a role on a project gives nothing in the CRM, so without one they see no Contacts or Companies and cannot choose a deal's company or people.
The deal fields
Five custom fields come with the Deal type and are asked on every deal's form:
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Value | The amount, as a number. |
| Currency | The currency of the value. The dollar, euro and pound are offered; an administrator adds others under Custom fields. Amounts in different currencies are never added together, and a value with no currency is written as a bare number. |
| Expected close | The day the deal is expected to close. |
| Probability (%) | How likely the deal is to close, from 0 to 100. |
| Lost reason | Why a deal was lost: price, timing, a competitor, no decision, or other. |
They are custom fields like any other: an administrator may rename them, add options or add fields of their own beside them.
A deal's company and contacts
A deal belongs to a company, chosen on its form, and has contacts in one of three roles: the decision maker, a champion, or another person involved. A contact holds one role on a deal, and is named in the list with their company. Both are on the New ticket dialog and the edit form of a sales project and nowhere else, and both are shown and changed in place on the deal's page, under Details, with every change in the deal's history.
The lists hold the deal's company and people, the company's other contacts and the first few others by name; when the workspace has more, Find a company or person above them finds the rest by a name or an email address. The company and the contacts are offered to people who may see the CRM. Someone who works in the project without it still sees the deal and the name of its company.
A deal's page also has a timeline of the calls, meetings, notes and follow-ups about it, for people who may see the CRM; what is logged there is on the company's timeline too, and on the contact's when one is named.
A deal is never shown to the company's own people. A customer in the portal sees the requests they and their colleagues raised, never a deal that names their company.
The pipeline board
The board is a kanban board like any other, with a column a stage. A deal's card adds a line under its summary: the company, the value in its currency, and the expected close, which turns red once the day has passed on a deal that is still open. Won and lost deals leave the board after fourteen days, as done tickets do on every kanban board; the board's settings change that.
Winning and losing
A deal's offer on paper is its quote: lines, a total and a validity, prepared from the deal's page and sent to its people.
Win moves a deal to Won and records the day it was won as its resolution date. A won deal's page then offers to create a contract for the company, to whoever manages that customer's billing: Create a contract opens the customer under Time with the contract's name, its reference (the deal's key) and its currency filled in, and nothing is saved until you send that form (see Customers and contracts). The offer is there however the deal was won, on its page or on the board, and goes once the company has a contract with the deal's key as its reference, or when you press Not now.
Lose asks for the lost reason before the deal moves, on the deal's page and when its card is dropped on Lost; a deal cannot be lost without one.
The sales reports add the pipeline up: its value by stage, the weighted forecast, the win rate and how long deals stay in each stage.
The company's deals
A company's page lists its deals, open ones with their stage and closed ones with won or lost, and adds up the open deals' values and the won deals' values, by currency. A lost deal's value is in neither total. Deals are listed there and not among the company's open tickets and requests.