Understanding Opportunity Pipelines
Working with Opportunity Stages and Statuses
In any opportunity pipeline, such as a sales pipeline or customer feedback pipeline, two crucial components are the Stages of the pipeline and the Status of each opportunity in that pipeline.
Stage
Stages represent the milestones in your pipeline (visually marked by the different columns) as you move a lead or client from left to right through your process.
For example, a very simple client feedback pipeline could be made up of the following stages:
- Ask for feedback
- Feedback received
- Positive review received
Stages are customizable and can vary in number.
Status
There are four fixed statuses assigned to each opportunity: open, lost, abandon, and one. These statuses are independent of your pipeline stages.
- Open: Represents an active opportunity in progress
- Lost: Indicates a deal that has been declined or cancelled
- Abandon: Occurs when you are unable to work the contact all the way through the pipeline
- Won: Denotes a successful outcome, such as a closed deal or positive review left on Google
Using Stages and Statuses
Stages and statuses work together to manage opportunities. Stages can be customized by going to the pipelines section and adjusting them according to your workflow. Statuses help track the progress of each opportunity, with the default filter often set to show only open status deals.
Example: Sales Pipeline
In a sales pipeline, stages could include:
- New lead
- Initial contact made
- Booked sales call
- Closed deal
Statuses like open, lost, abandon, and won help categorize the progress of each opportunity. Updating the status based on actions taken, like collecting payment, reflects the current state of the deal.
Creating Custom Pipelines
You can create custom pipelines tailored to your specific process. By defining stages, you can monitor and follow up with contacts through a specific process (e.g. sales process, onboarding process, feedback process, etc...).
Simply define the major milestones or steps in your process, and those can become the stages in your pipeline.
Define what makes an opportunity open, lost, abandoned, or won, and you can use a combination of automation and personal follow up to nurture each opportunity towards the final goal of being closed and won.
Conclusion
By understanding and effectively utilizing stages and statuses in opportunity pipelines, you can streamline the management of leads and clients across various workflows. Customizing stages and leveraging statuses help track progress and outcomes, ensuring efficient pipeline management.