Blog/CRM

Setting Up Your CRM Opportunity Pipeline

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Struggling to set up your Opportunity Pipeline in Copper? Unsure of what to name the stages of your pipeline? In this article I'll answer both of these questions & more 👌🏻

What it is: Opportunity Pipelines are used to map out and manage processes within your business. For example, think about the stages your prospective clients need to go through before signing a deal with your business — each stage will be reflected in the opportunity pipeline within Copper.

A lot of business owners say to us "I'm not sure what my process is" but the reality is if you're running a business you already have processes in place. If you're doing things ad-hoc, your processes may not be super obvious at first, but if we dig a little deeper you'll be able to see that they're there.

I've outlined some powerful prompts (below) to help you distill down your business processes. Grab pen and paper, follow the guiding questions below, and within 30 minutes, you'll have your pipeline mapped out within Copper 🔥

For the purpose of this article, I'm going to help you map out your sales and onboarding processes.

Setting Up Your Sales Pipeline

Setting Up Your Sales Pipeline

Say someone sends you an email asking about your services. What's the next thing you would do? You want each pipeline stage to reflect in past tense what has already occurred in that stage (not what needs to be done).

Stage 1: Call Booked

Say that the first thing you would do is respond to the inquiry and ask the prospective client to schedule a meeting. Once the meeting is locked in, you can convert the lead into an opportunity and they would sit under the first column named Call Booked.

Stage 2: Second Meeting Booked (Or "Call Completed")

What happens once you've completed the initial call in stage 1? For this example, say at the end of your first call you invite the prospect to a second meeting that is longer in duration. Therefore, you would name your second stage "Second Meeting Booked".

Stage 3: Proposal Sent

After the second meeting is booked, what happens next? Let's say you send them a quote with a proposal, therefore naming the third stage "Proposal Sent".

Stage 4: Proposal Signed / Payment Received (Client Won)

So now that you've sent them proposal, say they become a client. Now what? You'd likely mark them as a won client! What's the first thing you normally do after a prospect becomes a client?

Setting Up Your Onboarding Pipeline

Setting Up Your Onboarding Pipeline

Your pipeline doesn't need to be sales OR onboarding. It can be a mixture of the two. Or, if you have a long sales and onboarding process, you can create two pipelines within Copper.

So after the client is won, what happens next? What do you need to deliver on? Do you need anything from them to get started? Just like we did with the sales pipeline, you want to always think about the next step in the process and name the stage name in past tense to signify it's been completed before moving on to the next stage.

Best Practices & Common Mistakes

Best Practices & Common Mistakes
  • Always name your stages in past tense
  • Anyone on your team should be able to open up your opportunity pipeline and know exactly what has/hasn't been done as a part of your process
  • Don't think of stage names as tasks. For example, a lot of people tend to have a "follow-up" stage in their pipeline. We recommend keeping this as a task rather than an entire stage (especially as you may need to follow-up 2-3 times with certain prospects). However, this also comes down to preference — it's your CRM after all 😃
  • You can also use your pipeline for fun bits of your process — like reminding yourself to ask for a review or check in with your clients after a certain time period to see how they're enjoying their service.

See It In Action: Another example

See It In Action: Another example

Here's a breakdown of this example:

Here's a breakdown of this example:

First, we make sure that anyone sitting in our Opportunity Section has been qualified. Read this article to learn more about how to use the Lead, People, Company, & Opportunity sections of Copper.

Our qualification process includes two things:

  • We ensure our lead is using Copper CRM + Google Workspace (Formerly G Suite)
  • We also ensure that we have experience working with the software that they'd like integrated Copper with

If they're using Copper CRM and we think we can help them with their automation, then we would book a Demo Call. This is the first step of our sales process:

Stage 1: Demo Call Scheduled

This stage is self-explanatory. A demo call is scheduled and upcoming.

Stage 2: Demo Complete (Call Follow-Up)

After the demo, we send a proposal via a follow-up email. Once we've sent the proposal, we move the opportunity to this stage. If the customer decides to not move ahead, we mark the opportunity as "lost" or "abandoned" (this can be done during any stage of the pipeline).

Stage 3: Payment Received

Our team knows that opportunities sitting in this stage require the initial onboarding steps from our end.

Stage 4: Onboarding (Doc Sent)

As a part of our onboarding process, we create a shared workspace for our customers. Once we've invited them to this workspace, we move them to this stage.

Stage 5: Build Complete

We move the opportunity to this stage once we've built the integration and have sent the final product to the client to review.

Stage 6: Client Approved

Self-explanatory! We move opportunities to this stage once we've heard back from the client that they're happy with how their integration is working. 🤓

Stage 7: Client Success Check-In

We check in with our clients 14 days after their initial build to ensure things are working as planned.

Stage 8: Subscription Started

We give our clients a heads up that their subscription begin shortly.

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Now it's your turn! Use the examples in this article to map out your pipeline stages. Have questions? Feel free to use our chat in the bottom-right corner of the site to reach out and our team will try our best to help you out!

- Alex

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