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 đđ»
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 â 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 đ„
For the purpose of this article, I'm going to help you map out your sales and onboarding processes.
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).
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.
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".
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".
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?
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.
As a final bit of information, here is our teams sales/onboarding pipeline explained in a 5 minute video. This will give you an idea of how we use our Copper pipeline in action with our clients that require custom Copper CRM integrations âĄïž
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:
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:
This stage is self-explanatory. A demo call is scheduled and upcoming.
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).
Our team knows that opportunities sitting in this stage require the initial onboarding steps from our end.
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.
We move the opportunity to this stage once we've built the integration and have sent the final product to the client to review.
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. đ€
We check in with our clients 14 days after their initial build to ensure things are working as planned.
We give our clients a heads up that their subscription begin shortly.
â
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
â
Our Copper Tips Digest is read by 300+
businesses that are successfully using Copper
to automate and scale đ
Our CRM Tips Digest is read by 300+
businesses that are successfully using their CRM
to automate and scale đ
Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more podcasts, candid chats, Shorts, & best practices on how to make your business more efficient!
Subscribe on YouTubeIf you'd like help refining your processes, automating communication, and would like ongoing support, we can help!
Request PricingStruggling to set up your Opportunity Pipeline in Copper? Unsure of what to name the stages of your pipeline? In this video I'll answer both of these questions & more 👌🏻
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 in the article 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 🔥
0:00 - Introduction
0:15 - Before You Create A Pipeline
1:22 - Mapping Your Opportunity Pipeline
2:12 - Stage Naming & Workflow
5:28 - Final Thoughts
Hi there I'm Alex and I work with many different businesses—specifically with Copper to streamline their businesses.
I wanted to share some things that I've learned over the years specifically in mapping out your process within copper so the opportunity section works really well for that but the thing that we hear time and time again is well I don't have a process or I'm really just seeing the stages that have been built by customers and kind of going back and figuring out how to map these better to their actual processes.
So if you either have already mapped out an opportunity pipeline this will be helpful for you for some best practices if you don't feel like you have a process then this is also going to be helpful to you as well so think of your process is just the steps that you're taking in your business so i'm going to use this as kind of just an example process and we're going to be spanning in a few different sections here so the first couple stages is part of the sales process and then we move to kind of an internal process of a payment being received and then we're going to move more to like an onboarding process so you can have a pipeline that's just specifically the sales process and there could be a lot of moving parts maybe you're sending out a proposal to a customer after having a call with them you can go down a whole path there but here's just kind of a way to show you a few different processes in a business and i'm going to talk through each one of them individually to kind of visualize it so for one we typically like to have the first stage in a pipeline to be especially if it's a sales process the onboarding um sorry the qualification factor in a sense so it's so when we talk to companies we say okay so what makes a person actually qualified so you have a lead how do you qualify them well typically we have that initial demo or a phone call or something like that great so that first stage really should be that the call is either scheduled or that a demo is scheduled so that's where the bulk of people will be sitting in and you're kind of waiting to do the demo before moving forward so then the next stage in the process is essentially well what happens when that demo is complete or the call is complete you typically maybe just do an initial email outreach or some type of quick follow-up which is still kind of part of your sales process so what people will often do is they will create stages that are kind of more like tasks so for example it may be the stage that says like send proposal so maybe after that initial call that you have you send a proposal but send proposal is more of a task that would be a task that would be involved in the opportunity so say for example we just had a phone call with them or danny diamonds and then we were moving them to the heat the stage here so demo completed you could visualize this is like okay well now that the demo is completed i need to send over a proposal i need to maybe send over an initial email just saying hey thank you for your time there's a few different tasks that maybe people within your team or you have to do before moving them to the next stage in the process so then from there say that you send out a proposal and the customer signs that proposal and they make an initial payment then you'd move them to the next stage in the process here so payment received and then internally this is kind of an internal task that your team maybe needs to work on so we're going through setting up some things or maybe setting up the client's account and some of your for example we have like a password manager so signing up the client's account and the password manager doing all these internal things that we need to do maybe going to google drive creating a customer folder there's just a myriad of things that need to be done before moving to the next step and then from here we're kind of more in an onboarding process so that would be moving them to onboarding so sending them an initial document and this is kind of a collaborative document that we'll work from so by this point in order to move them to the stage that document needs to be created because we need to actually send them a link to that document so you can't actually move this opportunity forward until that document is created so now these stages are kind of past tense in the sense of you can't move it there until you've done some things so really it's better to think of a stage as kind of a group of tasks or something of a specific piece of your process that needs to be completed before you can move it forward so then from there say that you have the onboarding document shared you work from it now you're building out the project that needs to be done for the customer cool you finish that off now you move it to build complete so again it's another stage that's like we made a massive milestone and then we're going to move forward to that and maybe this is sending an email to the customer that says hey here is uh the project here's like a you know password protected landing page to check out i'm just waiting for your approval and then you're now waiting on them so the client maybe says okay cool like looks really good can you speak this and then we approve it so they approved it so now you move to the next stage in the process so everything that i'm doing here it's kind of part of project management onboarding at this point but we're moving it through a step in the process so now if you kind of go through historically through all this you have a good idea of where different customers are at various points in the process some are still in the sales area some are in the onboarding and then you even can have a stage for say for example a follow-up maybe after you work with a client if you want to do like a 14-day check-in or if you're on-boarding an employee or a client onto software maybe a 14-day follow-up which is pretty typical so they've been using your software for a bit of time and you just want to say like hey um just want to check in and make sure that you're finding success in it and then maybe giving them a heads up hey your subscription is about to be starting so think of each one of these stages is either like a direct communication that you want to have with a customer or an internal task that your team needs to do or a mixture of both all of which is kind of a group of tasks for each stage so if you need any help figuring out your process that's something that we could definitely help out with and there's many different examples that we can record additional videos kind of show different use cases for onboarding and things like that so hopefully this helps please let us know if you have any questions and best of luck.