How To Use CRM Opportunity Pipelines

Struggling 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.