Sales Pipeline Preview * Progress Update * More Jobs

Part of the impending Sales and CRM update is the inclusion of a new sales pipeline report.  For those new to the concept of a Sales Pipeline or Funnel, it is a chart that provides for a visual representation of your entire sales process.

Before I explain further, let’s take a look:

So,  looking down the right hand side(3) (above)we have the list of your custom sales stages (ie Contracts Sent) which shows the key metrics of that stage:

• The Total value of all opportunities for that stage
• The total Likely value of all opportunities.  This is an estimation of the value of opportunities in that stage that will proceed to a final sale
• The number of all opportunities
• The average age of opportunities in that stage

The General Overview panel(2) displays a quick snapshot of your entire sales pipeline and the Selection Menu(1) allows you to drill down and view individual performance for individual players or team roles (groups).

By reviewing the Sales Pipeline you can instantly see how much potential sales are in progress and where they sit in terms of pushing them through to a close/win.  It helps you identify bottlenecks in your sales process as prepare for future work loads.

This has been developed alongside the new Sales & CRM module and will be released to all accounts as the updates come out of beta.

Leads vs Opportunities vs Deals vs Pool

The way WORK[etc]’s sales module has always worked is to collect all inbound sales opportunities into the “Lead Pool” and then as opportunities are assigned to people, the migrate to the “My Leads” screen.  The terminology causes confusion as many companies, sectors and countries can all use different terms to describe different stages of their process.

So what we’ve done with this update is given account administrators the option to customize the language they want to use to describe “opportunities” and “leads” and thus use the terms that are best suited to their particular operation.  Just the same as we let you define what you call your customers (ie clients, students, patients, Cretans) you’ll now be able to decide when to call a lead, a lead, an opportunity and opportunity and everything in between.

Roles & Permissions

Another fundamental change with this roll out is addition of Roles under the new permission tool.  Roles are essentially groups of employees assigned a particular function in your business.  The point of Roles is to make it easier to manage people in a larger organization.

For example, you might create a role called “Reviewer” and assign 10 people to that review.  Whenever a project comes up that requires quality control, you can assign that project in one click, to the Reviewers.  Previously you would have had to assign it manually to each individual person.

Roles also make it easier to manage who has access to what WORK[etc] tools.  For example (above), you might create a role called Inbound Sales(1) whose job it is to answer your phone and capture new sales leads.  You want them to have access to Contacts(2) but you definitely don’t want them accessing tools like  Finance(3) .  The Role tool makes it easy to set a standard list of permissions and then add people to that Role.