One of the great benefits of pipeline visibility is the fact that you can see trouble brewing before it becomes a disaster.
At Pipedrive we place great stock in forecasting, predictability and being able to course-correct mid-stream. To do this a sales manager needs information and he or she needs a lot of it.
Of course, it’s not all negative. Confidence in your statistics brings the peace of mind that you have the facts and stats needed to have complete confidence in your forecasting.
As a former sales manager, I know that simply seeing which deals have been opened or closed is just the beginning.
We need to know how open deals are being managed, hence this new statistics release.
See what drives deals through your pipeline stages
Your business most likely has a key stage, maybe even more than one.
When I worked as a sales manager, the ‘Proposal Sent’ stage was the one.
It usually meant the client was definitely committed and would almost certainly end up buying, even though there were still several pipeline stages to go through before we marked the deal as won.
As our sales cycle took up to six months, it was important to see how deals were moving between stages, but with so many deals flying around it was almost impossible to keep track of this movement without help. Remembering where a deal was last week or the week before, when looking at 50 deals just wasn’t possible, but I needed information on how deals were moving, not just which deals had been closed.
Thus the Deal Stages view...
What does this mean for my business?
By tracking deal movement through the stages of the pipeline you develop insight into the drivers behind your results.
You can identify the key stages in your sales cycle and see what makes them happen.
On the other side of the coin, you can also see where roadblocks exist and quickly spot whether your pipeline is healthy or not.
A healthy pipeline means that deals are closing regularly and enough new deals are being started to maintain that closing rate. This information is available in almost any CRM.
But it’s what happens in the middle that matters, which is why we feel the Deal Stage progress is such a key metric. We’ve taken a sales manager’s approach to statistics and believe this data will benefit managers immensely.
The finer details
This new Deal Stage Progress view lets you see deal movement by stage, by stage over time, by users, and by users over time.
The great thing is that all deals are under consideration here. No matter their start date or open or closed status.
So let’s look at a practical example:
In my monthly sales meeting, I want to see how many deals we moved into the ‘Proposal Sent’ stage in the last two weeks of the month. Unfortunately, it looks like we haven’t moved nearly enough deals to maintain our closing rate and hit target.
So now I look at which salespeople moved the deals and which ones failed to do so. Say it clearly shows that only half my team have been moving enough deals. I can now take corrective measures while the situation can still be saved — rather than realizing two months down the line that we weren’t taking the actions to move deals quickly enough when it is way too late to fix the issue.
This ability to forecast accurately is as good as money in the bank to a sales manager.
How do I get it?
The view should already be available in your stats section on Pipedrive. Simply go here and start exploring.
As always, our support team is on hand to answer any questions.
Happy closing.
This article was published on November 8, 2016. Product descriptions were correct at the time of publishing.
