What is sales pipeline management?

Sales pipeline management visually represents your prospects, leads and customers. Sales pipeline management software lets you track and direct potential customers throughout your sales cycle. You can use it to both analyze and improve your sales process.

What are the stages of a sales CRM process?

Since every sales process differs, the stages vary from one business to the next. There are, however, a few typical stages, including prospecting and generating new leads, qualifying them and closing the deal.

What are CRM processes?

CRM processes refer to the activities and strategies that nurture customer relationships and contribute to the sales cycle. Some examples of CRM processes include automating marketing campaigns, upselling and cross-selling, data analysis and acquiring new leads.

What different types of CRM solutions are there?

There are three main types of CRM systems : collaborative, analytical and operational. A collaborative CRM aims to improve cross-functional collaboration by removing communication silos. It’s helpful for businesses where different departments often work together. An analytical CRM helps businesses review customer data and insights. It has the features to collect large amounts of customer information and allows users to analyze data effectively. An operational CRM focuses on streamlining business processes to improve customer relationships. If you’re not sure which type of CRM you need, take a look at Pipedrive . Our CRM software offers intuitive features covering all of these key areas.

What is a CRM life cycle?

A CRM life cycle includes the stages a customer moves through, from becoming aware of the service or product to closing the sale.

CRM processes and activities

Structure your processes for success

Juggling the data and sales activities required for successful customer outreach, lead generation and customer support isn’t easy – especially as your company grows.

Customer relationship management (CRM) processes help you streamline communication, build brand awareness and quickly move leads through the sales funnel.

Pipedrive's visual pipeline includes goal setting and activity tracking to help you create reports and optimize your CRM process.

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CRM processes, pipeline and activities features

Activities and goals management

See what’s in your schedule, manage your sales activities like follow-up emails, phone calls and meetings and plan your time efficiently

Data import

Effortlessly import customer data and contact information from a spreadsheet or migrate from other CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot and Zoho

Pipeline management

Stay organized and take control of your complex sales process with visual, drag-and-drop pipelines

Sales management software

Measure sales funnel metrics to optimize support team and customer engagement strategies

Sales pipeline report

Monitor your team’s progress and drive sales by using a CRM with built-in sales pipeline reports

Sales process management

Use CRM data to define and visualize your sales process, accurately forecast performance and identify areas of improvement

Benefits of CRM technology

A CRM platform can help you streamline your entire sales process:

Create a forecast report for future revenue and profitability: Allocate resources and strategize for success.
Manage multiple pipelines from one place: Create custom stages for each pipeline to manage the customer lifecycle.
Track individual, team and company goals: Monitor your sales goals, metrics and business needs in one location.
Simplify workflows with marketing automation: Automate repetitive tasks like updating deals and sending emails to streamline lead management.
Boost contact management: Track customer interactions with a contact timeline and analyze customer data to better understand your target audience.
Elevate CRM processes with integrations: Keep your workflows running smoothly by integrating third-party apps and tools with your CRM platform.

SOFTWARE FEATURE

Pipeline analysis and reports

Understanding the metrics of your sales pipeline and CRM processes can help you significantly improve your sales cycle. But extracting data takes time, and human errors can lead to losses.

Pipedrive provides an overview of three crucial areas of the sales pipeline: the number of deals, their average size and value and their close ratio. With this visibility, you can analyze your pipeline in just a few clicks and use the findings as a benchmark.

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SOFTWARE FEATURE

Sales process management

Business success often depends on a full understanding of your customer journey.

Use Pipedrive to outline and visualize the stages of the CRM process in your pipeline. Plan CRM activities, forecast your performance and spot sales issues early on.

See where your prospects are in the sales process and which actions you need to take to get them to close.

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SOFTWARE FEATURE

Sales team management

Effortlessly hit your sales objectives by tracking sales performance and milestones with a CRM system.

Use Pipedrive’s reports, dashboards and filters to see whether your sales team is on track to hit their targets and make adjustments where necessary.

Set goals for individual salespeople or entire sales teams and easily align them with company KPIs.

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SOFTWARE FEATURE

CRM activities and goals

When business is thriving, your sales activities can quickly pile up. Staying focused on what matters is key to boosting sales, keeping leads engaged and guiding prospects and new customers along your pipeline.

Use Pipedrive’s activity-based sales approach to minimize distractions. The pipeline reveals where your team needs to take action and structures your workday with to-do lists, focus views, reminders and more. Attach any activity (such as a call, meeting or email) to a deal, person or organization to keep everything in one place.

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Improve customer satisfaction with elevated CRM processes

Manage customer interactions through every step of the customer journey with the right CRM processes in place. Streamline the customer experience, boost customer retention, strengthen customer loyalty and increase customer satisfaction.

Used by over 100,000 companies in 179 countries

In the forecast view, we look at what deals are due to close this month, next month just to make sure everyone is really honest about what they should be working on.

Carolyn PearsonFounder, Maiden Voyage

One of the favorite features within Pipedrive is the email integration. It pulls all of the clients details in, so that we don’t have to think about it.

Erin and DrewFounders, Pro Arts

As a business owner, my favorite feature in Pipedrive is the statistics and being able to look at the dashboard and use those metrics to help each individual on the team.

Lisa CoyleCEO, 360 Payments

CRM processes FAQs

There are three main types of CRM systems: collaborative, analytical and operational.
- A collaborative CRM aims to improve cross-functional collaboration by removing communication silos. It’s helpful for businesses where different departments often work together.
- An analytical CRM helps businesses review customer data and insights. It has the features to collect large amounts of customer information and allows users to analyze data effectively.
- An operational CRM focuses on streamlining business processes to improve customer relationships.
If you’re not sure which type of CRM you need, take a look at Pipedrive. Our CRM software offers intuitive features covering all of these key areas.

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Full access. No credit card required.