Multiple Sales Pipeline - An Overview

What is sales pipeline?

A deal moves through various stages before it is won or lost. These stages are called sales stages. From business consideration and negotiation through to closure, there are several stages that a deal could pass through or skip depending on how the previous stage goes. For example, if a product has a fixed price then the deal will skip the negotiation stage or if a legal agreement is required before signing the contract, the deal will have an additional stage to pass through. Similarly, the stages in the sales process may vary depending on the deal, product, or service.

In order to track the progress of the deal, to know its current stage, and to guesstimate the revenue based on the number of deal closures, you need a holistic view of the entire process in your CRM software. To achieve this, salespeople build a pipeline in the CRM account that consists of all the stages and is a digital version of their sales process. It is designed to give a complete picture of the sales process.

What are the stages in a basic sales pipeline?

Let us take a look at some stages present in a typical pipeline:

• Qualification: Selecting the most viable deals and engaging them.
• Proposal or Price Quote: Discussing the proposal, budget, and signing off on compliance, IT, or onboarding requirements.
• Negotiation: Revisiting the quote, deciding the final price, and signing the contract.
• Sales Order: Creating the sales order and finalizing the dispatch details.
• Payment: Delivering the order and receiving payment.
• Close won: Deal is won and the customer details are saved for future business.
• Lost: Deal is lost and the customer may or may not be contacted for future business.

These stages represent the fundamental buying and selling process in a business. The sales stages can vary between businesses, industries, products or services.

For example, a furniture manufacturer who sells ready-made and made-to-order furniture has to follow a different sales process for each type of order. When ready-made furniture is sold, they receive the customer order, create an invoice, and close the deal once the customer makes a payment. However, for customized furniture, they gather the customer's requirements, give a price estimate, negotiate the amount, receive the first instalment, complete the order, receive the final payment, and then close the deal.

If they add the deal stages of both the sales processes into a single pipeline it will be confusing and difficult to identify the current stage of a deal and take the necessary actions.

Therefore, they should create individual pipelines for each process:

• Ready-made furniture: Receive order > Create invoice > Payment received > Deal closed.
• Made-to-order furniture: Gather Requirements > Cost estimation > First instalment > Order completed > Final payment > Deal closed.

Creating individual pipelines for sales processes makes it easier to track and monitor the progress of different kinds of deals.

Before we proceed, let us take a look at some of the key concepts that are integral to the deal pipelines.

Important Concepts in Multiple Pipelines

What are Standard or default pipelines?

The standard pipeline is a system-defined, default pipeline that is automatically created when you build a custom pipeline for the first time. It contains all the stages in the existing Deal Stage picklist field. The standard pipeline is created to ensure that all existing deals are associated with at least one pipeline. You can transfer the deals to another, more suitable pipeline if required.

How are pipelines and layouts related?

A layout in Zoho CRM is a form that captures the details of a record. A module can have multiple layouts to save records that require you to collect different information. This allows you to keep records of the same kind in one layout and helps maintain a clean and organized database.

For example, the information collected from customers for ready-made furniture will be different from the information collected for made-to-order furniture. Therefore, they can be stored in the same module but using different layouts.

Having layouts also allows you to set permission access for each layout so that only the users who need to can access it. So if different sales teams manage the ready-made and made-to-order furniture orders, you can configure CRM so they can only access the layout for the order type they work on.

If these records follow different sales processes, then you can create pipelines and associate them with the layouts to track their progress through the selling process.

• Ready-made orders - Pipeline A
• Made-to-order - Pipeline B

Let's now look at different industries and understand how they use pipelines in their business processes.