Have you ever had an sales opportunity that you worked on for a time but ultimately went quiet on you? Or a lead that seemed hot and then suddenly went cold? Of course you have, this is the nature of sales. You also most likely have had that wonderful moment went one these leads or opportunities comes back to life suddenly. That email that says “Sorry we were focused on another project but we are ready to move forward now” – once you have stopped celebrating, the reality kicks in that you have to find all the information connected with this opportunity and try to reassemble it – or at least that is what happens with CRM systems other than Pipeliner.
We developed the Archive function to allow salespeople to remove lost leads and opportunities from their active pipeline but still save all the associated data. So we designed, what is in essence, a shadow pipeline with all the same stages of the process but instead of active leads and opportunities, it stores the lost ones frozen in time at the exact stage where they were lost. (By the way you can also move Won opportunities to the Archive if you want to keep your active pipeline uncluttered – it is simply a choice).
There are a number of reasons why we built the Archive. Firstly, you can simply click on the lead or opportunity in the Archive and immediately reactive and it comes alive again in your active pipeline. Simple as that, no stressing on finding the data. Secondly, you can learn a lot about individual salespeople by looking at where in the sales process they lose the most leads – for example someone losing a lot of leads in the first stage can mean they are rigorous in their qualification or they are not very good at starting a sales process. Be worth knowing which, I think you would agree? Or you see they are great until the latter stages so maybe closing is an issue. Bottom line is now you have real data to help analyse their strengths and weaknesses.
It is not just the performance of salespeople, however, that you can analyse, there is also the performance of your actual sales process. Again being able to see where the majority of your opportunities are lost in the sales process can provide you with insights into whether you:
- need to alter the process (maybe you need to add or subtract a stage)
- do some additional training focused on that stage (e.g. how to better move to the proposal stage)
- Add additional collateral to the stage for salespeople to use (e.g. customer case studies, templates)
The beauty of the Archive is that it is a treasure trove of insight and provides you with performance indicators that are immediately actionable. So when you think of the Pipeliner Archive feature, don’t think of a dusty, cobwebbed room but rather see it is as the gleaming data center full of analytics that it truly is!
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