Sales POP - Purveyors of Propserity
Treasure Trove of Insight
Blog / For Sales Pros / Nov 26, 2018 / Posted by John Golden / 5142

Treasure Trove of Insight

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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!

About Author

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Author's Publications on Amazon

John Golden, best selling author of "Winning the Battle for Sales" presents "Social Upheaval: How to Win At Social Selling" to explain how every B2B salesperson can add social selling methods to their toolkits, and why it is so important that they do so without…
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FROM THE CREATORS OF SPIN SELLING―TRIED-AND-TRUE STRATEGIES TO ARM YOU IN THE WAR FOR SALES SUPREMACY "I distinctly remember my first VP talking about 'campaigns' and 'targets.' Indeed, successful salespeople have made learning from military tactics an important aspect of their careers. In this engaging…
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