How to Create a Sales Pipeline Effectively with Saphyte

Saphyte Team

5 min read

Updated: September 16th, 2020

A sales pipeline is one of the most important CRM features that allows your sales team to move effectively. The term ‘sales pipeline’ also gets thrown around a lot; that sales people often forget it is more than just a buzzword or a sales lingo.

Your sales pipeline is the most important tool for your sales management operations, and can greatly affect or create a significant difference to your bottom line. Your unique sales pipeline helps you visualize your sales process and marketing campaigns.

The ‘funnel’ or ‘pipeline’ visualizes your current deals, where they’re stalling, and which of your sales activities are generating most of the revenue. The visual pipeline adds a layer of accountability and transparency, which makes the moving of your sales products easier by breaking your business processes into bits and trackable and pieces.

If your team does not have a sales pipeline yet, most likely, you’re driving blind. Due to lack of insight, your sales team cannot function well and won’t realize their full potential. Given that, here’s how to create a sales pipeline effectively with Saphyte.

In order to build a sales pipeline that consistently close deals, there are a few things you need to understand.

• The things you need before starting your own pipeline
• The stages of your pipeline
• The perfect tool to use to build and maintain your pipeline

What are the things you need before starting your own sales pipeline?

Your pipeline is an important tool, that is why you can’t just throw one without carefully planning it.  You need to make sure that all the information about your company, customers, sales team, and products are gathered before assembling your pipeline.

Here’s a list of the things you’ll need before you can start your own pipeline.

List of your leads and prospects

The most important part of your pipeline are your leads and prospects. You need a list of people who would want to buy from you. Your prospect’s list should be as detailed as possible. Vital customer information details like names, contact information, their company detail, position, how you can reach out to them, and how you know they’ll be interested in your product offerings.

Your sales team’s process

Your sales process should be clear, structured, and should have a step-by-step formula that will tell your team what activities they need to do in order to close a deal. Having a good sales process allows your team to effectively and consistently win deals by simply following the necessary formula.

Your revenue targets

A goal is a vision and mission driven motivation. In the sales world, revenue is always the end goal and your pipeline can help you get there. That is why designing a successful pipeline is imperative, in order to reach your revenue goals.

The numbers you see in your pipeline will let you see what’s working and what’s not, and what your current conversion rates are. Having access to this type of knowledge allows you to calculate your number of deals on its early stages.

Meeting scheduled with your colleagues to discuss the pipeline

Your pipeline is not just a sales team-oriented tool, rather it is a company wide tool. Since everyone in the company will be using the same pipeline, you might also want to include your sales team in the decision-making process. Your sales team are imperative to the success of your pipeline build, since they’re the ones at ground zero.

What are the stages of your pipeline?

Every business is unique and no two pipelines are the same. The number and type of stages in your pipeline will differ due to its unique factors (how you contact your leads, and what your products is). Here are some of the most common stages you should have in your pipeline.

• Prospecting
• Qualifying
• Contacting
• Building Customer Experiences
• Closing
• Following up on Cold Leads

Saphyte – The perfect tool to use to build and maintain your pipeline

More than anything, a sales pipeline without the proper tool is ineffective. That is why you need help from customer relationship management (CRM) tools to build an effective pipeline. CRM systems are more than just contact management tools that manages contact information and gather leads from your email marketing and social media campaigns.

With that, why not consider looking into the Saphyte CRM system?

Saphyte is a CRM system built to help small businesses and small enterprises streamline their corporate activities and integrate them into one powerful sales and customer management platform.

With Saphyte you know where to stand in your sales because of its easy-to-use sales pipelines. Saphyte’s sales pipeline allows users to set up the important stages of their sales tailored to their business processes. Users can track and monitor the progress of their deals throughout the simplified sales pipeline in real time.

Creating a sales pipeline with Saphyte is easy. Here are the simple steps on how to create a sales pipeline with Saphyte CRM.

Creating a Sales Pipeline

You can also create a pipeline by going through the Deals tab. Click on ‘Manage Pipelines’. The system will direct you to the Pipelines settings.

Click ‘Add New pipeline’.

Label your Sales Pipeline. This is a required field, so you may need to fill this one up.

Start adding the stages to your pipeline by clicking the ‘+’ icon.

Click the ‘Add Status’ button and assign a status to each of your stages on your pipeline. The status of your pipeline will depend on your business process (please refer to the screenshot below for example).So, customize as much as you want to.

Once you’re done adding the status of your Sales Pipeline, click on the ‘Save’ button.

Editing your Sales Pipeline

Editing your Sales Pipeline with Saphyte is easy too. It doesn’t take rocket science to figure things out either. Making changes in the stages of your sales pipeline or re-assigning the managers or team members associated with your pipeline is easy. All you need to do is to follow these steps:

Go to the Admin Panel of your Saphyte CRM account. Navigate through the Marketing and Sales Settings, click on ‘Pipelines’.

You can also edit your sales pipeline by going through the Deals tab, then click on ‘Manage Pipelines’. The system will direct you to the Pipelines settings.

Select the pipeline that needs editing from your list and click on the pencil icon to edit the selected pipeline.

Make the necessary changes to your pipeline like editing your stages, associating managers and team members. You can also enable a private mode, or add a sales hierarchy into your sales pipeline. Once you’re done with the necessary changes, click on ‘Save Pipeline’

Creating a Sales Hierarchy

With Saphyte you can your sales according to your business preference. This feature is flexible that users can use this function to categorize their deals according to sectors, team hierarchy, timeline, milestones, and many more.

Here’s how users can create a Sales Hierarchy with Saphyte.

Go to the Saphyte’s ‘Admin’ panel. Under the ‘Sales & Marketing Menu’, click ‘Pipelines’.

You can start by creating a new pipeline or editing an existing pipeline. Click the ‘Hierarchy’ tab and start setting your Sales Hierarchy.

Note: Your sales hierarchy will depend on your business’ whole process. You can create a hierarchy according to the timeline of your deals or according to your teams, and many more. With Saphyte, you can add a maximum of 4 layers of hierarchy into your sales pipeline.

Label each level of your hierarchy. You can also add a color-code to each pipeline for easier visual identification. You may consider your Sales Hierarchy as a folder and sub-folder for all your deals.

Start assigning a team member to your pipeline. The creator of the pipeline will automatically be assigned as the manager of the pipeline. As the Manager of the pipeline you can modify the settings of your pipeline (update and delete functions). The Team Member is only allowed to manage the deals (e.g. add and update deals).

Once you’re done setting up your Hierarchy, click on ‘Save Pipeline’.

Conclusive Thoughts

So those were the necessary steps on how to create a pipeline with Saphyte CRM solutions. Remember, your visual pipeline is your roadmap for a successful sales campaign. Choose a CRM that can partner and grow with you along the way,

Choose Saphyte today by booking a free demo with us or starting your free trial now.