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12 custom pipeline ideas for your industry or business use case

12 custom pipeline ideas for your industry or business use case
Michelle from Copper
Copper Employee
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Everyday, Copper customers are taking their businesses to new heights with the help of Copper pipelines. Pipelines help teams visualize and manage an often repeatable process, providing visibility into business operations and delivering key insights 🚀

Repeatable, well-defined sales processes are super important to driving success for a sales team. By defining your sales pipeline structure, you’ll be able to see exactly what opportunities and deals are in motion and what requires your team’s attention. 

The four most common stages in a sales team pipeline are:
1. Prospecting

2. Qualifying

3. Proposing 

4. Closing

We’ve spoken to many different Copper customers across various industries to understand how they’ve put their spin on things — and the results are inspiring. It’s clear that customizing your sales pipeline structure for your business will ultimately help your sales team overcome their biggest challenges 💪

A well-structured and customized sales pipeline help sales leaders: 

  1. Properly manage their team’s activities: With a clearly-defined pipeline, sales leaders can guide their team on where to focus their time and energy. 

  2. Understand the numbers: Understanding total pipeline value is important, but beyond that, a clearly defined process enables sales leaders to track the movement of opportunities through each of the stages and understand the conversion rate from stage to stage. This insight can help improve the process and aid you in coaching your team more effectively. 

Pro tip: Striking a balance is important. Too many stages and you risk overwhelming your team, but too few stages could mean losing out on critical insights. The goal is to empower your team, not burden them with the process.

🚨 We recently recorded an entire webinar on working with pipelines in Copper. Watch it here.

 

12 custom pipeline ideas

 

We know stepping outside of the traditional “prospect-qualify-propose-close” structure can be challenging. So we’ve done the heavy lifting and put together 12 custom pipeline setups that any sales manager can use to craft the perfect pipeline in Copper 🔥 We’ve even taken it a step beyond new business, and shared a few ideas for managing renewals, investments and projects.

Many of these templates are available in Copper when creating your first or an additional pipeline 🎉

Check out our suggestions by industry (but feel free to take inspiration from each of the categories):

 


 

Agency / Media

 

Creative agency sales stages

Creative agencies are always being asked to provide quotes for projects. Having a repeatable sales process can ensure proposals don’t end up in the void and follow-ups don’t slip through the cracks. Try this structure: 

Project Discovery → Scoping → Proposal → Negotiation

 

Partnerships stages

Securing partnerships or sponsorships can be critical to businesses in sectors like media and entertainment. Track the entire process with this structure: 

Qualify → Discovery → Presentation → Agreement
 


 

Building and Construction

 

Building and construction sales stages

Taking a new construction project from concept to contract requires close control over dates, design revisions and changing prices. Your pipeline should reflect the most important stages to see where the red tape is slowing things down. Here’s one way to assemble a construction sales pipeline:

Initial Scope → Quote Development → Quote Delivered → Contract Signed 

 


 

Consulting

 

Consulting sales stages

If you offer consulting services, you need to see how well you’re scoping projects and where proposals may be struggling during negotiations. Here’s how we recommend tracking the consulting sales process:

Initial Scope → Proposal Delivered → Negotiations → Commit

 


 

Financial Services

 

New investment stages

Unlike more straightforward sales transactions, investing requires due diligence. A custom pipeline can help track investment from researching through successful signing of a deal:

Investment Research → Initial Conversation → Offer Made → Contract Signed

 

Loan process stages

Walking consumers through the loan process can be complex, but with the right pipeline structure, loan managers can make better sense of what’s happening at any given moment. Here’s one way to track the process:

Consultation → Submit Application → Approval → Funds Dispersed

 

Venture capital stages

Smart venture capital investment requires a lot of research up front and sustained negotiation to land the right deal. Here’s how you might structure your VC capital pipeline:

Evaluation → Due Diligence → Legal Review → Finalization

 


 

Real Estate

 

Real estate selling stages 

Representing a seller in real estate requires a specific sales pipeline unique to this type of highly regulated transaction. Here’s one way to structure your pipeline: 

Discussion → Exclusivity Signed → Listed → Offer Received

 

Real estate buying stages

On the flip side, realtors or real estate companies representing a buyer also need to manage this unique and complex process. Here’s our recommended pipeline structure:

Exclusivity Signed → Searching → Offer Submitted → Offer Accepted 

 


 

Software / Technology 

 

Account renewal stages

It’s much less expensive to keep a current customer than it is to close a new one. Creating a custom pipeline to track account renewals can have a big effect on the bottom line for many businesses. Oftentimes, renewals are left to the last minute or forgotten completely, leading to lost business. With a pipeline in place, you can automate the renewal reminder process to make it as smooth as possible for both parties. Try this:

Qualify → Engage → Propose → Commit

 

 New business stages

Curating new business doesn’t always end with a signed contract. Some sales leaders may want to track the early stages of new business acquisition more closely. Here’s one way to do this:

Demo Booked → Demo Held → Consideration → Verbal Commit

 


 

Bonus: Project Management


Pipelines can even be used for tracking a process after a sale is made. You can use the same approach to map out and track your client projects, providing you with oversight into your team’s activities and tasks while ensuring client work stays on track. Here’s how a project management pipeline might look:

Research → Strategy → Execution → Delivery → Reporting

 


 

We hope this helps you along your journey in optimizing your business with pipelines. 

If you have any questions, leave a comment below ⬇️

 

The Copper team

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Do we find that having multiple pipelines is best practice for tracking opportunities that aren’t ready to be added to this level of commitment yet?

 

For example, I have a Lead Pipeline, a Prospect Pipeline, and then a Sales Pipeline.

 

The SDR send information to Leads, schedule meetings with prospects, and hand off successes to the sales pipeline.

 

Or would people rather have that all in one pipeline?

 

 


Michelle from Copper
Copper Employee
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Hi @mrsethwilson, that’s a great question! To be completely honest, it really depends each organization’s process, use case and team.

In your case, you have different teams managing different parts of the process. Which means each time knows exactly where to go to manage their leads/prospects/sales! And that’s one important consideration: making sure the your teammates know where they sit in the sales cycle and where to do their work. So from that perspective, it sounds like you have a good setup.

There are some cases where it might make sense to have one longer pipeline for the entire sales cycle. For example:

  • If your full sales cycle is short and doesn’t have many steps. e.g. if the Lead Pipeline, Prospect Pipeline, and Sales Pipeline only have two stages each - it might make more sense to make one Pipeline with 6 stages instead, because that would allow you to keep your info in one single Pipeline that’s still a manageable size.
  • If you have one rep or team handling the entire sales cycle. In that case, if you have them working across different Pipelines you’d be forcing them to keep switching between them. It doesn’t sound like this applies to your team.
  • If you often need to export your opportunities, it’s easier to do that with one single Pipeline since that’s one export. The same applies to certain types of reports or statistics.

Another consideration is what your team is currently doing, and whether changing it is worth the effort. I would say if your current setup with multiple pipelines is working well, then that’s the most important thing! Because at the end of the day, you could have a perfect setup and implement all the best practices, but what really makes it work is having your team use and adopt it.

Let me know if that helps :)


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