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:
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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.
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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
