Manage Your Pipeline, Don’t Just Track Contacts

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The Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF):

This post is aimed at solo sales agents and small team sales managers and executives who can make decisions on inexpensive tools that will dramatically impact how they manage their pipelines. Pipelinedeals.com is the featured solution.

The Full Story

You’re not managing your pipeline well.

We all know about Act, Goldmine, Maximizer, Outlook. Bloated software where you COULD store everything. Maybe you’re using one of them. If not, there are free solutions out there–the Palm desktop software can log all of your contacts, give you a calendar and todo list for free. Essential PIM does the same thing.

Then there’s the behemoths such as Siebel/Oracle, Salesforce.com, and others who will help you track it all online. No software to download. Sounds great, but they’re complex as well.

If you work on a large team or you’re a midlevel sales manager, I wish you the best of luck. But if you’re a solo sales agent or you lead a small sales team and can affect change, here are my suggestions.

Keep your contact management software (or get one of the free ones I mentioned). In your contact manager, log EVERYONE you come in contact with. But don’t just add their name, title, and other basic contact details, though. Choose a field or customize a field where you can add one- or two-word tags or keywords about the person. For example, you might add the name of the person who introduced the two of you as a tag; or simply use “referral” or “ku grad” or “association banquet” and so forth. These tags can be used to later filter your database or search through it based on details other than address, city, state, zip, etc.

Then, as a contact becomes a legitimate prospect, i.e., after you’ve completed the first appointment and initially qualified them, use one other system for tracking just those deals-in-the-making. My specific recommendations are our Excel-based prospect management report (version 2.0 coming in mid-August), or a new tool I’ve been testing recently: Pipelinedeals.com.

Pipelinedeals.com (a full review with video and narration is coming in August as well) is a powerful, online system for managing your deals and prospects in a notebook-style format. I have to tell you, I’ven tinkering with this a bit, and it’s really amazing…and being enhanced continually.

In short, Pipelinedeals.com lets you add “deals” with unlimited contact associated with each, track them with your customized stages in the sales process, and run reports to see an overview of your pipeline. But it also lets you share your deals with other individuals on your team, setup different access levels (for example, rep, manager, executive), upload documents associated with each deal, and create todos and reminders tied to specific deals and contacts.

And it’s very affordable, starting for free (up to 10 deals) and topping out at $100 per month (unlimited deals). Assuming you customize your sales process and only use the system for active leads, it really helps you take an objective look at your sales pipeline. And you know how important we think objectivity is…

As I mentioned, a full review and video walkthrough of Pipelinedeals.com is coming to Salesteamtools.com in the near future. Bookmark this post and we’ll update you when it’s available. But feel free to setup an account there in the meantime and investigate.

The most important thing here is that you consciously manage your pipeline — evaluate it objectively and think through ways to move people out or ahead. Don’t simply track contacts and leave the rest up to your memory. Managing your prospects and pipeline continue to be a key differentiator for many top sales professionals over their colleagues.