Why work with a Sales Pipeline in a Kanban Board

Handling your business opportunities in a structured and intuitive way will help you and your sales team to close more deals.
If you want to achieve your sales goals, it is important that you have a pipeline that is large enough.
For each step that you move your prospects through the pipeline, some prospects will get lost.
After you have been working like this for a few months, you will know your win ratio, how many prospects you need to make one deal.

In this video, Timo Rein explains how this works.

By visualizing your pipeline in a kanban board  it  becomes very clear to the sales team how they are doing and what they need to do to reach their set goals.

With SuiteCorners Kanban Pipeline Board for NetSuite you achieve exactly what Timo went through in the video.

This Pipeline Board uses 6 statuses (can of course be adapted to fit your companies needs)

OPPORTUNITIES IDENTIFIED – When a new deal is identified and created it ends up here. This is the default status when creating a new opportunity from a lead.

QUALIFYING – When a new opportunity is created, the first step for the sales rep is to qualify the opportunity.

• Decision Maker Identified – Have you identified the person that takes the decision to buy
• Have you identified what the prospect needs – You need to know what the prospect needs to be able to give them an offer that matches their needs.
• Budget Identified – Do you now that the prospect have budget to buy from you. Don’t waist time on a prospect that don’t have the budget. It is better to find this out early in the process
• Timing Identified – Do you know if the prospect needs your products/services right now. If the timing is off, you should change the expected closing date so you can resume contact when the time is better.
• Solution Prepared – When you have enough information to give the prospect an offer, you create an estimate and the opportunity will be closed. An estimate takes over the deal in the pipeline

PROPOSAL – When you create an estimate this is the default status. Send the proposal to the prospect and follow up.

NEGOTIATION – The prospect might think your offer is too expensive or does not include enough. If there are open questions regarding your offer, then move the estimate over to this status. Estimates in this status is closer to a closing and should get extra attention.

PURCHASING – If the prospect lets you know they accept the offer a sales order should be created. If you don´t have time at the moment, or the creation of the sales order should be handled by someone else, the estimate should be moved to this column.

WON (Sales Orders) – When you create a sales order from an opportunity or an estimate, the sales order will end up in this column. The opportunity and estimate will change status to Won. You can´t manually move a card to this column.

LOST (Estimates) – When a prospect turns an estimate down the card can be moved to this column. The card will stay in this column until the sales rep updates the estimate with a lost reason.

At the top of the board you can see the some important metrics to keep track on

Ongoing Deals – all ongoing deals (won and lost not included)

Weighted Pipeline Amount – Ongoing deals weighted amount (total * probability) (Won and lost not included)

Total Pipeline Amount – Ongoing deals total amount (Won and lost not included)

Won this Week – Sales orders this week

Avg won deal – Average won deal amount

If you want to read more, go to Boards for NetSuite >>

/Daniel