The foundation of your CRM is ultimately a critical piece to ensuring a cohesive workflow. You'll want something that is organized and focused on your ultimate goal, building relationships. You'll want to begin to consider:
What does my workflow look like? IE. Un-contacted Leads > Marketing Outreach > Contract Proposal > etc.
When looking at a funnel, what makes sense to you?
What are the milestones you're looking to hit?
What activities will you be using and tracking to help track your KPIs? Phone Calls, Emails, Contract Sent, etc.
As a precursor, we'd strongly recommend taking a look at these articles as well for a bit of contextual background:
Step 1: Your Sales KPIs
As we get down to thinking about what activities you'll want, ultimately you should consider, what do I want to measure? When I think back and evaluate myself or my team, what numbers do I want to hold my firm accountable for? What ratios will ultimately interest me? All of these answers should be solved in your activity based reports. When you sit down and consider what you want to measure, the item that comes to mind should be an activity. So what KPIs might be important?
Sales Call
Email (emails will track automatically so no need as an activity!)
Client Meeting
Contract Extended
Contract Signed
Open Job
Lost Opportunity
These KPIs can easily be set up as activities within your Settings | Activities section in Crelate.
Pro Tip: For activities pertaining to business development, we recommend making them Available On (see bottom check boxes below) both Contacts and Opportunities. The reason here is that you may log a Sales Call on a contact regarding an opportunity or on the opportunity itself.
Step 2: Setting your Sales Workflow
With your activities created, let's now transition to your Sales Workflow. We ultimately envision that you'll want to track new leads all the way through the process. Meaning the pipeline doesn't end what a contract is signed or the job becomes open but instead would end in a Lost or Continual Engagement process (maybe you have consistent health check-ins with your active clients).
New Lead (Yet to engage)
Prospect (Engagement made, looking for an 'in')
In Negotiation (Meaningful engagement leading to 'next step' discussions)
Contract Agreement (A formal agreement has been signed to begin work)
Open (Active Job, your team is beginning to work the req)
Job Closed! (Filled, Hired, Etc - Something to indicate you've closed the job by placing a candidate)
Could not Contact (A cold lead that was never reached)
Lost (There could be many reasons here, the Client withdrew, went with a competitor etc)
To configure, navigate to Settings | Workflows | Sales Workflow.
Step 3: Having your Sales Workflow and Activities Work Together
Now that both are setup, you'll likely want to have the two work together. Crelate provides the ability to automate when some activities occur. There are other unique triggers as well tied to probability and email automation that we'll also discuss!
Within each workflow stage, you'll have the ability to Configure Rules.
Activity Creation:
As an important step in the process, we've created a quick minute video explanation of the process of linking activities to your workflow.
Probability:
When you move a lead to a particular workflow stage, it may make sense to adjust Probability. Those earlier in the process may be set to 0 or 25% where the probability will progressively increase as they move through your funnel. We have an entire article dedicated to Why Set a Probability? that we'd recommend checking out to help you accurately forecast your pipeline's revenue.
Send an Email:
Triggering an automated email can be immensely beneficial for your outreach and workflow. Automate an email so that when an opportunity is moved to a new stage, that message gets sent out. Perhaps you have a Call 1 + Email 1, Call 2 + Email 2 routine? If so, why not automate that after your call, you drag the opportunity to the appropriate stage, from there an email can automatically trigger to follow up after your call!
Simply select the check box and then use the + sign to Built a Template.
How to Begin Configuring Your CRM/Sales Pipeline
What's Next?
With your pipeline and activities configured, let's take a look at creating your first lead!