Making it easier to keep track of opportunities
Running a small business keeps you on your toes! There’s lots to be getting on with and it’s really easy to lose track of all the different things you have going on. Using software like Marketcircle’s Daylite can help you in many different ways. Daylite uses an area called opportunities to help you track your possible new clients and potential projects, giving you one place to focus on, so you don’t overlook these important leads when you get super busy with everything else you have going on.
When managing an opportunity you can attach a ‘Pipeline’. This is a way to track the stages you need to pass through when managing your new sales. These phases can be things like ‘Initial phonecall/meeting’ or ‘Write proposal’. Inside each of these phases you could have many tasks, examples of these could be a reminder to call the client; or research for the possible project; etc.
Most businesses will have many ‘opportunities’ open at the same time, one for each possible new lead you’re following. Getting an overview of all of these opportunities so you know how many you have at each stage is vital as it helps you keep a flow of work coming into your business, and for a small business this avoids ‘busy->quiet->busy->quiet periods’. The reason that small businesses can fall into this pattern is that they only focus on new sales when they are quiet, making themselves busy again… and the cycle repeats!
Sales Funnel
We have built a report for Daylite that visualises your sales pipeline as a funnel. Using this report you have one place to look to check if you’re about to enter a period where there are no opportunities ready to convert to a project, hence ‘no new sales’. It’s really simple to see this, in the above image you can see a snapshot of the sales funnel for one user of Daylite (you can view all users too). At the bottom of the sales funnel you can see there are 6 opportunities in their final stage, so we can focus on closing these to get work paid work. If this was to be only 1 or 0… ‘Huston we have a problem’… possibly a quiet period is approaching.
Planning ahead: Not only can you look for imminent danger of a quiet period, you can also make sure you avoid that situation. Looking back at the above pipeline, there are 10 opportunities in the ‘Initial Contact’ stage, but only 2 in the ‘Send proposal’ stage. Yep, we need to shift some of those 10 into the proposal stage. This is where the new update to our sales funnel will help.
Clicking the funnel gives you the data you need
In version 2 of our sales funnel report, we’ve added the ability to view a breakdown of the opportunities for each stage. All you need to do is click on a stage name in the funnel. This makes is really easy to start working on these possible sales and converting them to projects.
Looking back at our situation earlier, we could click on the ‘Initial Contact’ stage in the funnel and get a breakdown of those opportunities that we need to begin moving along. Once you’re in the breakdown, you can even click on the row to go direct to that opportunity in Daylite.
A few extras
Once you’re in the breakdown, you can navigate to any stage by clicking on the tabs above the table, allowing you to view all opportunities in one report, and even viewing opportunities that have had no stages set.
Each column in the table is sortable, you can even sort on multiple columns when holding down the shift key and clicking the column header.
The report is available here https://www.lgo.co.uk/daylite/salesfunnel/ It comes with 1 year’s updates and help to get it loading and working.
Let me know if you have any questions or you’d like a feature added to the report.
Gareth
0 Comments