Close more deals for Administration

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hello my name is Paul Meiners welcome back to another one of my pipedrive training videos in this video I want to share with you some productivity tips with the goal of helping you to save time and close more of your pipedrive deals because if we can save you time if we can make you more efficient then you can increase your capacity and potentially handle more leads or you can follow up with more opportunities at once and if we can help you to close more deals that's more Revenue uh improved conversion rates which is exactly what any salesperson should be aiming for if you have any questions at the end of this video please feel free to leave me a comment below and if you would like some one-on-one help with setting up or auditing your pipedrive account if you want to learn how to take full advantage of pipedrive including how to automate your sales process then click the link in the description below to learn more about my pipedrive Consulting and Support options now my first tip might be a basic one but I'm often surprised just how many users or clients we meet who aren't using this feature so I'm going to talk about it anyway and that is to use email templates pipedrive gives you this great ability to connect your Google workspace your iCloud or your Microsoft email account in fact any IMAP email can be connected to pipedrive and once you connect your email you can compose and send emails directly from within pipedrive and they give you the option to send emails using templates so if I go to my manage templates here you can see I've got these various follow-up templates I've pre-written this and I've actually got a field in here for to put the person's name in here I'm actually sharing this with my team so any of the other users in my account can actually use the same templates as me I can make sure my sales team are using the correct language and copy and so you can see today I have this activity I need to do a follow-up on the proposal to Lois Lane so I'm going to come in here choose my template day one follow-up and there we go the email gets generated and it gets personalized with Lois's email I can then click Send or I can schedule to send this later most people should be using email templates for every stage of their sales process from responding to initial inquiries to booking appointments and Discovery calls following up on quotes and proposals maybe even sending a list of next steps and action items if you take a little bit of time now to pre-write those emails with your perfect language and tone of voice you can save a ton of time later not having to type the same thing every single time I could take this a step further so instead of following up with each person one by one if I go to my deal screen what I might do actually is switch to my list View and then I'm going to use a filter to find all of the deals in a certain stage so let's go add new filter we're going to look for deals where the stage is proposal sent and I only want to look for deals that are still open so I'm going to add that condition in here as well and that's going to filter down my leads here we go there's about eight deals here that I can follow up on including the lowest Lane deal that you saw me email before now if I select all of these I can send a group email this does require the use of pipedrive's advanced or professional plan if you're on essential you're not going to have this option but I can send a group email here and just like before I can choose which template I want to use and each you can see all the recipients here who are going to receive this email they are still going to get a personalized email personalized with their their name so instead of having to email each of these people one by one I can use a bulk or group email to follow up with everyone in one hit for my next tip I want to talk about activities a mistake that we see a lot of people make with pipedrive is they might have a deal a bit like this where it has this little yellow warning triangle and then there's no activity scheduled on the deal or you might have deals like this with the little red warning which says you have an overdue activity I'm very used to dealing with clients and I get into their account and I see lots of yellow and red warnings the reason this is an issue is if you don't have an activity on a deal like this you see I have no reminder telling me what I need to do next so if I have loads of deals in my pipeline there's a chance that this deal which might be a good opportunity is going to slip through the cracks because I have nothing reminding me what I need to do next so the best practice I recommend is always having at least some kind of activity reminding you what to do next so for this deal we're in the contact made stage I'm trying to book a meeting to do some kind of intro or Discovery so maybe I'll schedule an activity for later this week um follow up on booking Discovery call so maybe I've already sent Jane Doe here a link to book a call with me even though the ball is in Jane's Court I need her to book the session being a good proactive salesperson I'm going to set a reminder for myself to follow up if Jane doesn't do that I can't emphasize enough how important this is I hear all the time from clients things like our pipeline is full of some great opportunities but we're finding things are slipping through the cracks we're not following up effectively and we're losing revenue and it's usually the result of not following this best practice and having proactive activities scheduled remember the people you're following up with and dealing with are often very busy they may be talking to multiple people they maybe have multiple projects and things they're working on at any one time so they need some encouragement they need a reminder of hey this is what we need to do next to get closer to making a decision and and for you to make the sale so you being a good proactive salesperson should be taking it on yourself to to do those regular follow-ups my next tip is not a pipe Drive tip actually it's more of a technique I've been using as I've been doing my own follow-ups and it's to send personal video follow-ups instead of just sending an email or trying to call I'm sending these videos and I'm doing that using a service called bonjuro once I have the bonjour extension installed in Chrome or I'm using Brave here I can record my screen in my case I just use my webcam or I can do a screen plus camera situation and I can choose my mic and camera here and then I start recording now what I actually do is I you can see in the thumbnail there I hold up a whiteboard with the person's name on it because after I finish recording my follow-up message I can then insert this video into my email and I can include a thumbnail and I find that people respond really well when they see their name on the Whiteboard it shows that this is a personal follow-up message it gets a really good click and open rate and it's a really nice way of cutting through some of the noise people really appreciate the extra level of care and attention that I've gone to so here we go I'm going to start recording I'm going to hold up my whiteboard there we go I'm recording now I'm doing my follow-up message and then once I click stop my video starts processing there we go I'm recording now so I can see my video down there um bonjour lets me choose these various templates so I can pick a template here it's going to change things like the message on the right hand side I've got this sample video down below and then when I'm ready to share this I usually choose the thumb and Link option I'll copy that and then if I head back on over to pipedrive I can paste this into my email and so you see here it's a little bit small in this example but it's put a thumbnail in of the video they can click that and view my video and they can see it's it's actually this this is pasted in a little bit small but they can see their name on the Whiteboard and yeah I've been having some some really good results following up in this way when you're working in pipedrive if you have a pipeline that's really full I mean my one here isn't too bad I've only got 19 deals open but it's very common for clients that we work with to have you know dozens or maybe even hundreds of deals open in their pipeline at any one time so it can be challenging to know who should we follow up with first who what are the really good opportunities that we should be prioritizing there's a couple of ways that we can identify those the first is that you could use a filter and I've created one here called best opportunities and so for this filter you can you can Define what a good opportunity is for you of course what I've done is I've said show me any deal where the label is hot likely to convert so that's usually a label I will put on once I've had a conversation with somebody if I've got a pretty good feeling like Yep they're going to be they're going to become a customer I've had good feedback from them I'll use that hot label if the deal is expecting to close this month if I think I can get it across the line this month and of course I only want to look at deals that are open so if I apply this filter there we go I can find all the deals you can see here that have the hot label it's still open and using my expected close date it's expecting to close this month so rather than having to look at hundreds of deals at once I can focus just on these really good opportunities and try and get those across the line the other tool or view that we could use is the forecast view this is a view that again I find not enough people know about this feature or use it but this shows me the deals that I am expecting to close this month and again this comes from that expected close date field so I generally recommend once you've had a conversation with someone maybe you've even had a verbal approval yet we're going to go ahead we're going to approve the quote or we're going to accept the proposal you can put a an expected close date on I usually use the end of the month or sometimes people will tell me hey um we're not going to proceed now but we've got a privilege to do this in November so I could maybe set that expected close to a to be the end of November here are all the deals that haven't expected close day I can see the ones that I'm hoping to get across the line in October and some deals that are coming up in November as well so again I can sort of focus my attention and my follow-up energy on these opportunities where I've already had that verbal approval and they're pretty close to making a decision now any good salesperson or team should always be trying to work on their weaknesses in order to improve their conversion rates and close more deals so whether that be something like actually improving your product or service maybe that means changing your pricing the packages and and service that you actually offer maybe it's actually how you communicate your service and how you portray value whatever it might be we always want to be identifying for the deals that we lost why did we lose them because then we can actually work on improving those weaknesses and pipedrive makes this really easy to do in my company settings here you can see I've predefined some lost reasons these are the reasons I can can choose from when a market deal is lost I can say that the deal was lost maybe because the client didn't respond maybe there was an issue with my price they might have gone with a different option a competitor maybe the timing was just not right or maybe they didn't give me a reason whatever your reasons are you can Define them here and I do recommend coming up with a definitive list and disabling the free form entry of lost reasons because that really mucks up your reporting and then in my insights here I have a report a report that shows any deal that I lost this year I've just put it into the pie chart View and I've segmented it by my lost reason and so now for the deals that I've lost yet this year I can see well three were lost for bad timing and two were because the client didn't respond so actually if I click on this section of the pie chart I can identify these deals that were lost for bad timing and now maybe I actually want to follow up with them it's been a few months maybe the timing is better now so I could potentially Salvage those deals these ones where they didn't respond yeah maybe again I tried following up a couple more times uh to see again maybe they if their priorities have changed and there's a couple of reasons here a couple of people went with competitors and there was one case of the price being too high there's obviously not a huge amount of data here this is just my demo account but by identifying what are the most common reasons we lose a deal we can then work on making improvements to our sales copy to the product or service that we offer to ultimately improve our conversion rate inevitably we're not going to be able to win all of the deals sometimes people just don't respond or the timing isn't quite right and so this is an opportunity where we can again save some time in how we follow up and nurture them long term what I do is if I lose a deal I click the Lost button up here I'll choose one of my lost reasons maybe I'll say the timing wasn't right and our Market is lost and what I've done is I've connected pipedrive to zapier zapier is a third-party automation service that allows you to connect pipedrive with other tools and apps that you might use so in this particular zap or this this is an automated workflow it's triggered via a web hook that comes from pipedrive it does a couple of different things where it looks up different labels and tags to use but ultimately what I'm doing is I then tag the subscriber in convertkit with like a tag for adding them to my Asana newsletter or my pipedrive newsletter depending on what it is they've inquired about and so even though I've lost the deal I'm going to put them on my newsletter they're going to get some some content and updates from me depending on the last reason down here if I lost the deal for bad timing or maybe they just didn't respond that's going to tag the subscriber with a different tag and that's going to trigger an email to go out in three months and six months to see if the timing is right or if they didn't show up for their intro call um I'll tag them as a no-show and that's going to automatically email them seeing if they want to read books so rather than me having to do this manual long-term follow-up I can add them to my newsletter and Trigger different follow-up sequences based on that lost reason that I chose if you've never used zapier before it can be a little bit of a complicated tool to get started with so if you would like help with automation like that feel free to reach out to me there's a link in the description below and I'm happy to talk through different automation options but that's it for this video I hope you found a couple of these tips useful if you have any questions please feel free to leave me a comment below and thank you very much for watching I'll see you in the next video