Managing your sales pipeline in vendor negotiations

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welcome in this video we're going to be doing a review of the process for managing a sales pipeline and function point there are two areas in function point that are important in managing a sales pipeline the estimates module and function point crm function functionpoint's crm system is made up of companies in their sub-contacts if we navigate to the details page of a company we can see all that company's information including all of its sub-contacts and you can add an unlimited amount of contacts to each company an important aspect of function points crm is how you label the companies that you're working with here we'll find some common values such as a company type with some default settings you'll find prospect client supplier and office by default you can add additional options here if you'd like another important field is qualification this typically represents where a prospect is in the sales cycle the customization of these drop downs is done in the admin section under system setup and list maintenance you can also choose to create custom fields and those can be text areas they could be date fields of calendars they could be drop downs of predetermined values and all these fields are searchable another important field is the account executive field this allows you to select who owns this opportunity or who is the main point of contact for the client once you gain their business so in this example we're looking at an active prospect with my name as the account executive that's currently in the proposal stage let's now take a look at how we can search using these values if i select to do a company find i can choose my company type we'll say prospect the status defaults to active i'll select the account executive as myself and choose the qualification as the proposal stage click find companies and that produces the results of our search there are four companies that meet that search criteria select one and it will bring us to that company's details page now let's take a look at the process for entering a note on a communication with a prospect and creating a reminder to follow up with them i can choose to add a note at the company level but i typically recommend adding the note to the contact that you've been speaking with if i click on the contact name that will bring me into the details page of the contact where i can choose to add note from the action buttons at the top right but there is a shortcut if i click the plus note radio button for the contact directly from the company details page that will bring me to the note add page and will relate this note to the contact that i selected here i can load up a template you can create templates for notes in the admin section that can load up with default information in this case i'll say i spoke with neil and he asked me to call back in two weeks there's then a few different actions i can take one is what we call pinning to the dashboard i can pin this note to the dashboard of other staff if i want them to be made aware of it i can also choose to upload files i can also choose to create a follow-up date we'll say in this case i need to follow up in two weeks and i want to follow up let's say by 1pm depending on your alert settings in the system this can send you a system alert and or an email there's also an option to create a follow-up task selecting this checkbox will create a follow-up prospecting task that will show up on your dashboard once we've entered all the details that we need we can choose to submit and we'll now see the details page of the note that we've created clicking on the company name will bring us back to the company's details page and here we will see that the notes tab and the tasks tab have both popped out notes are more of a repository for information we can see the title of the note in the body tasks are the call to action we can see that we spoke with neil we're following up in two weeks and the due date of this follow-up task is the 9th of october at 1pm and again this will show up on your dashboard as a follow-up prospecting task now let's take a look at the estimates module it looks as though there is one opportunity with this prospect it's a new website design it's been submitted to the client it was created on the 25th of september and the potential value is 25 thousand dollars if we select it we'll be brought into the details page of the estimate estimates should be created for the potential opportunities that you have with prospects and clients and there are a few important fields here such as the approval status interview typically means that it's still interview internally submitted means that it's been submitted to the client for their approval approved of course means that they've signed off on it and decline means that it's no longer an opportunity when you have sent an estimate or proposal to a client and you are waiting for their approval it should be in a submitted status there are a few other important fields here as well here we'll see important fields such as the close probability this is what chance you expect this to have to close this opportunity we've set has a 75 chance of closing the month to close represents when we expect the client to sign off and give their approval we expect this to happen in the month of october all this information is searchable and will also feed into important crm and sales pipeline reports for example i can do an estimate find and say show me all the estimates with an approval status of submitted perhaps i only want to see opportunities that have a month close of october now selecting fine estimates will produce the results of our search we can see that there are six opportunities that have been submitted to prospects and clients that we expect to close in the month of october we can now produce this into what we call an estimate list by client report this will show us all these opportunities organized by client or prospect with the name status initials of the account executive the due date of the opportunity the description and other information such as the estimated hours and dollars going back to that list there are other options such as choosing to manage columns to add or subtract the fields that you're seeing in the list or also to reorder them if you wish you can then produce that list into a pdf or export it to a csv file functionpoint also has pipeline reports that will use data from both the crm and also the estimates module if we hover over the reports section and look at crm and sales we'll find two different reports here one pipeline report organizes the data based on the month close and the probability of it closing the second organizes the data by the account executive and the qualification level of the company let's look at this report as an example there's a variety of filters that we can choose from here including the account executive the qualification level the approval status of the estimate the type of company that we're working with and the month that we expect the opportunities to close click submit and a report will be generated and in this case an excel file this is a very useful pipeline report that organizes the opportunities by account executive and the qualification level of the company that the opportunity is for here we can see important information such as the name of the company the name of the opportunity its type the data was created and its current status we can see how many hours were estimated the dollar value of services and expenses the total value of the opportunity the probability of it closing based on what has been entered by the account executive an adjusted value based on that probability the month that we expect it to close and follow-up information we can also see the content of the most recent note entered against the company if that note has a category of current status and of course totals at the bottom showing us that for the month of october for these two account executives we have about ninety two thousand dollars worth of opportunities with an average seventy five percent chance to close and an adjusted total value of just under seventy thousand dollars if your account executives are entering all their opportunities as estimates and function point and using the appropriate qualification levels within the crm this can become a very powerful sales pipeline report that concludes this video on managing a sales pipeline at function point please continue checking out more of our videos more helpful information on using functionpoint