Month: July 2020

How we classify your opportunities in sales funnel stages

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The sales funnel stages

Over the last three years we have evolved a lot in our thinking about the sales funnel stages and how we should report them.

Find and surface the leads that you should focus on

We started off with a very radical approach. We got Saleswah to proactively alert the user that there was a sales lead. We used some nifty calculations to see which contacts and accounts were “active” and what more, which ones were active in a “deal-bearing” way. We had our views on which customer facing activities were more important i.e. more likely to result in a sale. So, we surfaced leads in your funnel before you recognized these as such. Pretty cool, huh? Or, so we thought. This was a blog we wrote which explained our thoughts.

About two years back we pulled the plug on this feature. Simple, we never managed to get customers to understand this. This was perhaps before its time in the market or simply poor marketing and/ or hand-holding on our part.

Next up, grade the deals in the funnel

Now, we took a fresh look at the sales funnel stages. Our earlier thought was to get to capture the marketing activities and sales activities that led to a sale and if the action was “hot” in an account, we reported a sales lead- the very earliest stage opportunity in the sales funnel stages.

As we evolved, and abandoned the previous strategy, we started concentrating on the opportunities that the salesperson had recognized as such and created a “Deal” record. We felt there is a huge scope in helping the salesperson figure out where to concentrate his efforts. Let me explain.

A sales funnel has deals which are at different stages of maturity. Some may close the next week, some may close the next month and some may never close. Also, there are various stages of probability that you will win the deal.

Traditionally, the sales review consisted of the manager and the sales executive looking at a spreadsheet with a list of these deals and arguing about the probability of a win and the timeframe of the eventuality. The Sales Executive is the optimist whereas, the manager is more pragmatic if not downright pessimistic! Having played both roles in the past, I knew there is a scope to contribute positively in this debate.

A sales deal requires information – as the salesperson engages with the customer contacts, he gathers more information. The critical information is about the budget, timeframe and decision making. Also, knowing how critical the need is helps her to understand if the deal will be prioritised above other issues demanding management attention at the customer place.

So, the information maturity is crucial in understanding how far down the funnel has the deal come. So we started tagging deals with the calculated sales funnel stages. We called them Prospecting, Opportunity, Investigation, Presentation and Close. For more details, read our previous post on the 5 sales deal stages.

We just changed the names of the sales funnel stages

While this time we achieved a lot better customer understanding and adoption, we felt we needed to make it simpler for folks to understand what the stages meant. So, we renamed them. Now they are called Sales Lead, Prospect, Warm deal, Hot Deal and Close. The algorithm that classifies them as such remain the same with some tweaking to better reflect how Saleswah itself has evolved.

Hope this made sense. Please get back to us to schedule a one on one session if you want to understand more about Saleswah.

How we classify your opportunities in sales funnel stages 1

Sell globally with quotations in any currency

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If you are selling globally to enterprise buyers, then you might need to send quotations in any currency – not just your home country. This is either because of regulatory issues or because of your customers’ internal requirements. There are some countries that allow trade in two or more currencies- Singapore or Hong Kong for instance.

As a CRM, we need to enable two broad things:

  • Actual quotation being made possible in multiple currencies.
  • Reporting continuing to be done in a master currency- so that everyone still compares the same set of data.

It is obvious that there is currency conversion involved. 1 USD is ~ INR 70 today. So, you can’t have a master price list which is in USD and quote the same in INR. Unless you converted. Here again lies a catch.

Why currency conversion does not work in sending quotations in any currency

We have seen multiple currency implementations done by others and how they do it is simple; keep a master price list as before in your “master currency” as defined by the user and then ask him to define the conversion factor for each currency he wants to enable in addition.

Why does it not work? Because of the following reasons:

  1. Selling a product in different countries is not simply a matter of changing the price from one currency to another by the bank conversion rate. There are other markups/ markdowns dictated by market forces like competition, import duties and sales and marketing overheads. For example, a product which you retail for USD 1 in USA might be sold for INR 85 in India.
  2. Different products might have different conversion factors- depending on market forces. You might sell accessories and spares at a higher margin than main products or vice versa.
  3. These factors change frequently – sometimes quarterly.

The best way for sending quotations in any currency

sending quotations in any currencyWe implement multi-currency quotes based on prices lists maintained in as many currencies you specify. These prices are independent of each other.

Every time there is a price change – in any currency, you need to upload a new price list replacing the previous one. And while making a quote, just select the currency in which the quote should go out.

What about sales reporting?

Sales reporting, forecasting and closed deals reports will continue to be done in the “master currency”. So, at the time of specifying the additional currencies, you need to specify the conversion factors.

So, conversion factors are still used after all! But, they are used for reporting- in one central currency. As it was always done.

A few more things we did for sales quotes

We added the ability to edit prices in the quotes. And, now you can add discounts, local tax rates. And as before, you can quote with tax or without- depending on what your local custom is.

Initiate sales meeting using Google Meet from within your CRM

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We released our functionality of starting sales meeting using Google Meet recently. The background to this goes 4 months back.

We were at a customer meeting – face to face – back when such things were possible, or should we just say, in the “pre-covid” days. Things were already bad and the country was heading for a lockdown.

The customer was grim- his major clients in the biggest city of the country were already refusing physical meetings and were suggesting virtual meetings. Zoom, Webex, Teams- suddenly these were cropping up in everyday conversation.

This was March; we haven’t met since that day- but, as our development team released the integration with Google Meet, I could not but think of our customer in a city 2 hours flight away.

The new paradigm is virtual. All my own meetings are virtual now.

We made it possible to initiate sales meetings over Google Meet from Saleswah CRM.

Virtual Meeting from Saleswah CRM using Google Meet

So, next time you are setting up an appointment in Saleswah, remember to check the box which says “Use Google Meet”.

Why Meet? We like the functional, no fuss interface of Meet. We do not like Zoom, Webex is too heavy. We would probably follow through with Teams (Microsoft Office 365), real soon.