Opportunities – An Intro To Funnels

Streamlining Your Business Processes

Transcript

Hi, I’m Allie, Our AI powered, training personality.

What is business? How do businesses operate? Businesses sell a product or a service, they fill the supply aspect, of supply and demand. So all businesses have some sort of client or customer. And with all businesses there is a process involved to gaining those clients. Some are as simple as sending out an advert to the consuming world, and waiting for a customer, to respond to your call to action, and buy your product. Others, can be a bit more of a lengthy process.

In professions that deal with high valued products or services, or ongoing services, you may need time, to be able to assure the customer, that your product or service, is the right one for them. If for example, you remodel kitchens, you can expect your customers, to be looking at various options, before deciding that you are the company that suits them best.

This process, will perhaps involve an initial phone call, a visit to give a quote for the job. Then a meeting to discuss their plans in depth after they have decided to choose you for their renovations. Then of course there is a commitment to buy, material sourcing and custom making, the installation process, quality checks and the end of the project. How would you normally keep track of this? When you have many projects on the go, it is even more important, to see where you are in each process, to make sure your company, has the man power and resources, to finish all of them on time. Well, brand machine has the perfect solution for this, in our opportunities section.

Let’s take a look and see what this feature is all about.

Let’s get started!

First, we need to head on over to the opportunities section of the platform, in the left-hand sidebar. And head on over to pipelines, or as you may know them – funnels. Here, we are going to create a new pipeline, by clicking on create new pipeline. Let’s carry on with the example i mentioned before, and call this pipeline “Kitchen Renovations”. Then, we need to add in the stages of our pipeline. Let’s start with “initial quote” Then we will have a “planning meeting” then “commitment to buy”. These are the first few stages before we start really getting into the project.

Then, lets have “sourcing materials” , followed by “installation in progress”, “installation complete”, “Quality Checks” And last, but not least, “project complete”. If you would like to, this whole process could be made into two separate pipelines, to separate the customer centric process, and the work entirely done by your company. But for now, we are just going to keep the whole process together, to make things a bit easier.

Then, to see our pipeline, we just have to head back over to opportunities, where we can select our pipeline from the drop down menu. Now we can see, all of the stages of our process.

Now it’s time, to add an opportunity to our pipeline, an opportunity is a lead, that we will hopefully, guide through the entire process. So Let’s click on “add opportunity” at the top right, to add our first lead.

So first, we are going to add in our contact name and email. The contact that is getting put into stage one, should already be in the system, as they would have either filled out a form, or made an initial phone call to your company. So, lets select one of the contacts we have here already. Doing this, will automatically fill in their email and their phone number, if it is available within the system.

Then, we can choose which pipeline we are adding them too. Here, we have our kitchen renovations pipeline already. Then, we choose the stage we would like to insert them into. We are going to use the first stage for now. Then set the status to open.

Now let’s say, that during the initial phone call, they told us they have a budget of $100,000, we will insert that into the opportunity value field. Then, we are going to assign this opportunity, to the team member, that is handling this customer. Let’s say it’s me, for now. And if the person dealing with this project, has a team in place for this, you can assign followers in the next box. Then, you can add a business name, and an opportunity source. This isn’t a business, it’s a domestic client, so I’ll leave this out, and I’ll add in, “incoming phone call” to the opportunity source , so i know where the lead came from. If you would like to add any tags to the client, you can do so in the last box. Then just click on “create”

When you have done this, you will notice there are new options, in the left-hand menu. From here, you can Book or update appointments with this lead, or add tasks and notes to the entry. When you have done all of this, you can just click update, and close the window. Once you have done this, you may notice, that the opportunity has not appeared in the pipeline, don’t worry, all you have to do is refresh the page and your opportunity will appear.

Then, you are able to move the opportunity, from one stage to another by clicking and dragging it across. If you noticed, when i picked up the opportunity, i also had the option to drag it down into one of the three boxes at the bottom. Those being “lost” “abandoned” or “won”. This is just a simple way of moving the opportunity out of the pipeline. Sometimes, you may not be the right choice for a lead, in which case, you will drag it to “lost”. Or perhaps the customer isn’t the right fit for your company, and wants something alternative to the product you deliver. Then, you will put it into abandoned. Or, if the opportunity has travelled the whole length of the pipeline successfully, you can drag it down to “won”.

For now, we are just going to leave our creation, on it’s first stage, ready to be moved onto the next, as the process continues. Should you like to add more opportunities to the pipeline, you can just repeat the process. You’ll soon find it much easier, to not only keep track of your existing projects, but also, make sure that everyone is on the same page, with the goings on of the company. As they can all come and check the pipeline, whenever they wish. And remember, with the added benefit of adding tasks, notes and booking appointments, managing your processes should be a breeze!

And, should you ever want an overview of all of your opportunities, and where they are within the pipeline, “or funnel” just head on over to your dashboard, where you will see be able to see data about existing opportunities at the top of the page, or get a better look into individual pipelines, with the funnel panel.

And that’s all there is to it!

Now you can keep track, of all your business processes, right from within brand machine! Good luck with your endeavors, and streamlining your day to day!