Sales processes 

Create one or more sales processes, coach your salespeople, and view forecasts and reports on each sales process with FunnelBud's CRM system.

What is a sales process?

A sales process is a series of steps that your prospects (often called Sales Opportunities) go through when they buy your solution. It is often represented as a series of steps that the opportunity goes through on the way to a purchase.

sharpspring CRM sales process

The steps in your sales process can represent phases that a business opportunity may be in, or activities your salespeople should undertake to win a business opportunity.

Sales process as phases or activities

Your sales process can be represented in the form of phases or activities. Below we show examples of the same sales process represented in both forms. Note that phases represent the "state" of the customer while activities represent the same thing in terms of what the salesperson should do to get the customer to the next phase.

Sales process as phases

  1. Interest
  2. Investigation
  3. Budget
  4. Short list
  5. Decision

Sales process as activities

  1. Get in touch
  2. Send product sheets
  3. Show ROI
  4. Showing the demo
  5. Send a quote

Both of these forms are an ideal representation of your sales process. In reality, the sales process looks different for different customers. For some customers, some steps are completely unnecessary, and new steps may be added. Customers don't flow through all the steps in the order you set up, but often jump back and forth. If you're unlucky, they'll drop out completely, or get stuck in a step and not move on.

Why do you need a sales process?

Even if not all opportunities go through your sales process as you have set it up, a sales process is necessary for several reasons. Here we list the three most common reasons we encounter in our work helping our customers implement FunnelBud:

  • Control: Without a sales process that shows the stages of different deals, it is difficult to see how the company is doing, where in the sales process deals get stuck (and thus which stages need improvement), and create sales forecasts.
  • Coaching: Without a well-defined sales process, it is difficult to see where salespeople need to develop. Is a salesperson really good at demos or bad at doing ROI analysis? With a well-defined sales process, you can measure where different salespeople are good or need development.
  • Automation: CRM systems with built-in Marketing Automation functionality can combine the automation features with the CRM features and allow salespeople to leverage marketing in their sales efforts. With a good sales process, marketing can become more relevant depending on where different customers are in the sales process.

How FunnelBud helps you manage your sales processes

FunnelBud is a combined CRM and marketing automation system that helps you keep track of your sales processes and business opportunities within them:

  • Keep track of all your business opportunities, contacts and customer accounts in one system.
  • Drag and drop business opportunities through your sales processes
  • Create different sales processes for different types of business - e.g. one for partner sales, one for direct sales, or for different product categories.
  • Set probability of winning deals automatically depending on stage to get better forecasts
  • Forecasts, activity reports and several other CRM reports per salesperson, product, sales process or just overall.
  • Leverage marketing in your sales efforts with automated campaigns and relevant messages depending on where your contact is in the sales process and what they are interested in.
SharpSpring

Let SharpSpring help you manage your sales processes

Digitalize your sales process

A buying process is a series of insights your lead needs to gain before they buy. You can define all the steps in your lead's ideal buying journey and measure where your leads are in the journey. Depending on where they are, you can display different messages in your emails, your website, and guide the salesperson to talk about the right things.

automate sales with lead nurturing

See everything your leads do and build a digital sales process

Score your leads

With automatic scoring, you can see which leads are worth chasing! It's also a strong motivator for salespeople. FunnelBud comes with a great predefined scoring system, but you can score different things at different levels of detail. The score automatically decreases as time passes, so old leads no longer show up. And with rules and alerts, salespeople can know when someone should be contacted!

automatic lead scoring for sales

See which leads are interesting

Process leads automatically

Process your leads fully automatically. With different info depending on what they are interested in. And just when they show interest. With the right information at the right time, you get more clicks and more positive responses! Then you can notify your salespeople - for example, when someone is looking at the pricing page - so they can get in touch. (Try our card trick to see how it feels to receive relevant messages!)

process leads automatically

create a series of events triggered by something your contact does

Funnel offer: Marketing Automation & CRM for a low monthly cost

Funnelbud is an easy-to-use cloud solution that helps you get more leads, keep track of your business, and sell more. Complete with advanced features like tracking, lead scoring and automations. We offer it as FunnelBud and help you both with setup, customizations and setting up automations and business processes at no cost.

Marketing Automation

Landing pages, newsletters, automations, segmentation and more. Instead of a bunch of systems - one for newsletters, one for events, one for lead scoring - you can do it all with Funnelbud.

CRM system

Contacts, companies and business. sales processes Mail sync. Reports. Integrated with marketing so you get new leads straight into the CRM and see the history.

Professional Services

We help you with everything. How will you get more leads? Which automations can help your sales? Training, beautiful email templates, fantastic support. Others charge 20-40 000 SEK/month. With us, it's included.

Low monthly cost. Everything included. Great support. Don't hesitate to contact us for a demo!

Want to learn more about sharpspring?

No more complicated systems to integrate. All your contacts in one place. Plenty of features to help you manage both your marketing and sales in one place, with all your company's customer communications in one place. And with low monthly costs and a dedicated FunnelBud specialist to help you, you'll be up and running in no time!