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.

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.

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.