Navigating the Pipeline's Deal Section
- Maxime Nie (Unlicensed)
- Max Nie
Once you’ve finished creating the Pipeline, you will be starting in the Deals' section of the CRM. This is where you will be able to create, organize, and view deals that you’ve created amongst other types of information.
The deal section has two main views available:
Board view
Grid view
These two views will offer some slight visual differences, but the information carried will be the same.
Board view
The board view will be the default view. In this view, you will be able to quickly see the funnel that you created, as well as all the current deals that you have, and in which stage of the pipeline they exist.
The board view will also display an overview of the deals amount and the number of deals, either from a column perspective, or from a pipeline perspective (from the upper right section of the screen). Unique to the board view will also be the ability to see the colour coded labels (see label section for more information) on each deal.
Filter & Group
You can filter the data by dates, Sales Funnel, Stage, Assignee, and more (Issue and contact)
In the upper right section of the Board view, you will also be able to Group the deals.
Group by Stage: Groups by your current sales funnel’s stage (e.g: Prospecting, Lead qualification, Proposal, etc.)
Group by assignee: organizes the columns by assignee. Doing this organizes the pipeline by user and their assigned deals.
Search
You can search your deals quickly via the search bar in the middle section of the Board view.
Adding Users
An admin can quickly add users to the pipeline by clicking to the “add user” button. This will redirect the admin to the settings page. See Adding your Team Members for more information.
Importing & Exporting deals
Export
An admin can also quickly export the pipeline by clicking the export button on the upper right section of the screen. The export button creates a .csv of the deals that can be downloaded
Import
Next to the export button is the import button. This will lead you back to the import menu to import new contacts from a .csv. See Importing Records, Contacts, and Accounts in Sales CRM for more information.
Showcasing additional deals
By default, Sales CRM will display 25 deals for your whole pipeline even if you have more than 25 total deals. The rest of your deals can be displayed by going through a different page. I.e: Sales CRM uses pagination in the board view.
This is done for performance reasons.
However, from the bottom left side of the screen, you are able to display additional deals at once. This will load the additional deals and make modifications to the pagination.
Do note that modifying the amount of deals in the board view will impact the performance of Sales CRM and its loading time. Sales CRM does not keep the amount of deals “in memory” In other words, leaving the board view and coming back will reset the view back to the default 25 deals displayed
Visualizing Activities
In the Board view, your pipeline will be able to display activities that are due/ are overdue for each deal cards. Note that you can only create activities if you have connected your Gmail Account (you will still be able to see and interact with other members activities if you did not connect your account). You can read more about it here: Google Suite Integration (Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, Drive) | Creating activities
There are four symbols that can appear
A yellow warning triangle: means that no activities have been scheduled
A Green Circle with < symbol: means that there is an activity due today
A Red Circle with < symbol: means that one or more tasks are overdue. If the task is overdue, it will also show at the bottom of said card.
A Grey Circle with > symbol : means that there are some activities scheduled for the future
A user will be able to quickly remind themselves of these activities by clicking on one of the three activity icons, which will prompt a breakdown of these activities. A user will also be able to complete a task from there.
Accessing My Work
My Work is a centralized space for you to see all the activities that are scheduled for you to do. Please note that you need to connect your Google Account to Sales CRM to create activities. You can read more about it here:
Visualizing Labels
Deal cards will also display labels in the Pipeline through colour schemes. For more details on what these colour schemes represent, a user will have to click on the deal to display more information.
Deals
In the Board view, a deal will be visualized as a card. The information displayed on each cards can be set during the creation of the card, and can be modified afterward.
Creating a deal
You can create a deal by going to the column of your choice and clicking on the “+ Add item” row that is displayed in blue.
This will prompt the create of a card with the following fields to be filled:
Name of the deal: E.g: Customer Trial
Amount: the currency can be changed in the settings
Linked Issue: Based on the linked projects that you set in the setup wizard or the settings, you will have a suggestion of possible issues, tasks, epics, etc.
Select Contact: Select a contact that you’ve created in the CRM (from the Contacts section) or you can create a new contact by pressing on the “+” icon. While creating a new contact, you can also select the account (or create a new one) that you want to link back to the contact.
Assign to: This will determine the team member that you want to assign the deal to. The available team members can be managed in the settings.
Organizing deals
Deals will be organized based on the stage that they’re in (Prospecting, Lead Qualification, Meeting & Demo, etc.) - in columns. Deals can be rearranged easily by either drag-n-dropping them to the stage of preference (across column) or up and down across deals.
As mentioned earlier, you can also group and filter the columns to further organize your deals.
Deeper dive on deals
You can access additional insights if you click on the deal’s name on the card of your choice.
From this detailed view there are a few elements to note:
Summarized information of the deal: Name of the deal, estimated Revenue, and where you can add notes, and where other integrations will appear (e.g: email integration)
More information about the deal : linked Jira/JSM ticket, name of the deal
Closure date for the deal: when is expected closure date for the deal (will not automatically close the deal)
Labels : What labels does it fall under (see labels section)
Contacts: the associated contact linked to the deal - you can click the “i” button to go to the linked Contact
Assignee: Who is the deal assigned to
Estimated Revenue: amount that is expected to be won
Estimated Probability (% ) : percentage of winning the deal
Status: Current Status of the deal (Closed, Open, Unqualified)
Stage: Current Stage of the deal (Won, Lost, Unqualified)
Sales funnels: Current Stage of the deal (where is the deal in the pipeline). e.g: demo, qualified, contract
Source: Where does the lead come from (e.g: Linkedin)
Custom fields - your custom fields for deals will be visible here (see Data field Center to easily manage your custom fields)
Data Tabs: Provides either an overview of information on the deal (Data highlights, or more details on the activities/interactions that occurred with the deal
Deal Metadata: provides some quick history on the deal (its current stage, funnel stage, etc.). Part of the overview Data Tabs. The data Tabs on activities will provide a longer history on the interactions/events accomplished for the deal
You can go back to the grid view from the upper right by clicking on “close” or by navigating back to the “Deals” section from the left side of the screen.
Labels
Labels are coloured tags that can be linked to a deal to add an additional way of categorizing the data. Labels will also show on the cards of your Pipeline with their respective colour codes.
Labels can be accessed when looking more deeply at a deal.
Choosing and creating a label:
To create a label, go to a deal and under the “Labels” Section. There you will see all the deal’s current tags (if any). You can click inn the same line as the labels in order to add an additional label. From there, a drop-down menu will appear with all the previously created labels of the pipeline. To create a new pipeline, click on the “+” next to the label’s search bar.
This will open up a new window that will give you a field to name your label as well as a colour to pair it with. Once you are happy with your label, you can save it to have it as a future option and add it to your current deal.
Editing a Label:
You can update a label by clicking on the “pencil” icon on the line of the respective label. This will provide you with the chance to rename or recolour the label.
Making changes to an existing label (name or colour) will also update the label to other deals.
Quick notes:
Anyone can add labels
Multiple labels can be added to a deal
There are 12 colours to choose from
Deals are on a Pipeline basis so a pipeline will store label’s names across deals. In other words, creating a label will make that label an option for future deals.
Labels are ID based, so a change will be reflected to all associated deals
Grid View
The grid view lists all the deals that are currently in your pipeline in a more condensed view. Do note that most of the options are from the Board view are also present in the grid view (e.g: export, import, displaying additional deals, etc.)
Filter
Similarly to the Board view, you can filter the data by dates, Sales Funnel, Stage, Assignee, and more (Issue and contact). However, there are no groups available in this view
Organizing deals
Deals will be organized based on the order of which they were created (the oldest deal will appear at the top) you can reorganize the data by drag-and-dropping the deal to the place of interest.
You can also make edits to the deals by clicking on the related data in the column of your choice (e.g: changing the assignee in the first row).
You can also add additional column/information: Issue, Account, Creation Deal Date, Closed Deal Date, Lead Source, Opened At, or any new field of your choice.
Adding a new field
You can track custom fields by clicking on the “+ Add column” and on the “+ New field”. This will open a new window to create a field based on your label that can be text based or numeric. This new field will also appear in the detailed view of a deal.
Detailed view
Similarly to the Board view, you can open the detailed view of a deal to have access to more information. This can be done by clicking on the “i” that shows to the right of the deal’s name.
The information will be the exact same as the one showcased above.
Other
If you ever delete a stage, the data associated will still be available through the Grid View. However, you will not be able to recover the deleted stage, so you will need to recreate it and repopulate it.