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How to track contracts & opportunities?

Streak is a Gmail plugins that allows us to:

  1. Track email threads according to a pipeline, making it easier to understand the progress and actions required for ongoing discussions.
  2. Schedule emails to be sent at a specific time. If you schedule an email to be sent at 9:00 AM for the recipient, chances are that you’ll be at the top of that person’s inbox when he/she arrives at the office.
  3. Check that a person has read your email. (We get desktop notifications!)
  4. Share discussions with each other without having to CC to oblivion.

We have two main pipelines for the sales channel:

  • The “Connections” pipeline, which helps us track ongoing discussions with interesting contacts who may lead to an opportunity (directly or indirectly). These are typically people we’ve been introduced to, met (at an event for example) or reached out to.
  • The “Sales” pipeline which tracks all sales opportunities coming connections, direct email inquiries, our website, phone calls…

Connections

  1. Contacted; for contacts you reach out to (e.g. sending an email after meeting at an event),
  2. Connected; once the person answered,
  3. Contact back; for people you should get back in touch with (e.g. some folks you need to ping next time you’re in town).

There are a few fields for this box that needs to be filled in for segmentation; location (particularly useful when you are in town and want to get back in touch with folks) and company.

Opportunities

  1. Prospect: potential sales are possible but not yet confirmed,
  2. Lead; at this stage we’ve established that there is indeed the need for or possibility to provide our services,
  3. Qualified: qualified leads have been vetted as a fit for us - we usually start the estimate process at that stage by creating a GitHub issue in the sales repo (see [[How to prepare an estimate?]]),
  4. Negotiating: once the estimate has been submitted to a client, we sometimes go back and forth about the price, scope, or conditions,
  5. Won or Lost & Rejected: we either win the project, or we don’t (either because we decide against it or because the client picks another vendor),
  6. Revisit: usually used when projects are put on pause and we need to recontact the client about it at a later date.

Make sure that you associate all emails to the proper box and regularly update and review your various opportunities.