Any sale will go through a portion of the following pipeline;
- Prospect; a prospect is a contact that may have a project for us. It may come referred from a friend or someone who came to us.
- Lead; once we’ve established that there is indeed a project opportunity, we refer to it as a lead. Most of the time we skip the “prospect” stage since we get contacted directly about our services or a specific project.
- Qualified; if a need is a fit for us (goal, technology, resources, timeline), we move a lead to “qualified” and finish collecting all the information we need from the client to prepare an estimate.
- Negotiating; once the client received the estimate, we often negotiate terms (price, scope, timeline).
- Won or Lost/Rejected; either we come to an agreement with the client or we don’t. Whether it’s because the client refuses our terms (“Lost”) or because we decide it isn’t a fit (“Rejected”).
- Revisit; prospects or leads are sometimes delayed
We use mainly two tools through this pipeline;
- Streak to track connections (people we’re introduced to or meet) and potential leads directly in Gmail. It’s particularly useful to share email threads without CC’ing a ton of people (and track if people have opened your emails).
- The GitHub sales repo where we coordinate the work on estimates. An issue is created automatically if the lead is using our online form. It helps facilitating the work on an estimate with the rest of the team for a qualified lead.
To summarize:
- Track your connections through the Streak “Connections” pipeline.
- Track leads through the Streak “Sales” pipeline.
- To get an estimate, coordinate with the team on GitHub.
Refer to the FAQ about how to track contacts and opportunities for additional information.