Your sales stages play a very important role in your sales process as they provide critical data about your sales pipeline, progression of deals, and more.
If you design your sales stages well, you can improve your ability to forecast, better understand your sales cycle, and have a better handle on specific deals.
Here is my Tip of the Week: Make sure your sales stages are consistent in their tense.
Sales stages should be progressive in nature, always looking in the same direction - consistently moving forward. This means that the sales stage names you use should all be in the same tense - an active, present one, representing what is happening right now with the opportunity.
As an example, I see many sales processes with one stage saying “qualifying” and then a stage called, “completed demo”. One is what is happening right now (Qualifying), and the other says what already happened, “demo”.
Using an active, present stage allows reporting to be more accurate and consistent. Plus, by nature they provide the data of what already happened because you will have defined what was required to get to the present stage. There is no need to state what already happened.
So, take a look at your sales stages and see if there are ways you can improve them by putting them all in an active, present tense. I promise, you won’t regret it!
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