How To: Multiple Sales Pipelines in Teamleader Focus

 

If your company sells different products or services or has many sales teams and company entities, you will need different workflows that match your specific methods. That's where the feature of multiple sales pipelines comes in. Read all about it here. 

 

 

 

What

A deal pipeline is a visual representation for tracking leads as they progress through different stages or phases in the purchasing process and buyer’s journey. It refers to the collective phases the lead goes through before and after they “sign the deal”.

 

Often, pipelines are visualised as a funnel or a Kanban divided into the various stages of a company’s deals process. Leads and prospects are moved from one phase to the next as they maneuver through the deal process.

 

The feature is especially handy for you if:

  • You sell different products or services
  • You sell both time & material
  • You use multiple company entities
  • Different users in your account have different sales processes

 

Packages

  • GO and SMART customers have 1 default deal pipeline and won’t be able to create additional pipelines.
  • If you’re a MOVE or GROW customer, you’ll be able to have 2 deal pipelines in your account. 
  • BOOST and FLOW customers can create unlimited deal pipelines.

 

Manage your pipelines 

Admin users can add, edit, duplicate & delete a pipeline. They can also mark a pipeline as default.

 

Add new pipeline

To add a new pipeline, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to Settings
  2. Click on Deals and Quotations
  3. In ‘Pipelines’, click on the + in the top right-hand corner
  4. Fill out a name for your pipeline
  5. Choose if you want to make this pipeline your default pipeline by enabling the slider
    Note: A pipeline is marked as default on account level. Setting a certain pipeline as default has an impact on deal import (if no pipeline is defined a deal will be added to the default pipeline), on adding deals via the API and for downgrade reasons (cf. below).
  6. Click on Save. A pipeline is created with 4 default phases that cannot be deleted: New, Quotation Sent, Accepted & Refused. Read more information below on managing the phases within your deal pipeline.

 

Duplicate a pipeline

In your pipeline settings, you can also duplicate existing pipelines:

  1. Go to Settings > Deals and Quotations
  2. Click on the three dots next to the pipeline you want to duplicate
  3. Choose Duplicate pipeline. This action will duplicate the pipeline along with its phases and phase settings. You can always edit these later.
    Notes:
    • The new pipeline name will be the name of the pipeline + ‘Copy’. 
    • If you’ve duplicated from your default pipeline, the duplicate won’t be set as the new default pipeline.

 

Delete a pipeline

Delete a pipeline by clicking on the three dots next to it and choosing Delete pipeline.

 

Note: 

  • It’s not possible to delete your default pipeline.


     

After clicking on this button, you’ll see an overview screen stating that this pipeline has X number of deals. View the list of deals by clicking on the hyperlink.

In this screen you:

  • Determine the pipeline you want to move the deals to
  • Choose a phase destination for your current deal phases

Restore a pipeline

After you've deleted a pipeline you might want to restore it afterwards. This is possible via the recycle bin. Keep in mind though that deleted pipelines wil only be stored there for 30 days. Afterwards they're permanently deleted.

 

Know that there are some limitations when it comes to restoring depending on the package you have, which you can read about in the article.

 

Managing phases within a pipeline

All users with access to Settings can set up and manage deal phases within a deal pipeline. Read the following article for more information on managing deal phases.

 

Selecting a pipeline for your deal

While adding a deal from anywhere in the tool, a pipeline is auto-suggested based on what a user selected in their Kanban board on the deal overview page. (Note: So it’s not the default pipeline that’s selected).

 

When editing a deal, users can also change the pipeline for that deal. If a pipeline is changed however, a phase must be assigned. It will simply be moved to the first phase while retaining its status (open, won or Lost).

 

Moving multiple deals to another pipeline

When changing the status of a deal phase in bulk (via Deals > Select a segment or a pipeline > Actions > Change deal phase), it's possible to move multiple deals to another pipeline by selecting one of the phases of the destination pipeline.

 

Deal pages

Kanban view

You can switch seamlessly between different pipelines on the Kanban Board. The pipeline selected here is the one that’s suggested when adding a deal (cf. above).

 

List view

On your deal list view, you can filter deals by pipeline, including selecting ‘All pipelines’:

 

  • Easily manage pipelines by clicking the hyperlink ‘Manage pipelines’
  • When a pipeline is selected, you can further filter based on Status or Phase
  • Add the column ‘Pipeline’ to the Deal overview page via the cogwheel in the bottom right-hand corner
  • Execute bulk actions by selecting a segment, a pipeline or a status:

 

Deal forecast

Check out the forecast per pipeline or for a combination of pipelines using a multi-select filter:

 


Deal insights

Under Insights, you’ll find extensive reports on deals such as deal cycle length or your yearly sales performance. Customise your reports further by filtering the results by deal pipeline or assignee, or adapt the time frame. Read more about it here. 

 

Segmenting & exporting

  • You can add deal segments based on pipelines and/or phases
  • While exporting your deals to Excel, you can choose whether to export all pipelines or export only a specific pipeline

 

Downgrades from MOVE/BOOST or from GROW/FLOW

Note: Find more information here on how to switch to a smaller Teamleader Focus package.

 

When downgrading your price plan to a smaller package there are two scenarios concerning multiple deal pipelines.

 

Downgrade to GO or SMART

  • You’ll only be able to keep 1 pipeline, the default pipeline.
  • After confirming the switch to the smaller package, admins will see a banner that they need to remove extra pipelines and move their deals to the default pipeline
    • As mentioned above in ‘Deleting a pipeline’, you can decide when deleting a pipeline what the phase destination of your phases should be
  • After the downgrade the deals from the additional pipeline(s) will have moved to the remaining default pipeline
    • The status (Open, Won, Lost), for all your deals will be preserved
    • If you didn’t define which deal phases the deals should end up in in the default deal pipeline, then by default the deal phase will be assigned to the first deal phase in the status.
      E.g. if a deal had the status ‘Won’ in your extra pipeline, then it’ll be assigned to the first phase with the equivalent of the status ‘Won’ in your default pipeline.
  • Note: No deals will ever be deleted (!), just moved to another pipeline.

 

Downgrade from BOOST to MOVE, or from FLOW to GROW

 

  • You’ll only be able to keep 2 deal pipelines, the default pipeline and the most populous pipeline (with the highest amount of deals)
  • After confirming the switch to the smaller package, admins - if there are more than 2 pipelines in the account of course - will see a banner that they need to remove extra pipelines and move their deals to another pipeline.
    • As mentioned above in ‘Deleting a pipeline’, you can decide when deleting a pipeline what the phase destination of your phases should be
  • After the downgrade the deals from the additional pipeline(s) will have moved to the default pipeline
    • The status (Open, Won, Lost), for all your deals will be preserved
    • If you didn’t define which deal phases the deals should end up in in the default deal pipeline, then by default the deal phase will be assigned to the first deal phase in the status.
      E.g. if a deal had the status ‘Won’ in your extra pipeline, then it’ll be assigned to the first phase with the equivalent of the status ‘Won’ in your default pipeline.
  • Note: No deals will ever be deleted (!), just moved to another pipeline.

 

Note regarding package trials: if you're on a smaller package but you're trying out a package in which the feature multiple sales pipelines is available, then deals revert to their old pipeline once the trial period ends. This means that created pipelines during the trial will be deleted too. If you don't want data loss, you should upgrade your package before the end of the trial.

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