Aligning pipeline stages with your sales process

What's my plan?

You can personalize stages in the pipeline to improve both your team's adoption and conversion rates, in Settings > Customize > Sales Pipelines.

The sales process refers to the sequence of steps your sales team takes with a prospect to move them from initial awareness of your offering to a confirmed customer. To enable accurate forecasting and to decrease ramp for new sales representatives, mapping of your sales process to a simple, meaningful pipeline is key. Zendesk Sell provides a quick and easy way to configure your pipeline to your specific business requirements.

Configuring your pipeline

There are several recommendations for configuring your pipeline:

1. Ensure your sales process is linear. Don’t create steps that can be skipped.
2. Include these elements in each stage:
   • Action-oriented naming (e.g. Discovery). 
     Use strong verbs so you can understand the state of the deal, and any next steps.
   • Associated sales activities (e.g. Confirm Client Discussion, Notate Use Case and Requirements, Prepare Demo Environment). 
     Define the activities that your team needs to complete in each stage.
   • Clear exit criteria (Demo Scheduled).
     Note what single activity needs to be completed before the deal can move to the next stage.  This stage can never be skipped.
     
3. Input and use your best guess at the Win Likelihood stage to enable accurate usage of Zendesk Sell forecasting and reporting.