⚙️⚙️ An easy sales pipeline process ⚙️⚙️


Hello Reader,

A sales process is just moving people through a pipeline.

There's a typical progress that people go through, on the journey from stranger to customer. It might start with filling out a form on your website, or giving you a call, or requesting a quote, or walking through your door.

Unless you sell on impulse - you meet, pitch, and close in the same meeting - your new customers take some time to go through the 4-Step Marketing Cycle of Know, Like, Trust, and Buy.

(I talk about these 4 steps in my book, Marketing Yourself. If you don't have my book yet, you can buy it here.)

Keeping track of lots of people (and lots of relationships) can be a huge challenge. I like to set up a simple system that has all the information I need, where I need to see it.

For people who are allergic to CRMs, I recommend using Trello to make four lists for four stages of your pipeline:

  1. Leads
  2. Prospects
  3. Suspects
  4. Customers

This gives you a simple strategy for closing new clients. When people you know are qualified to do business with you, add their name to your Leads list. Once they volunteer that they're interested in engaging with you commercially, drag their Trello card to the Prospect list. If they've got a proposal and they are considering a buying decision, move them to Suspects, and after they pay you, add them to your list of Customers.

For each list, develop a checklist for what moves someone from one stage to the next. When you want to work on business development, looking for clients means you look at your checklist, and just do that for everyone in the list.

If you have more than 4 stages, it's easy to add a new list in Trello. You can add all sorts of information to any individual card - attachments, comments, forwarded emails, labels, due dates, and more - and drag and drop everything in a Kanban interface.

Here's my system (no opt-in, no purchase) - PipelineTemplate.com

You can see me demonstrate how to use this Trello board template in this 9-minute video:

Selling yourself in addition to marketing yourself is challenging enough. Make it easy on yourself where you can by setting up a good system.

GenAI Training Newsletter

Generative AI improves your Productivity, Creativity, and Strategy - but only if you build the GenAI Habit. Learning how to incorporate GenAI Training into your day will help knowledge workers prepare for the future of work.

Read more from GenAI Training Newsletter

'The new workflow for me is I think with AI and work with my colleagues.' - Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft Hello Reader, LLMs are changing fast. What worked well last week might be garbage to use today. If you're still using just one AI model for everything, it's like playing a round of golf with just one club. You need to be able to select the best tool for the job. This 3-minute tutorial shows you how to test multiple LLMs—side-by-side, in real time—so you can instantly see which one's...

'We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.' - Archilochus Hello Reader, You know that feeling when you're juggling five ideas, six tabs, and a dozen half-finished chats with ChatGPT? Your brain is buzzing, your files are scattered, and your best insights are lost in the mess. Now imagine turning ChatGPT into your command center. All your notes, files, and conversations—organized by project, remembered forever. As of now, Projects are only available...

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." — Alvin Toffler Hello Reader, We are living through a revolution of intelligence, from human to artificial. The illiterate of the 21st century will be those humans stuck in the 20th century's methods of working. Those of us preparing for the future of work are unlearning, and relearning, how we work, through our relationship with AI. Professionals who take the...