Agency Sales Pipeline

The agency sold ad management, consulting and a coaching program, and its leads came from its education community and its ads. I took its sales calls. My closing and onboarding started out case by case, so I built the process while I sold.

The owner needed to see what revenue was coming each week and each month. A process that ran case by case couldn't show him.

I built the pipeline in Pipedrive. Each deal carried a probability by stage, multiplied by its expected price, so a prospect at the questionnaire stage counted for about 3% of their deal and the forecast rose when they booked a sales meeting. Mixmax showed me when and how often prospects opened my emails, which told me where an opportunity was opening. I recorded my calls so I could reread a prospect's words before the next one and see how much I talked against how much they did, and the agency's leadership reviewed them at double speed. A commission sheet worked out each payout from the sale's size. And I mined the calls for the buyers' own words. Every prospect in 34 calls said they wanted to get to the next level, so I proposed naming the program after it.

• Pipedrive
• Mixmax email tracking
• Recorded and transcribed sales calls
• Commission sheet

About 15 people turned up to calls for one round of the coaching program, 11 committed to buy and 9 had already paid. Late in August 2020 the pipeline forecast about $165,000 in sales across three weeks, with the last deal 90% likely to close. That forecast was almost triple the pace of a month or two before, and August was already well past what the agency had expected to sell.

The owner could read the month in the pipeline before it closed. Every call became something leadership could review and I could learn from.

Measure your own selling the way you'd measure an ad account. The forecast, the open tracking and the recorded calls each showed me something I'd have missed from memory, and the buyers' own words named the product.