Your sales team is the life-blood of the business and the pipeline runs through them, which is the greatest source or dread for your sales revenue. But every business functions differently and thus the CRM pipelines should also differ. While there are many plugins for preset stages in CRMs, most of them lack in matching the unique procedure through which the organization passes. Custom pipelines are critical to ensure that the CRM mimics the journey followed by leads, from the date first introduced to the date secured as business. It doesn’t only make the team more efficient, but also leads to higher conversion rates.
If you want to know how to create custom pipelines in your CRM, this is the right platform. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the online steps to ensure that your CRM works without the need for you to fit into its prescribed methods.
Why Should You Build Custom Pipelines in Your CRM?
Your business is as unique as its sales processes and so should the tools you use. Custom pipelines allow you to trace the journey of your sale accurately, which directly affects how effective your sales cycle will be. Create a pipeline that helps your process, whether it is B2B or B2C:
- Reflect your specific sales stages: Different industries and businesses often need distinct stages and actions.
- Improve forecasting accuracy: By tailoring stages, it’s easier to predict deal progression and close rates.
- Enhance collaboration and communication: With clearly defined stages, your team knows exactly where each deal stands.
- Automate repetitive tasks: CRMs can automate mundane tasks like follow-ups and reminders, freeing up more time for selling.
The Power of Custom Pipelines for Your Business
In Pipedrive’s view, businesses with customized pipelines would find their operations to be more smooth and clearer in terms of deal understanding. Marketing products HubSpot and BigContacts further find that custom stages allow sales teams to concentrate on value-adding activities that help them close deals faster and better.
Step-by-Step Guide: Building Custom Pipelines
1. Map Out Your Sales Process
The first step in creating a custom CRM pipeline is understanding your sales process. Take a moment to reflect on each stage your leads move through:
- Lead Generation: How do you acquire new leads? This could be through cold emails, inbound marketing, or referrals.
- Qualification: How do you decide which leads are worth pursuing? This stage helps determine if a lead fits your ideal customer profile (ICP).
- Needs Analysis: At this point, you assess your lead’s needs and pain points.
- Proposal/Negotiation: This is where you present your solution and discuss terms.
- Closing: The final stage, where you seal the deal.
If you’re unsure about the stages, look at what BigContacts recommends: create stages that align directly with your current workflow and the steps your team regularly follows.
2. Customize Your CRM’s Stages to Reflect Your Sales Process
After going through the process of defining the various stages, the next thing is actually customizing your CRM pipeline for the magic to happen! CRMs such as HubSpot give you the flexibility to rename, customize, and add or remove stages according to your requirements. Some adjustments you can make are:
- Adding a Discovery Call stage if you always start with an introductory meeting.
- Including a Contract Negotiation stage if your deals involve complex legal agreements.
- Requiring a Post-Sale Follow-up stage to ensure customer satisfaction and set the stage for upselling.
Label stages properly so that each member knows what to do at that stage. HubSpot’s pipeline setup page is excellent guidance when it comes to customizing pipelines specific to your team’s needs.
3. Automate and Streamline Tasks Within the Pipeline
Here’s where it gets exciting—automation! With your stages set, now it’s time to take advantage of CRM automation features to save time and improve consistency.
- Auto-assignment: Automatically assign leads to specific sales reps based on territory, product interest, or other criteria.
- Task automation: Set up automatic task reminders for follow-ups, ensuring no deal slips through the cracks.
- Email sequences: Automate outreach at key stages to ensure timely communication without manual input.
- Lead nurturing: Send out pre-scheduled, personalized emails at certain points in the pipeline to keep leads engaged.
LeadDelta emphasizes that automation minimizes manual errors and boosts productivity with one agenda in mind: to enhance the effective lead conversion rate. Automation means that your team can focus on what matters most—closing deals.
4. Add Custom Properties and Fields for Each Stage
One size does not fit all, and that includes CRM fields. You can add custom properties like:
- Deal value: Track how much revenue each deal could bring.
- Lead source: Identify where your leads are coming from (organic search, paid ads, referrals).
- Time spent on stage: Identify bottlenecks and ensure deals don’t stall.
- Probability of closing: Set deal probabilities to forecast revenue accurately.
These custom fields can help you understand your pipeline better, making it easier to focus on areas of improvement.
5. Track, Optimize, and Improve Your Pipeline
Building a pipeline is not a one-time task. Over time, you’ll need to review pipeline performance regularly. Use CRM analytics to track key metrics such as:
- Deal progression rates: How quickly are deals moving through each stage?
- Win/loss rates: How often are you closing deals, and why?
- Time in stage: Are deals taking longer than expected in certain stages?
Use these insights to tweak your pipeline, remove bottlenecks, and continually optimize your sales process.
Custom Pipelines Lead to Better Results
Building custom pipelines is more than just setting up stages—it’s about creating a workflow that truly fits the way you sell. With personalized pipelines in your CRM, you can:
- Align your team to work toward common goals
- Automate tasks for improved efficiency
- Track progress more accurately for better decision-making
Customizing your pipeline, as Pipedrive suggests, would improve conversion rates and shorten your sales cycle. With the right setup and constant earning optimization, your CRM pipeline will be a really indispensable tool to help your team produce good outcomes.
DoInsight: Enhancing CRM with AI-Powered Pipeline Intelligence
One platform that’s redefining how businesses interact with CRM pipelines is DoInsight. It integrates seamlessly with your CRM while providing AI-driven analytics that indicate which stage your deals are bound to stall and why. DoInsight helps teams make better revenue forecasts, detect behavior patterns, and suggest deal acceleration through the pipeline by analyzing historical sales data. Sales managers improve coaching on their teams and better align their strategies using visual reporting and insights dashboards. When layered onto your custom pipeline, DoInsight will turn your static CRM into a real-time performance engine.
Build, Automate, Win
Customized pipelines are no longer just for show; they are really a must in today’s savage sales environment. When set up properly and used with powerful CRM tools, your organization should be able to:
- Personalize each stage in the customer journey
- Establish better forms of lead management and sales forecasting
- Leverage AI and automation to ensure it’s working smarter, not harder
- Create a culture of collaboration and accountability within and across teams
HubSpot, Pipedrive, BigContacts, or DoInsight integrations—whatever your sales structure looks like, a custom pipeline surely offers that much-needed unique touch to sales success. Start by mapping your present sales stages and use this guide to build a pipeline that works the way you sell. With time, further refine and polish it-and allow your CRM to grow with you. To work smarter and get better results, connect with DoInsights.
