What is a pipeline, and when do you need one?

You’ve got a few quotes pending, a site visit scheduled for next week and another three enquiries you need to call back on. But what exactly is pending and who’s handling what? What is a pipeline? It’s a visual overview where you keep track of all ongoing sales opportunities, from the initial enquiry right through to whether the contract is won or lost.

For a self-employed person with just a few projects, a note or your memory might still do the job. But as soon as you have more enquiries and quotes than you can keep track of, that becomes unreliable. That’s when a pipeline helps you see what needs attention, without having to constantly search through your inbox or separate lists.

What is a pipeline board?

A pipeline board is a board with columns. Each column represents a stage in your sales process. Each ongoing opportunity is assigned its own card, which you move to the next column as the process progresses.

You could compare it to a planning board on the wall, but for enquiries and sales. Instead of notes, you see cards containing the relevant details. This way, you not only keep track of a list of quotations, but you can also see where each opportunity is in the process.

A simple pipeline for SMEs might, for example, have the following stages:

• New enquiry
• Contact made
• Appointment scheduled
• Quotation sent
• Awaiting response
• Won
• Lost

Not every business operates in the same way. A gardener might have a further stage for work planning after the quotation. An engineer might want to distinguish between a service request and a new job. The most important thing is that the columns correspond to the steps you actually take.

When do you need a pipeline for quotations and enquiries?

You need a pipeline as soon as you can no longer keep track of ongoing quotations and enquiries in your head. That moment often comes sooner than you think. Even with ten open opportunities at once, you can easily forget who you were supposed to ring last week or which customer needs a site survey first.

A pipeline is particularly useful if you find that you:

• regularly have to search for the latest status of a quotation;
• don’t immediately know which clients are still waiting for a reply;
• keep track of enquiries, appointments and quotations in different programmes or lists;
• work with colleagues and not everyone has the same overview;
• follow up on quotations whenever you remember, rather than at a fixed time.

A spreadsheet can partly solve this, but it does require discipline. You have to enter every change yourself, and the information is often disconnected from the client, the quotation and the appointment. In a system where everything is linked, a pipeline board becomes much more practical: you open the card and immediately see which stage of the process it relates to.

Why is a pipeline card more than just a quotation?

A quotation is a document containing terms and a price. A pipeline card covers the entire process surrounding it. After all, a client may already be interested before a quotation has even been drawn up. Conversely, there may also be several separate processes running for the same client.

In Klantly, a card is created as soon as you draw up a quotation, schedule an appointment or add a lead to the board yourself. This allows you to track a sales opportunity from the very first contact. Quotations, appointments, invoices and work orders can be linked to the card.

This distinction prevents confusion. For example: an existing customer requests a quote for new sun blinds and later calls about maintenance for a previous installation. These are two separate processes. The request for a sunblind can be categorised as ‘quotation sent’, whilst the maintenance is handled via an appointment and a work order. If you put everything on a single card, you’ll actually lose track of things.

A good card therefore not only shows what you’ve quoted, but also what the next step is. For example: calling back after the quote has been viewed, scheduling a measurement appointment or waiting for the customer’s decision.

Anyone sending out quotations can also benefit from an overview showing when a quotation has been opened. This provides a better starting point for follow-up than calling at random. You can read more about this in ‘Following up on quotations without separate lists’.

How do you use stages without overcomplicating your process?

Don’t start with ten columns just because you think everything needs to be recorded in detail. A pipeline only works if you keep it up to date. So, first choose the stages that determine what you need to do today.

For a company that installs conservatories, for example, the process might look like this. A visitor requests a quote via the website. The card is placed under ‘new enquiry’. After a phone call, you move it to ‘consultation scheduled’. After the visit, you draw up the quotation and move the card to ‘quotation sent’. If the customer opens that quotation, you know it might be worth following up. If they agree, the card goes to ‘won’; if the customer doesn’t choose you, you mark it as ‘lost’.

The benefit isn’t in dragging cards around. The benefit is that on Monday morning, you can immediately see which cards are still in the ‘quote sent’ stage. These are the leads you don’t want to forget.

In ‘Klantly’, you set up the stages yourself. You decide on the name, colour and order. You can also set a probability percentage for each stage and choose whether cards count towards the pipeline value. This way, you tailor the board to your own working method, rather than the other way round.

A pipeline works best in conjunction with a centralised customer history. When you click on a card, you don’t want to have to search for previous messages, appointments or documents. By managing customer data centrally, you keep all that information in one place.

What does the pipeline value represent – and what doesn’t it represent?

At the top of a column, you might see how many cards there are and how much money they represent. That total is called the pipeline value. If a quote is attached to a card, its value can be used automatically. If there isn’t a quote yet, you can enter an expected value yourself.

The pipeline value helps you understand the scale of your outstanding work. If you see a lot of value in the ‘quotation sent’ stage, you know that follow-up is important. If you see many cards stagnating for a long time at an early stage, you may need to make calls sooner or agree more clearly who will handle new enquiries.

An opportunity percentage can make the value more realistic. A lead in the ‘new enquiry’ stage is less certain than a client who has already given their approval. However, this is not a revenue forecast you can rely on blindly. A client may decide against the job, a project may be postponed, and an estimate remains just that – an estimate.

You should therefore use the pipeline value as a rough guide, not as a certainty. It helps when discussing capacity, procurement or planning. But it is only once a contract has been won that you really know what is coming in.

How do you keep a pipeline board useful?

A board that isn’t updated gives a false sense of certainty. So make one simple rule: move a card as soon as something significant changes. It takes very little time and prevents you from having to piece together what was going on weeks later.

Automation can help with this. For example, you can set up a task to be triggered if a quotation hasn’t been accepted after a certain number of days. Or you can have a reminder sent out, whilst opting for personal follow-up for larger enquiries. The pipeline then remains your overview, but you don’t have to remember everything off the top of your head.

A pipeline isn’t a complicated sales system. It’s a practical way to keep track of sales opportunities, see outstanding quotations and call the right customer at the right time. Would you like to see how it fits in with the way you work? Get started for free.