A pipeline that fits on one page

A customer relationship system is usually the wrong first purchase for a small business. What is needed is a list that is actually looked at, and most people would be better served by one page than by software they stop updating in week three.

What the list has to do

Three jobs, and software that does more than these is adding maintenance rather than capability.

• Stop you forgetting anybody. The main one. Most lost opportunities were simply not followed up.
• Tell you what to do today. A list without a next action and a date is a record rather than a tool.
• Show you where things stall, so you can fix the stage rather than the individual conversation.

The five columns

1. 01Who, including the business and the person.
2. 02What they want, in one line, in their words.
3. 03Stage, from a short fixed list: spoke, proposed, deciding, won, lost.
4. 04Next action and the date it is due. The only column that makes it a working document.
5. 05What they said. A few words of actual quotation, which is what makes the conversation resumable in three months.

Deliberately absent: probability percentages, expected value, lead scores and a dozen custom fields. Each of those is a number you will invent and then make decisions with, which is worse than having no number.

The weekly fifteen minutes

1. 01Do the actions that are due. This is the whole point and it is usually two or three messages.
2. 02Give a next action to anything that lost one.
3. 03Move anything you have not touched in a month to lost, with a date to revisit. Lost is not failure; it is an honest state.
4. 04Count the rows at each stage and compare with last month.

Fifteen minutes, once a week, at a fixed time. The discipline is the product; the format of the list barely matters.

Reading the stage counts

Where the list stops being an administrative chore and starts telling you something. Where conversations pile up is a diagnosis.

• Many spoke, few proposed: you are talking to the wrong people, or not asking for the work.
• Many proposed, few won: the proposal, the price or the qualifying. Usually the qualifying.
• Many deciding, nothing moving: no real timing, or you are not talking to whoever decides.
• Few at every stage: this is not a conversion problem, it is a lack of conversations, and no improvement to the later stages will help.

That last distinction saves a great deal of misdirected effort. A business with four conversations a month does not have a sales process problem.

When to move to software

When more than one person needs to see it, when you genuinely cannot hold the detail, or when you need the history across years. Not before. A spreadsheet that is updated weekly beats a system that is not, and the main cost of the system is that it feels like progress.

How much should be in it

A question people answer by feel and can answer by arithmetic, which is more useful because it tells you when to stop selling as well as when to start.

Illustratively. You need two new engagements a month. One in four proposals is accepted, and one in three conversations reaches a proposal. So you need about six proposals and eighteen conversations a month to land two. If your list has five conversations in it, the next month is already decided regardless of how well you sell.

Work it backwards with your own numbers once and the pipeline stops being a feeling. It also exposes the common trap: a business that stops looking for conversations while delivering a large project, then finds the pipeline empty two months later, exactly when the project ends.

The defence is a minimum. Whatever your arithmetic says, keep that many live conversations even when busy, and treat falling below it as a problem to act on rather than as a consequence of being fully booked.