Two of the most beneficial features of Nimble CRM are workflows and deals. In some cases, they are directly related. They even share some common features. However, they also differ in a number of ways. While I won’t go into every feature of each in this article, let’s take a quick look.
Both represent a graphical representation of a process. The steps that you would normally take in order to complete a specific task. Process is important. It can and should be replicated, consistently, providing that it is a good process.
Workflows are populated with contact records (people or companies). You can have multiple different workflows and a contact can appear in more than one at the same time. Nimble offers a variety of workflow templates, for all different aspects of your business, that can be modified, or you can build your own from scratch.
Deals are a part of a contact record and deals are also their own unique records. These records, while still associated with a contact record, are graphically displayed in a pipeline which is structured to represent your specific sales process. You can create multiple pipelines, but a deal can only reside in one pipeline at any time.
A deal will leave a pipeline in one of three ways …
- It’s deleted. This deal just went away.
- It’s registered as a loss. The deal went through but to another company.
- This deal was a win. You closed the order.
Deals have unique elements including … a dollar value, an expected close date, and a predicted percentage chance of closing. All of these work together to provide you with a sales report and a sales forecast. There are no reports for workflows.
So how can workflows and deals work together? They don’t need to, they might represent entirely different aspects of our business, but they can. Let’s look at selling. We already know that a deal represents a dollar opportunity. Where might a workflow come in? Handling an incoming customer inquiry would be a good example.
When somebody contacts our company about our services, we need to assign this inquiry for someone to handle. It is up to this person to determine whether or not this inquiry is a good match for our services and whether or not this inquiring company is qualified to secure our services. Are they the M.A.N.? Money, Authority, and Need.
These steps represent the stages, the process, of a lead workflow. They have expressed an interest in our services but they do not yet represent an opportunity. When an interest becomes a bona fide opportunity, including a predicted dollar value and close date, this contact leaves the workflow and a deal record is created and placed in our pipeline.
In this example, do you need both? Can a workflow and a pipeline be combined into one process only? The simple answer is “yes”, but there will be some caveats.
If we did all of this in a workflow, we would be giving up our sales and forecast reporting. If we did it all in a pipeline, our deal records would probably start out without a projected dollar amount. They might not even have a projected close date. They may never move past the first few stages.
The most important question though is … what works for you? Nimble is a very flexible platform and I specialize in adapting it to meet your unique needs. If you would like to schedule a free 30 minute consultation to discuss Nimble and my services, please follow this link to do so.
Craig M. Jamieson
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