Pipeline Opportunities/Quotes

Augtools pipeline management is centred around two main concepts namely leads and prospects. 

Leads are contacts you have found through research or referral that can in our opinion be qualified or unqualified. These are contacts in companies or private people that you have not spoken to before and want to qualify and convert into a prospect. 

Once you have converted a lead into a prospect the prospect can be treated differently with its own types of phases and activities. 

Prospects in our opinion go through a few phases namely: 

• Consider

• Evaluate

• Negotiate

• Purchase

These phases can be fully customized to suite your business.  

In our opinion once a prospect reaches the negotiate or purchase phase you can then use our opportunity feature to create and group quotes in the system for that prospect. Should a prospect actually become a customer then you can mark that prospect as won and convert it into a customer or supplier. 

On the list view you will notice a few icons to the left of each lead/prospect. You can send the tellephone number or cell number from the list to your phone directly, open an email to the prospect or view their website addres. This can also be done when you open a pipeline lead as you can see below. 

As you can see, you can add any phase to the phases section of Augtool Pipeline. Please note that the order column that you can set orders the lists in drop down lists for the user. 

User defined activities are a good way to standardise the processes within Augtool for pipeline management. This is used when a user wants to set or plan what their next activity is on a lead. You can always come back to this setup page and change these at a later stage. 

With most pipeline managment tools, customers want to record unique information about their clients. In this tab, you can create user defineable fields that a user can or should fill in.

If you create a Text type field, the user can enter any information into the text type field. 

If you create a lookup field as shown below, you will have to create lookup options such as decision maker, budget and interest below. 

You can also set if this user field will appear in the list of the leads (if not then it will only appear in the actual lead) and if you should have a filter to search for this field. 

Opportunities (or quotes) are normally created in the system when a Prospect reaches the negotiate or purchase phase of a sale. You do not need to use the Pipeline feature to create opportunities and quotes but can do so if you choose. 

Opportunities are a way to group and collect quotes related to one or many deals that are related in one place.  

Below you will see 4 opportunities in Augtool that are created for one customer. 

As you can see in opportunity OP003 below, the customer ADV Marketing has three quotes in the system related to one deal we are negotiating. The user has made on of the quotes active which adds to the total of active (expected) quotes for that customer. More than one quote can be active and will add to the Active total below which can be compared to what you are expecting on the opportunity.

Quotes that are listed on the opportunity can easily be duplicated to make minor changes on and viewd directly from the opportunity. 

Many customers want to keep a history of quotes that they have sent to a customer. Instead of changing one quote over and over and sending that to the customer, the user can duplicate a quote so that you can look back in hindsight to see which quotes are successfull and which ones fail. 

Once the customer accepts a quote and the deal is closed or a sales order or Sales Invoice is created from the quote the user can come back to the opportunity and close the opportunity or continue on the one opportunity to quote further.