How to Manage Your Project Sales Pipelines

What do you do before BillQuick comes into the picture?

BillQuick is great project management software, but what do you do with projects that haven’t come in yet? You may not want to set up projects in BillQuick for every lead that comes in. In fact, you probably wouldn't want to set anything up in BillQuick until it’s time to prepare an estimate. Until that point, you need something to track your leads. Whom do you have calls scheduled with? When?

Even when you create an estimate in BillQuick, you haven’t necessarily defined a project in BillQuick. Your estimate stands on it’s own. It can be converted to a budget, and then when you get the approval from the client, you can create a project and assign the budget to that project.

Trello is another great project management tool. It will not ever replace BillQuick. For one thing, it isn’t set up to handle any of the accounting that BillQuick handles so beautifully. It is, however, laid out specifically in a way that suits a sales pipeline perfectly.

Trello allows you to set up “Boards.” Each board can be thought of as a different project. Let’s say you set up a board called “Sales Pipeline.”

With Trello, you set up your “Lists” and then within each list, you add your “cards.” Your lists can describe the status of a task. The cards are the tasks.

A “Card” in Trello can hold a lot of information. You can assign other users to a card, making it a task for them to complete (such as a phone call to a lead). You can assign Labels (color coded) to make your information more visually appealing, highlighting certain things to make them stand out. You can add a checklist, assign a due date, and even attach documents (e.g. proposals) to a card. People can subscribe to a card which means they will receive an e-mail notification whenever something happens. That e-mail gives you a link directly into that card so any necessary or appropriate action can be taken.

All in all, Trello gives you a great platform for managing the workflow of a sales pipeline right up to the point of setting up a new project in BillQuick, and that of course would be the final task described in Trello - once a lead has become a client.

If you haven’t already, watch the video to see what this looks like and as always post your questions and comments below.