Sales Pipeline for G5

Sales Pipeline for G5

The English language has a wonderful feature called Homophones, which are two words that sound the same, but mean different things. Dads everywhere rely on this feature for some of the most naturally flowing humor in the world. Unfortunately, it also sometimes has the effect of confusing our attempts to communicate.

In the BGM system, we teach that a Lead is “any client or prospect in the process of active follow-up” in The Sales Pipeline Glossary. Or to put it another way, a lead is anyone who is on their way into or still in your sales pipeline.

However, users of G5 will notice that the Status field tracks Leads, Prospects, and Clients separately. This is because, despite them both being leads, a current client who has an opportunity and someone you have not yet qualified as a prospect have very different relationships with your office.

Any client with an opportunity is a lead. These Client leads are tracked in the opportunity workspace and taken through the sales process until their opportunities are resolved.

The Lead status is used to show contacts that have not yet been qualified to be Prospects yet. The Sales Pipeline Glossary defines a Prospect as, “Someone (not a client) who has responded to a Lead Generation Campaign or has been referred, with whom you would like to do business.”

To see your list of these pre-Prospect leads, you can go to the Contact Workspace, and filter by the Status field to see just those contacts with a status of Lead.

Materials Available

Many of the default activity plans that come with G5 are designed to help you manage the leads in your pipeline all the way through onboarding. The document manager likewise comes with a Pipeline folder filled with letters designed to help with this process. Both the Activity Plans and Letters are generic versions designed for anyone to use. At the end of this article, we will discuss how you can customize them for your practice.

Entering the Sales Pipeline

There are two ways for someone to enter the sales pipeline. Either by Lead Generation, or by the discovery of a new Opportunity for a client.

Lead Generation

The Sales Pipeline Glossary defines Lead Generation as, “Promotional actions or messages that cause a person to respond the first time.” This can include people who responded to a lead generation campaign or people who got referred, but not introduced to you. In this case, the Lead is always a pre-Prospect lead, and not a Client Opportunity lead.

  Do This When You Have a New Lead:

  • Create a Contact and a Household for these people.
  • Set their status to Lead.
  • Fill in the Lead Status, Market Segment, Sales Concept, and Source Type fields as appropriate.
  • Initiate contact with them. Find if they are Qualified or Not during this initial contact. Enter notes according to The Law.
  • If the new lead was referred to you by a Client Activate the Referral Activity Plan.
    Otherwise, activate the Appropriate Lead Generation Activity Plan based on this initial contact.
  • If they have already been qualified and scheduled their first appointment change their Status to Prospect and continue to The Sales Process.
    Otherwise, continue to Lead Development.
  • Add a matching Category to the pre-Prospect lead when you activate a Lead Generation Activity Plan for them. Use this category to create filters on the Contact Workspace.

Client Opportunity Discovery

Like Lead Generation, discovering a new opportunity is accomplished through campaigns. In fact, client-targeted campaigns are designed to discover opportunities.

It can also be done through the course of your regular interactions with your clients. Top of Mind Awareness is a key method of gaining opportunities.

  Do This When You Have a New Opportunity:

  • Create an Opportunity in the client’s record or on the Opportunity Workspace.
  • If they have already scheduled an appointment with you about this, Continue to The Sales Process
    Otherwise, continue to Lead Development.

Tossing Out the Garbage

Sometimes you don’t want a lead to enter the pipeline. The reasons this might happen are:

  • They are not qualified and/or interested. These are Pits.
  • They are a jerk.

These people are not leads. Your client opportunities should never be unqualified or a jerk, since you weeded them out before they became clients. However, while it may be rare, they may not be interested.

  Do This When You Have a Pit or Jerk:

  • If they were a pre-Prospect lead, change their status to Perm Off.
  • Enter a Note about the reason they were a Pit or a Jerk.
  • Do not delete them from your database. This ensures that you can identify them if they appear on another leads list in the future.
  • If they were a Client Opportunity lead, assess whether you should continue with a client who is uninterested in doing business with you.
  • Enter a Note about your assessment and what you found.

Moving through the Pipeline

There are two parts to moving through the Sales Pipeline: Lead Development and the Sales Process.

Lead Development

Once someone is in the sales pipeline, moving through it is called Lead Development.

The Sales Pipeline Glossary defines Lead Development as, “Those communications made to increase a Lead’s desire and reduce their fear to the point they will set and keep the first appointment.”

The lead development process sorts out the pre-Prospect leads by either turning them into Prospects, or by disqualifying them as prospects.

  Do This When You Have Leads Under Development:

  • Filter the Contact Workspace to Status equals Lead to manage the leads that still need to be qualified as prospects.
  • Give each Lead a Lead Source, Sales Concept, and Market Segment as you learn about them.
  • When you determine if a lead is qualified or not, change their Lead Status as appropriate. This will automatically update their Status.
  • Use the SLM to maintain contact with each Client and Prospect.
  • Use the appropriate Lead Development Activity Plan after each activity as needed.
  • Add a matching Category to a lead when you activate a Lead Development Activity Plan for them. Use this category to create filters on the Contact Workspace.
  • Use the Overdue Product Opportunity report to prioritize opportunities that need more attention to be resolved.
  • Use the Upcoming Product Opportunity report to make weekly assessments of upcoming Opportunities.
  • Use the appropriate Lead Development Activity Plan with each opportunity you want to develop further.
  • NOTE: You can also use the Stage and Expected Close filters to view your opportunities directly in the opportunity workspace.
  • When a lead sets an appointment, continue to The Sales Process.

The Sales Process

The goal of lead development is to increase a Lead’s desire and reduce their fear to the point they will set and keep the first appointment. This begins the Sales Process.

  Do This When You Have Leads in the Sales Process:

  • Use the SLM to maintain regular contact with your Clients and Prospects.
  • Use the Sales Process Activity Plans to develop your Prospects into Clients.
  • Use the Sales Process Activity Plans to close your Client Opportunities.
  • Continue with Completing the Journey Through the Sales Pipeline.

A Pitch and Miss

Despite your efforts, a prospect may decline your services. This is called a Pitch and Miss. It has its own activity plans with the Lead Development ones. This is because you may still want to work with them, so they remain a prospect. If you determine that they are no longer a prospect, they can go the same way the Pits and Jerks do.

Completing the Journey Through the Sales Pipeline

Inevitably, the sales process will finish, ideally by closing a new client or bringing more money in from an existing client. When it does, there are steps you can take to reinforce the feeling that they made the right choice.

  Do This When the Sales Process Completes:

  • Use the SLM to maintain regular contact with your Clients and Prospects.
  • Use the Sales Process-Sale to Client Activity Plan to send a thank you card to the client when their Opportunity closes.
  • Use the Sales Process-Sale to Prospect Activity Plan when a Prospect becomes a Client to thank them for becoming your client.
  • Use the Red Carpet Activity Plans to bring the new client fully onboard and introduce them to your team and your practice.

Red Carpet Activity Plans are designed to bring a new client into the fold and introduce them to your full team and practice.

This is an important final step, because as The Sales Pipeline Chart shows, the process isn’t complete until the Client is Delighted with Quality of Service and Investment Advice.

Not that the sales pipeline is ever complete, because guess what, it’s not a line, it’s a cycle!

Customizing the Sales Pipeline Materials

G5 comes with many activity plans and letters designed for anyone to be able to use the sales pipeline right out of the gate. But better results are to be had by tailoring them to your own practice.

The Letters need to be examined, customized, then submitted to your compliance for approval. The process for doing this is detailed in the Sales Pipeline Materials Checklist.

This process focuses on adding your team’s names and phone numbers directly into the letters. Some of them need to be updated with a specific person’s pronouns in order to make sense.

For example, in the letter below you would replace the highlighted text with the Service Assistant’s full name, first name, your office hours, then your Sales Assistant’s full name, first name, and the appropriate pronoun needed to complete the sentence.

To make these changes, download the letter from the Pipeline folder of your Document Manager in G5, alter it, submit it to your compliance for approval, then replace it in G5’s document manager. G5’s Activity Plans will automatically use the one you have uploaded to the Document Manager.

  Note:

  • If something happened to the Pipeline letters in your Document Manager, and you find yourself in need of replacing them with fresh copies of these default letters, you can find them in the Letters Library.

It is recommended that you make changes to and submit all the letters together, with a cover sheet explaining to your compliance what they are for.

Once the letters have been finalized and returned to G5, the next step will be to examine, assess, and customize your activity plans.

Look at each step of each activity plan, and assess the following things:

  • Is this step assigned to the role in my office I want to handle this task?
  • Is the timing of the step set to the timing I want it to use?

Make any changes you determine need to be made

The above hyperlink also explains how you can make a copy of an activity plan. If your office has multiple teams, you can use that feature to create separate customized versions of any activity plan that needs to be set up differently for different advisors.

Ideally, each team will make their own assessment of the activity plans and create customized versions of them for their team this way.


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