Use pipelines to track multiple orders

This article was included in the March 22nd, 2016 issue of the LACRM Newsletter.

Managing multiple sales and orders can be tricky -- one lead may place many orders and each order can be vastly different from one another. Making sure each order is closed out without any hitches or mix-ups is key to generating loyal, repeat customers (who are usually the best kind of customers!). For travel agent Sarah Bergman, her Magical Miles Travel clients usually book multiple trips with her at once. Being able to manage every single trip made by one client allows Sarah to stay on top of all her follow ups, and helps keep her organized:

“I use my pipelines to track each individual trip a person goes on, and if they are going on multiple trips, I attach multiple pipelines to them. I like this because I can then go onto the contact’s profile page and I’ll be able to see each separate trip as a badge on its own. This helps me keep track of individual trips, makes sure every trip is being paid for on time, and keeps me organized!”

-Sarah Bergman, Travel Agent at Magical Miles Travel/Foerster Travel Inc.

How can a CRM help?

A contact record in a CRM holds all the information you know about a contact in one place, and by having a pipeline item attached to a contact for each of the orders they place, you will be able to know exactly how many open orders they currently have, and how many they have placed before. You can look into every individual order to see what a client bought each time and this can be helpful if you have a deal in the future, and want to reach out to everyone who had made a certain type of purchase in the past. What’s more, being able to remind a client of what they wanted previously helps you add a personal touch to all your interactions -- building stronger relationships, and closing more sales!

Tip to try: Try out an oft-overlooked feature of our custom pipeline fields, display settings. Display settings allow you to set a pipeline field to display on pipeline badges on the contact, making it more visible. This is particularly useful when it comes to multiple purchases or orders because the last thing you want is to have a contact with many ‘Order’ or ‘Trip’ badges on their page with no idea what each badge is referring to. By having the name or number of the order show up on the pipeline badge, you can distinguish one from the other on a contact’s record.

This way, not only can you see the number of active orders a client currently has, but you can also see which order number the pipeline items correspond to. The more information you can get at a glance, the more time you have to close your deals! Click here to read a tutorial on how you can make a pipeline field the name of a pipeline, and see more examples of how this helps.

We hope this gives you some ideas on how you can play around even more with your pipelines, and if you have any questions, or want to get on the phone to talk more about this, just contact us!

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