CRM Pipeline Stages for Acquisition

August 08, 2023

by a searcher in Cyprus

What are your pipeline stages in your CRM for acquisition and managing dealflow?

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Reply by a searcher
from Indiana University, Bloomington/Indianapolis in Chicago, IL, USA

Thanks ^redacted‌ for the tag! I use my CRM funnel mainly for tracking my email campaigns I use free version of hubspot - and I chose hubspot over Pipedrive because I use outlook and the plug-in works great). It's easy for me to know which companies I've had site visits for / IOI / LOI (not many successfully get to these later stages!). So for me, I leverage my CRM to help focus on the initial stages of my process: Prospective Target > Initial Outreach Initiated > Received Response > Engaged in Active Dialogue > IOI Submitted > LOI Submitted > Lost/Rejected.

All but one will eventually end up in the Lost/Rejected. And I can count on two hands the number of deals that are under IOI at any given time, so I don't need much help from my CRM at that point. Also, I never foresee being under LOI with more than 1 company at a time...so my pipeline basically ends there.

In short, my perspective on CRM system is simply to help keep a bit of order to the chaos (particularly early on)...but as things progress I don't find it nearly as useful because I can keep track of it in my own head! So my stages are very much focused on those early stages where I need the most help keeping organized.

Reply by a searcher
from IE Business School in Munich, Germany

All the above + try to not overengineer it. The most important stages are the early ones for monitoring, automating and analyzing your outreach (e.g. calculating conversion rates). Everything after LOI signed is not that important as a minimal fracture of your deals will get there and those are the ones you will (hopefully) have top of mind anyways, so in my opinion no need to break it down into 3-5 additional stages. 😉

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