Sell is very flexible about adding leads to your account. For example, you can import lead data, send leads to Sell from Support or Chat, connect a web lead capture form to Sell, and set up integrations with other apps and services to add new leads to Sell as they’re captured using Sell’s APIs.

As you add leads to your Sell account, you can easily assign them to individual sales team members (or assign to round robin distributions), move them along your sales processes to convert them to contacts and create deals, and track all that activity along the way.

When a lead becomes an opportunity for business, you convert the lead to a contact and create deals that you manage through the sales pipeline to closure.

For tracking post-sales account management and customer success activities, there are a range of recommendations depending on your business and sales processes. You can create company contact custom fields to manage critical information, build secondary pipelines to manage renewal or upsell sales processes, customize call and visit outcomes to track and report on critical post-sales activities, and use apps like the Clone Deal app to track ongoing sales activity. Examples of company contact custom fields you may want to create include Renewal Date, Company Tier, and so on, seeCreating and managing custom fields in Sell.

After you’ve captured this data for your company contacts, you can then modify how you view contacts and deals to monitor those post-sales activities and create smart lists and templates that can be used by the entire team.

These post-sales smart lists can help team members to prioritize accounts, determine next actions, and so on.

For more information, seeCreating and using smart listsandCreating and using smart list templates.

Sample stages of a sales process are built into each new Sell account by default. A sales pipeline includes active stages (such as: Incoming, Qualified, Quote, and Closure) and closed stages (Won, Unqualified, and Lost).

You should customize Sell sales pipeline stages such as number of stages, and default win likelihood, to align with your sales operations. For more information about how to customize your Sell sales pipeline, seeAdding stages to your sales pipeline.

Your deals move through your pipeline stages from creation to completion. Your pipeline stages should follow a logical order toward deal closure, but you are not forced to follow them in order. You can skip stages (for example, going directly from Qualified to Won). You can also downgrade a deal to a previous stage, going from Qualified to Incoming, for example.

If your current sales process does not currently align to stages within a defined pipeline, we recommend that you align your sales process with pipeline stages with defined exit criteria. It’s a foundational step to tracking, managing, reporting, and executing with a sales team.

Your stages should be sequential and dependent on the length of your sales cycle. For example, if your deals typically close in a week or so, you might want a streamlined pipeline that contains fewer stages than you might need in a much more lengthy sales process and pipeline. For example, perhaps your active stages end with the Quote stage, not Closure.

To get started aligning your sales process to a pipeline, seeAligning pipeline stages with your sales process.

You can create more than one pipeline if you want to track multiple sales processes with different pipelines. For example, you may have a standard sales process that covers most of your deals and maps to your primary pipeline, but you’ve developed a new sales process for a new line of business that is very different from the standard process. Depending on your Sell plan type, there is a limit to the amount of pipelines you can add. To find out how many pipelines you can use for you plan seeProduct limits in Sell.

When you use multiple pipelines, you can choose which one to apply when you create a new deal. For more information, seeWorking with multiple sales pipelines.

If your organization does both in-house sales and support using Sell and Zendesk Support, the two work together to help you quickly push sales related inquiries you receive in Support to your Sell account so that your sales team can capture the lead and follow up. In Support, a customer who submits a support request or inquiry can be converted to a Sell lead (seeCreating a lead in Sell from Zendesk Support).

After the lead has been added to your Sell account, you can view their ongoing interactions with your support team. This information can be helpful, and at times vital, in working on an opportunity with a customer. For example, if they’ve opened support requests, you can investigate the issues they’re having to better understand how your customer relationship and their satisfaction is doing. For example, if they’re struggling with your product, it may not be the best time to propose an expansion to the business you’re doing together.

For more information about using Sell and Support together, seeSetting up the Zendesk Sell-Support integration.

如果你的一些交易结构允许customer to make recurring payments over some length of time (for example, monthly payments over two years), you can handle this type of deal in Sell using the following two options.

The first option is to create one deal to represent the total deal amount or contract value and then to create a custom deal field to hold the data for the recurring payment. As an example, you have a deal with a customer for a two year contract for a total of $2400, with monthly payments of $100. You could use Sell’s Deal Value field to represent the MRR ($100) or you could have it could represent the entire contract value ($2400). Whichever approach you choose, just make sure to define it across the account and stay consistent so that reporting is meaningful. If you chose one of the above options, you could create a supplemental custom field called Monthly Payment or Total Contract Value to track/report on that information.

Alternatively, because following up and processing recurring payments is usually managed by Revenue or Finance Operations teams, you can integrate Sell with your finance system using Smart Links (seeSetting up and using smart links in Sell), an app integration (i.e.Flare app for Sell), or a custom integration using theSell REST API.

The third not mutually exclusive option is to add theSell Clone Deal appto your Sell account and duplicate a deal into multiple deals that reflect the number of recurring payments.

Your deal’s total value isn’t captured in one deal in this case, but spread out among the recurring payment deals you created.

To track deals that are new versus those that are upsell deals to your existing customers, you could use a deal custom field or a second pipeline. To use a deal custom field, you can create a deal dropdown custom field called Deal Type with the options New and Upsell.

You can then filter on this custom field when viewing your deals and create smart lists to track the different types of deals, seeSetting up and using smart links in SellandCreating and managing custom fields in Sell.

If your sales process is particularly complex (for example, you use a number of systems and integrations to manage things such as quoting or sales commissions) you’ve got several options in Sell.

We recommend reviewing the Zendesk Apps marketplacehereto see if there’s a pre-built App or integration that meets your needs. You can also build any integration or workflow you need within your Sell account using Zapier or theSell REST API. Alternatively, Zendesk has in-house consultants and advanced hands-on-training. If you think you would benefit from the help of experts contactsupport@zendesk.comfor more information.