The Deals application is one of the most powerful tools that our platform has to offer. With this app, you’re able to easily create a variety of sales pipelines to help you visualize your sales process and track your latest deals.
A sales pipeline allows you to break your entire sales process down into individual steps. This makes tasks more manageable and makes it easier to track progress at each part of the process. It also helps you hold your sales personnel accountable for their performance.
This document will cover the basics of navigating and customizing the sales application to your liking. Along the way, we will link to additional help documents that provide deep dives into more complicated mechanics that will ultimately improve your team’s efficiency.
Accessing the Deals Application
Each time you log in to your account, you will arrive at your dashboard by default. To access the Deals application, use the app drawer in the top right corner of the page. Then, click on the Deals icon.
Navigating the Deals Application
My Deals
When you arrive at the Deals application, you will see the tab My Deals displayed by default. This page will display your latest sales pipeline along with your active deals.
If this is your first time using the application, you won’t have any pipelines or deals present. However, this page can show an unlimited number of stages in your pipeline.
At the top of each stage, you will see one or more solid color lines. These lines also indicate which stage of the pipeline it occupies.
At the top of this page, you can alternate between page views by clicking on the Table, Board, and List toggle. The image above depicts the default Board view.
Clicking the table view lists your deals first followed by various columns containing relevant information.
Finally, the list view lists all of your deal stages vertically within expandable rows. You can click on any deal stage to expand the view and look at the individual deals available at that stage.
Next to this toggle, you can quickly search for a specific deal by entering the name in the search field to the right. If it finds a match, it will filter out the rest of your deals and display only the matching deal at the appropriate stage.
Exporting Deal Information
To the right of the layout toggle, you'll find the Export button. Clicking this allows you to export all of your data from your Deals app into a CSV file.
You can learn more about this process here.
Create a New Deal
Moving right across the menu, you will find the + New Deal button next. This allows you to create a brand-new deal card, which allows you to easily add a new deal to your sales pipeline.
Creating deals is a relatively simple process, but comes with some useful features that we will break down in a separate help article here. We highly recommend reviewing this before you begin to utilize the Deals application for your team.
Add, Edit, or Reorder a Sales Pipeline
Continuing further right, you will see a button that houses your list of sales pipelines. Clicking on this button opens a small menu containing your list as well as a search bar for quick access.
Switching to a different sales pipeline is as simple as clicking on a new name. The active pipeline will always have the blue checkmark next to it.
You can add a brand-new pipeline by clicking Add Pipeline within the menu. This will launch an additional menu that allows you to create and customize your pipeline to your liking.
You can edit your current pipeline through several different methods. First, you can click Edit Pipeline in the menu. Alternatively, hovering over the pipeline name in the list will reveal an edit button. Click on this to go to the same menu. Finally, the same edit button exists next to the original button.
Finally, you can reorder your current pipeline by clicking on Reorder Pipeline. We cover the mechanics of each task in our help article here.
Deal Automation
Moving right across the menu once again will allow you to discover the Deal Automations button. This is potentially the most powerful feature available within this application.
When your sales personnel are working a pipeline, they are likely completing similar tasks daily for each new deal. This might include sending a follow-up email or sending a text message a day later as a reminder. The more tasks that need to be done manually, the greater potential there is for human error.
The Deal Automations feature allows you to automate any number of these tasks throughout the various stages of your sales pipeline. Our platform currently allows you to create automation for Email and SMS. It also allows you to create automation to Build InstaSites and Build InstaReports, two of our standout prospecting tools.
You and your team need to utilize the Deal Automations feature properly, which is why we created help articles that will help you and your team become experts in no time.
Reporting
Now that we’ve explored the My Deals tab, it’s time to review the Reporting tab.
This feature allows you to track the performance of your sales team by analyzing your deals won and deals lost versus your total deals. You’ll be able to explore your team’s performance over certain periods, track who’s winning in won deals, and isolate reporting for specific pipelines or specific individuals.
Once again, we created a separate help article that walks you through how to take full advantage of these reporting features here.
Automation Logs
This tab allows you to keep track of the status of all of your deal automation. You can see each deal where automation is present, the type of automation when it's scheduled to occur, and the current status of the automation. You can quickly look for specific automation by using the Status filter or the Deal Automations filter on the left.
To learn more about how to utilize automation logs effectively, check out our article here.
Customizing Your Deals App View
There’s one more feature available within this application that we have yet to cover. Click back to the My Deals application and look at the column on the left. You may have noticed that there is a Smart Lists section that we have yet to explore.
How to Create and Customize Smart Lists
By default, you will always have the All Deals and My Deals filters available. You cannot delete or remove these from your list of filters. The former displays every deal that is currently in the system while the latter features the deals currently assigned to you.
To create a new Smart List, click on the + icon on the right side of the column.
Notice that “New filter” appears at the bottom of your list. + Add filter also appears above your pipeline. Click on that button to begin tailoring your filter to your liking.
A menu appears allowing you to select one of the values that describe the deal. After you select the value you want to filter your deals by, a second menu appears prompting you to qualify that value:
Is - the value must be an identical match
Is not - the value must not be an identical match
Starts with - the value only needs to match with the same starting letter
Ends with - the value only needs to match with the same ending character
Contains - the value must contain the entered characters somewhere in that order
Does not contain - the value must not contain the entered characters anywhere in that order
Unknown - the value is unknown; any values that do not have this entry
Has any value - the deal must at least have some value; entries without value will be omitted
To provide a basic example of a filter, we selected Deal name followed by is. We enter the name of the deal we specifically wish to see in this Smart List.
You can see our Smart List at the top as the pipeline automatically updates to show the applicable deals within the filter. If you are satisfied with this basic filter, be sure to click Save to the right. You can always Clear everything created thus far to start fresh.
However, you can continue building on this filter in two ways. The first is to select the + icon immediately to the right of your Smart List.
Note that the grey box expands and now features the word and connects our two filters. In this case, the value must satisfy both conditions of matching the deal name AND being in the qualified stage.
You can also click on the and button to reveal that you can select and/or. Switching to or would mean that the value must satisfy either condition, not necessarily both.
The second method is to select + Add filter to the right. This creates a new filter that is independent of the original. Take a look at our example below:
In this example, the first aspect of our filter still calls for the deal name to be exact. However, we now have a separate value indicating that we are also interested in any deals that are currently in the stage qualified. As a result, we are every deal that fits in with these restrictions. Once again, you can click on the or button to reveal an and/or selection.
When you are satisfied with your filter, click on Save. A small menu will appear prompting you to name your filter. You can also determine if you would like to keep this filter personally for yourself or create it for the rest of your team. Then, click Save again.
Your new filter will now appear in the list along with a number signifying the number of deals in the category.
Note - When selecting a Smart List, notice that your Total Amount will change accordingly at the top of the list. This allows you to quickly keep track of your deal totals within a segmented list.
Final Notes
Though you’ve familiarized yourself with the Deals application, there is still more to learn to fully master its features. Below, we are including a list of relevant help articles that we featured through this article. Be sure to read through each so that you can take full advantage of what our application has to offer.