Transform Your Sales Team With Anvil Pro Pipeline Software
5/4/2023A great sales pipeline stands at the core of your dealership. At Tractor Zoom, we recognize that a sales pipeline riddled with poor follow-up, recency bias, and inconsistent reporting can halt potential revenue flow.
Is your current sales pipeline organized, detail-oriented, and reportable? How about manageable, easy, and intuitive? If you’re an equipment sales manager or salesperson, chances are that a workable sales pipeline is more of a dream than a regular part of your daily workflow.
If this sounds familiar, then you’ll want to read on. Anvil Pro’s Pipeline Manager is the ultimate tool for sales professionals and managers in the sales pipeline application as it puts all information related to equipment quotes at your fingertips in an intuitive process-board layout.
Sales pipeline software for the entire sales department
One difficult aspect of being in a leadership position is getting your team members on board with using new technology in their workflow. After all, “We have always done it this way,” can be an enticing (if unproductive) mindset. But that’s not how dealerships get ahead in an evolving and competitive landscape. Fortunately, Anvil Pro makes adoption of new tech easier, as these tools simplify the work of everyone on your sales team and allow them to focus more time repricing equipment and other important tasks.
Salespeople
The Pipeline Manager organizes and streamlines your workday:
- See your entire sales pipeline at a glance.
- Drag-and-drop simplicity.
- Organize all your deals.
- Know where every potential deal is at, and your next step.
- One centralized screen with one-click access to everything.
- Automation of all steps in the pipeline.
- Color-coded visual cues highlight which deals need attention.
- Put your sales pipeline together in minutes.
Sales managers
Finally, access sales pipeline software that shows you the big picture in your sales department:
- Visualize sales volume (deals and dollars) through summary totals at each stage of the sales pipeline.
- See the complete picture for each salesperson, team, region, and the whole dealership.
- Visual cues make problem deals stand out in a crowded pipeline.
- Only one click away from the detail of any deal.
- A starting point for initiating proactive conversations with salespeople.
- Make actionable decisions quickly around lost sales or number of deals in negotiations.
- Intuitive to use; get the sales team started in minutes.
- Automation makes salespeople more efficient.
However, gaining acceptance from your sales team remains the critical point where the plowshare meets the soil. If the system isn’t simple, straightforward, and easy to figure out, users will get frustrated and skip steps, circumvent the process, or even reject it entirely. That scenario doesn’t benefit the salesperson or the dealership.
For equipment dealers, the Sales Pipeline solution takes a complicated, multi-system process, pulls the information onto one screen, and applies automation to execute the details for the salesperson.
The visual Kanban board is one of the Pipeline Manager's most unique features. As Jason Hoult, former President of Anvil App Works, says, “We want to make it simple and straightforward to update as deals move forward. As a salesperson, I don’t have to think about it. I don’t have to go somewhere else. I just move the deal forward and do what Anvil Pro tells me to do.”
Critical sales pipeline information at your fingertips
The Kanban board view in Pipeline Manager shows all your deals as columns of cards on a board. Each column represents a stage of the sales pipeline, and each card links to details or actions related to the deal. New deals lift automatically from systems like John Deere’s JDQuote and drop into the “New Deals” column on the left.
Each card gives visual cues to assess the health of the deal with a color cue that changes as a deal becomes stale.
“The goal of this card is to recognize when deals need attention,” says Hoult. “A salesperson only needs to glance at their sales pipeline to see who to call next, whereas a sales manager may have 200–400 deals in flight at any time. That manager needs a tool that quickly identifies deals to focus on with the sales team.”
Salesforce sales pipeline software brings drag-and-drop simplicity
Anvil Pro is built on the Salesforce platform, one of the most comprehensive, reliable, and easy-to-configure business applications. To move a deal forward to the next stage, the salesperson simply drags the deal card into the next column. That movement triggers preset automation that may call for the close date to be updated, a new next step to be entered, or a trade evaluation request to be created. Everything the next step requires is collected and created through this automation. Then, Anvil Pro enters the new information into appropriate John Deere systems and local work queues throughout the dealership.
The Pipeline Manager process culminates in Anvil Pro’s most powerful automation: the Marked Sold cascade. “Marked Sold is the largest automation in the Anvil system,” says Hoult. “The salesperson doesn’t need to open outside systems, like JDQuote. Simply dragging the deal card into the ‘Sold’ column triggers the automation.” As part of the Marked Sold process, Anvil Pro does the following in an instant:
- Confirms the equipment details and what was sold.
- Marks the stock units contained in the quote as sold.
- Talks to EQUIP (a John Deere-specific automation).
- Gathers information.
- Creates requests based on inclusions in the quote and dealership processes.
30-Minute Challenge
When asked about how salespeople react to working in the Anvil Pro Pipeline Manager, Hoult relates this experience described by one Anvil Pro user: “That sales manager said he challenged his sales team to use the Visual Pipeline Manager for 30 minutes a day for one week.”
After a week, that sales manager said a salesman told him, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but my daily pipeline review took five5 minutes each day, not 30.” To the surprise of both the manager and the rep, he found that becoming more organized, more efficient, and more responsive took only a few short minutes out of his daily workflow.
When combined with Anvil Pro’s dealer CRM, inventory management, order to cash, and other dealership workflow software in the Tractor Zoom solution suite, your dealership will be equipped to increase turn, close on more deals, and overcome most challenges facing modern equipment dealerships. Learn more about how Tractor Zoom can help your dealership go beyond the status quo and achieve results you didn’t know were possible.