Membrain uses sales lingo. Actually, quite a lot of it. So to minimize confusion we have provided an alphabetical list of the sales-terms used in Membrain as well as an explanation of how to interpret these terms within the Membrain context.
Account Growth is about understanding who your best prospects and customers are, their challenges and ambitions, and proactively align and collaborate toward defined goals.
Account Growth Process is a template workflow that guides salespeople through a customized growth plan, helps them expand relationships and better understand customers, and gain insights on how to increase revenue on key accounts.
This is the Sales Representative that is responsible for this Company
In Membrain, an Activity is an Email, Task, Note, Phone call or Appointment recorded for the past or the future.
The Activity Stream is a chronological list of all activities relating to an individual Sales Project, Prospect, Company or Contact. It is found by scrolling down to the lower section of each of these areas.
An Appointment is a meeting over the phone, via webinar, or a meeting in person.
A comment is an additional remark made on an activity in the Activity or Story Stream.
A company is just that. A business where people work. You may already have a good working relationship with a company and its contacts, or you may be pursuing a Company for business.
A contact is a person that works at a company. This person may be part of a Prospect, Sales Project, Account Growth Project, or maybe be just a contact in the CRM database currently not related to anything other than a Company.
A custom field is a place that holds data that your administrator has created specifically for use by your organization. It can be in the form of a multi-select list, single-select list, text box, numeric field, or date field.
Decision Map is a tool that will help you visually map out the major stakeholders in your sales project, their attitude towards your solution, and how big their influence on the decision is.
Goals settings mean setting up and allocating achievable goals in Membrain for yourself and for your teams, as well as applying other key metrics that will help focus and motivate everyone to monitor your progress while working towards these targets.
Mentions added to a comment in the Activity Stream to reference another Membrain user and bring their attention to the comment. Using @ followed by their name in the comment will ensure they receive a notification about the comment in Membrain Guide, as well as an email in their inbox.
This is the sales representative who is responsible for the overall Sales Project. This is not the same as the Account Manager who is responsible for a Company. There can be multiple sales projects open for one Company, each with different owners.
Apart from the stakeholders, a complex sales project will also involve a number of participants. Participants are internal or external contacts of importance to the sales project, even if they are not part of the decision-making committee. For example, a pre-sales consultant that assists the sales project owner may not be a key stakeholder in the decision, but is still a very important player.
Potential usually represents the revenue that you believe is possible to achieve with a specific account during its specified lifetime. This can also be configured in many ways including manual entry, a calculation, or value taken from another field in Membrain.
The probability of a sales project is measured in percent. In Membrain, probability can be assigned to different milestones in the sales process. If you are in the second stage and have completed a second meeting, the probability may be at 25%, whereas a sales project in the final stage of negotiation may be at 85%. While the probability of a sales project can be amended manually, it automatically accumulates and grows bigger the more steps you complete and the further along the sales process that you are.
A Process is the consistent, step-by-step structure that defines the stages and milestones of a sales team's activities, from prospecting to closing. In Membrain, processes can be created for use in Prospecting, Sales Projects and Account Growth Projects.
A prospect is a company or a contact that you would like to do business with in the future. In other words, it is a prospective client. If the prospect is a good fit for your offer, it can be converted to a sales project and at this time enter the pipeline. However, before conversion you need to do some "prospecting" - i.e reach out to the prospect contacts and determine whether their needs match what you can deliver. This can be both new and existing customers, the common goal is to generate a new, fully qualified sales project.
Different prospects may need to be managed in different ways. An inbound lead completing a questionnaire on your website may need to be nurtured through automatic emails and the occasional telephone call from sales. A contact expressing interest in your services at an event may need a higher activity level. Membrain's Prospecting Processes allows you to set up different rules and structures around how to manage the different types of prospects you have.
The average length of a sales project in days, from the time it is created and enters the pipeline until it is marked as won or archived.
Sales projects are often referred to as opportunities. In complex sales, the person managing an opportunity is not unlike a project manager. There are numerous stakeholders to involve, deadlines to meet and milestones to reach. Hence we have chosen to call them sales projects. A sales project should only be created in Membrain if the qualification criteria are met and there is a real opportunity to close the deal.
Each sales process in Membrain have between 3-5 defined stages. Each company sales process is unique and the stages can be allocated different names, such as discovery, needs analysis, negotiation or proof of concept.
When managing complex sales, each sales project will have a number of key stakeholders that you need to identify. A stakeholder is an external or internal contact with significant influence in the decision-making process. Failure to identify all relevant stakeholders and ensuring the problem you can solve is elevated on their respective agendas may very well result in not winning the deal.
This is a term used in Membrain to describe a Sales Project which has stopped progressing forward in the process. When a step is completed or a project has moved to the next stage, this is considered progress. Progress is not to be confused with activity in a project e.g. sending an email, booking an appointment etc. as these do not always move the project forward.
In each stage of the sales process, a number of steps need to be completed in order to move the deal forward. The steps are visualized as checklist items in the sales project view. In order to complete a step and move it forward, the sales project owner may need to complete an activity, capture some vital information, identify the name of a stakeholder or upload a document. There are several tools can be used in these steps, and it's entirely customizable to fit your sales organizations needs.
The Story Stream is a chronological list of all activities relating to all Sales Projects and Prospects, by all Membrain users. It is filterable by user, date, and process. Goal and activity progress is also available here on the right-hand side for all users selected.
A task is a piece of work that needs to be done or undertaken. This can be a simple check of information or a larger assignment that is part of an overall project, much like a to-do list.
The total value of the pipeline is shown in the Active Pipeline view and represents the expected total value of all Sales Projects, related to any filters applied.
The untapped potential is the value that is currently available in an Account for growth/expansion. This is what you have identified as achievable from a sales revenue perspective, and what allows you to, amongst other things, prioritize your accounts and focus on the ones that offer the most growth potential.
A Value usually represents the amount currently won under an account during its specified lifetime. It can be a manual added by the salesperson, an imported amount, or the process can be configured to pull in the total of all Won sales projects from a different sales process in Membrain
The weighted pipeline value is calculated by taking the sales project value multiplied by their probability percentage.
You have 5 sales projects in your pipeline, each worth $1mil. So the total value is $5mil. A very positive way to think about it :)
But if you consider that all of those deals are at the beginning of the process, and maybe have a probability of winning of, lets say 10%. This means that each deal's weighted value is not $1,000,000 but only 10% of that, so $100,000.
So looking all of those deals with a total value of $1,000,000, but are only at 10% that means that instead of having $5,000,000 in your pipeline, you actually only have $500,000 (weighted)
This example is very simple of course, and in the real world you would have different sales projects at different stages of the process, with different percentages of probability. But the same concept applies, a simple calculation of taking the sales project value and multiplying it by their probability percentage gives you the weighted value.
Membrain does this automatically for you, and total vs weighted values are shown throughout Membrain. Active pipeline, Performance views, and the Dashboard for example.
In the Active Pipeline View a subheader shows you:
The Weighted Pipeline graph in the Sales Analysis view also takes the estimated closing date into consideration. This determines when a sales projects value will no longer add value to the weighted pipeline. Any sales project with a red warning flag will not be included in the weighted pipeline graph.
Win rate is presented in percent and is calculated by taking all the sales projects you have won, divided by the total number of sales projects won or archived.
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