How can I use stages?
Need information on CRM Settings right away? You may use this table of contents to navigate through this article:
What are stages?
stages are custom lead and job statuses that can be set on each job.
Sighten automatically pre-populates stages within your account, but you can easily add new stages, or edit and delete stages that are not applicable to your organization's workflow. For your reference, here is are the stages that we set up for your organization by default:
Requires Follow-up
Contract Signed
Canceled
Postponed
Closed Lost
Closed Won
Once you're able to successfully set up your organization's stages, you can manually update the status of a job on the notes section. This is the notepad icon on the right side of the job, as shown here:
Where can I edit stages?
Please note that to add, delete, or edit a stage, a user must have Organization Admin permissions. To access this feature, follow these steps:
Head over to the Settings page.
Then, click on the CRM Settings tab.
Note
As you can see above, Sighten has prepared default stages for all organizations.
Adding stages
To add stages, click on the Add stage button
Choose a name, then click Save.
Edit a stage
To edit a stage, you may click on the Edit button on the right side of each stage. For example, let us try to rename Requires Follow-up to Needs Follow-up:
Edit the Name and click Save.
You may also edit the order in which stages are displayed on the note tool. To do so, drag and drop the icon with three horizontal lines towards where you'd like it to be displayed. For example, if I click the icon for Needs follow-up, I may drag and drop it under Cancelled.
Deleting a stage
To delete a stage, click on the Edit button beside the stage you'd like to delete. And then click on the trash icon:
You will then be asked if you'd like to replace the stage, or simply delete it by choosing No stage. This is especially helpful if jobs are assigned to a stage you're about to delete. If you choose another stage to replace it with, all jobs under the stage to be deleted will be moved to the selected stage.
Assigning a stage for a job manually
There are two ways to do this. One can assign a stage for a job through the notes modal on the pipeline. See below:
Click Add Note.
Then choose a stage.
Another way would be through the note icon on a job as shown earlier:
You may edit the fields here and then, click Save.
A note and follow-up date can also be added through the modal.
Filtering by stage
On the Pipeline, you can filter jobs by stage. Here's how:
Click on the Filter Icon on the Pipeline.
Select stage and click Save.
Then you can filter stages. stages displayed here will be limited to available stages on the jobs on your pipeline. In this case, since all jobs on our pipeline fall under No stage, only this is displayed. Should other jobs be assigned to other stages, this will display a longer list.
Transitions
In addition to updating jobs manually, the Organization Admin can also setup automations around updating stages. These are called Transitions. As certain events (contract signed, credit approved, milestone rejected, etc) happen naturally through a job's workflow, transitions can be setup to automatically update the stage of a job to a stage that would best fit the new status of the job.
To edit Transitions, head over to Settings through the gear icon on the upper right section of the screen. Then, choose CRM Settings on the left panel. Below stages, if you scroll down (and with the right permissions), you will be able to see the Transitions section. It would look like this:
Adding Transitions
To add a transition, click on the Add Transition button. And you will then be prompted to fill out certain fields. This is how it would look like:
Here are the events that can be utilized for automation:
Contract Status Change
Qualification Update
Site Archived
Milestone Status Change
Proposal Emailed
Follow-Up Date Set
Follow-Up Date Complete
Setting up a Transition manually
Follow these steps to set up a transition.
First, set up an Event. Events are pre-defined phases throughout a job's workflow. You can choose among 4 Events, namely:
Follow-up Date Set
Site Archived
Contract Status Change,
and Follow-up Complete
It would look like this on the platform:
Depending on the event, you may be required to supply additional information. For example:
When utilizing the Contract Status Change, you may want to specify a status of 'Signed', and thus the transition will only occur when a contract is signed.
When utilizing the Qualification Update, you will be required to specify Credit, Title or Property as well as a status. Most likely, you will create a new stage: Credit Approved, and then setup a Qualification Update for Credit that has a status: 'Approved'.
When utilizing the Milestone Status Change, you can specify whether the automated stage transition occurs whenever any milestone has the status 'Approved' or when a specific milestone has status 'Approved'. We'll talk about this in detail below.
To show you an example, let's try to select Contract Status Change. Event Status is initially grayed out. But since an Event that needs a specific Event Status is chosen, it will be enabled and will show choices, as seen below:
For reference, we chose Contract Signed. The next fields required are thus enabled. You may now define a stage change. Two fields will need to be filled out: Active stage and New stage. For the Active stage field, you may choose Any or another specific status.
Please note that the Active stage is set to Any by default.
The same options are available for Active and New stages, but Active stages has the option to be set to Any. Below, choices for a New stage for the Event we specified are shown:
When you create a transition, certain fields will be disabled; you will only need to enter information in the enabled fields, and specify the start and end stage as shown above. As you enter information, sentences will form to explain in plain english how the automated transition will function. Assuming that we specified Any as an Active stage and Closed Won as a New Transition, here is what the said sentence would be like:
All that is left to do now is click Save, and we now have a new transition!
Once saved, here is how it would look like on the platform:
Editing a Transition
We can also edit a transition. Let's try it on the New Transition created above.
To begin, click the Edit button:
The fields above will then be shown, and editable fields will be enabled. Edit highlighted fields as needed, and don't forget to click Save!
Deleting a transition
To delete a transition, click Edit for the transition you'd like to Edit. Once the fields are shown, look for the trash icon and click it.
A pop up window to confirm the requested change will then be shown:
Click Delete, and the transition will then be deleted.
What if I'd like to delete a stage that is part of a transition?
Good question! When this happens, the transition where the deleted stage is in use will be deleted as well.
Here, the stage Closed Won is used for a Transition.
After deleting, here's how it would look like on the platform: both the stage and the transition where it is used are both deleted, as you can see below:
