At Stormz we try to use the simplest tools ever. That's why we are big fans of Trello.
We started only with a single board, and many cards, but due to increasing needs we have split them into multiple boards. But then it was difficult to track appointments and deadlines across them. So I first developed Trello Calendar. It started as a simple calendar on a web page and now it's a node application which provides ics feeds to plenty of people. It's easy to use also with Google calendar for example.
But then we started to sell. Not an easy task in a startup. At first we created a new Trello board to list all our opportunities - all in a simple list.
After a first appointment, we can decide to move an opportunity to a qualified opportunity.
At this level, we always try to add a budget and more details, such as contact info, the date of the event, etc...
Our goal for next levels is to move the card to the sold list, then to invoice and hopefully to be paid.
Sometimes the journey is shorter and falls into the fail list. However we keep track each one.
That's the typical workflow and the nice thing is that this workflow is not enforced!
But we faced a problem. It's difficult to have a vision of this board with many cards and many lists.
So we used the API again to build a simple graph to visualize our potential profits compared to potential pitfalls.
Nevertheless, we are planning to extend this simple visualization to something more complete, with more tools such as a reminder, filters by clients, etc... and you,... how do you manage your sales pipeline?