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Approaching new business in a way that works for your team and goals

Selling smarter: how to align sales, resource, and reporting

Updated this week

🕰️ Est. Time: 7 mins

🎯 Goal: Track, forecast and align new business with your team’s capacity

🔑 Requirements: Access to edit jobs

Big numbers can feel daunting, especially without a clear path to get there. When goals feel out of reach, it’s hard to stay motivated and easy to feel overwhelmed.

That’s where a realistic, strategic sales pipeline comes in.

If you're looking to improve how you capture new business, or start from scratch, this guide will help you think through all the key details.

👤 Manage prospects and clients


Using Contacts in Streamtime allows you to keep everything in one place. Add labels like Prospect or Lead source: Referral can help you segment quickly later when reporting.

You can also integrate with CRM tools like Hubspot to sync contact updates.

📊 Use Priorities to track your pipeline


Priorities give you a visual kanban view to manage your pipeline and see where each opportunity sits.

We've created a template that you can use to grab and go right away.

Head to Priorities > New Board > Recommended > New Biz Pipeline.

Example stages you might use:

  • Qualified

  • Pitching

  • Awaiting Approval

  • Verbal Yes

Drag jobs between columns as they progress. This gives you a real-time view of what's moving, and where things may be stuck.

⚡️ Capture new opportunities without lifting a finger


Lead capture should be lightweight and natural.

Often it's a discovery or qualification call, so you can add a new job card directly to your pipeline board while you're on the phone.

If you're using forms to capture new requests, you can map key fields into Streamtime automatically.

For example, let's say a client has submitted a new request via Typeform or Google Forms (which can also be embedded on your website), you can:

  • Create a new Job with the project name, company and budget already populated

  • Assign a label with useful details like the lead source

  • Add a new job card to a chosen column in your pipeline board

  • House the brief within the Activity section of the Job itself

Here's our guide to creating multi-step zaps and a quick recording below of how this set-up could look in Zapier.

🧐 Learn from your data


To build a smarter pipeline over time, it's important to track more than just values. We recommend using job labels to track useful insights such as:

  • Pipeline stage / win likelihood

  • Lead source (referral, campaign, repeat client)

  • Industry

  • Win/loss reason

This lets you answer key questions:

  • Where do your best leads come from?

  • What type of work converts most often?

  • What do you tend to lose, and why?

Don't forget you can set up filtered views using those labels to dive into that data and keep learning.

⚖️ Forecast with a weighted pipeline report


Not every opportunity will close but some are more likely than others. By using estimated budgets and pipeline stages, you can build a weighted pipeline report.

Here’s how to get realistic projection of your upcoming revenue:

  • Assign each opportunity a stage (and probability) with labels (e.g. Quote Sent = 70%, Discovery = 30%)

  • Head to Reporting (beta)

    • Create a column to represent each stage of your pipeline, applying filters for the relevant label

    • Use a custom formula to create a forecasted total of all opportunities (multiply each job by its potential value based on the stage it's add, and add all stages together)

🧩 Sell what your team can deliver


A good pipeline isn’t just about closing work, it’s about closing the right work.

The Availability view allows you to spot where you have underused resources and align that with your new business push.

For example: Your design team is at capacity, but your writers have room. Focus efforts on selling content services this month.

A healthy pipeline isn't just about more work, it's about the right work, at the right time. The above is a great way to approach new business opportunities but we're always here to talk about any specifics or new ideas you may have.

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