Visualizing CRM Opportunities with Kanban

First of all – let’s preface this post by preventing the heart failure of Kanban purists. We respect the Kanban development method. It came from Japan in the 1940s and is a scheduling system for lean production.

We respect it, which is why we will not pretend to be introducing some kind of Kanban sales process to Zurmo simply by adding Kanban-board-like visuals. We get it. Kanban is really cool and it is much more in depth than what we’re doing here, okay?

So… having hopefully halted any rising blood pressure, let us introduce the Kanban View for Opportunities. It’s pretty simple (remember we’re not professing otherwise). We’ve taken the idea of a Kanban board and applied it to stages in a sales cycle. The result is a nice big-picture look at Opportunities.

Why did we do this? Jason likes the visualization of objects in Pivotal Tracker, an agile project management tool we use for everything from product design to development. The status of a feature moves from “Icebox” to “Backlog” to “Current”:

This has worked so well for us with Pivotal Tracker, why not apply the same visual representation of objects and their respective phases to sales?

Well, we have. And here’s how it looks so far:

Rather than having to go into the edit view, an Opportunity sales stage can be changed simply by dragging the whole Opportunity to the next level.

It’s cool moving those numbers across the screen all the way from “Prospecting” to “Closed Won”. If something gets stuck for too long in the middle, it probably should get the ax. Kanban view keeps things moving right along.

Moving right along…