The opportunity module in Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) kind of flies under the radar for most businesses – if they know it’s there, they often don’t know what it’s for, or how to use it in their business. (And if that sounds like you, that’s okay!)

In a nutshell, the Opportunity Pipeline is a tool designed to help you and your team track prospects through a process. Normally this is a sales process, and most often, I see people use this tool when their sales process is largely over the phone, offline, or heavily manual.

As much as I love automation, some things just can’t (or shouldn’t) be automated. And if you’ve got a process in your business that is heavily manual, but you’re looking to improve tracking and instill accountability into that process; then the Opportunity Module might just be a good fit.

But once you start using (and inevitably loving) the Opportunity Module, one of the first questions you might find yourself asking is “Can I set up multiple pipelines?”

The answer is Yes, and it’s easier than most people think.

First, Some Context

Let’s start with some definitions:

Opportunity: In Keap, an opportunity is a record type. Just like you have contact records or order records, an opportunity record has its own ID, and it’s own fields, and it’s own data. You can think of an opportunity as a vehicle for tracking someone through a process. Not every contact will have an opportunity tied to it, but every opportunity will be connected to a contact. (Learn More)

Pipeline: The pipeline is the set of stages through which you’ll progress your opportunities. It’s a tracking tool to help you see where your contacts are in your process (sales process, or otherwise). You’ll define the stages for your business, and as you move opportunities from stage to stage, Keap will offer reports to help you identify bottlenecks or areas where you might be able to optimize.

Okay, so opportunities are the vehicle. They move from stage to stage. And are connected to a contact. And the stages they’re moving through, that’s your pipeline. Ya with me?

And Now The Problem

Cool. So once you start setting this up, and defining your stages, you might recognize that your business has more than one process you hope to track. And if that’s the case, then you might want more than one pipeline.

There are a handful of scenarios where you might be reaching for more than one pipeline, but here are two examples:

I’m sure there are plenty of examples, but the basic premise is that you may need more than one pipeline. And, by default, Infusionsoft only has one pipeline. You can’t clone, and create a separate pipeline with its own settings, or anything like that. Bummer, right?

And Finally the Solution

So, technically the Max Classic version of Keap only allows you to set up one pipeline. All of your stages WILL be part of the same pipeline. But don’t let that phase you, we just have to shift our thinking a little bit.

If you’ve defined your sales pipeline already, or even if you’re just looking at the defaults, you are probably looking at something like this:

Each stage of your pipeline has an “order”. The order controls where it fits in your pipeline. If your pipeline stages are ordered between 1 and 100 (mine are between 5 and 62 above), then when you need to build your second pipeline, you’ll want to set the order for those stages between 100 and 200, or something like that.

Once you’ve added the stages for your second pipeline, then your pipeline should look something like this. You’ll also notice that I basically duplicated the first set of stages, but simply added 100 to the original “order”.

Now, let’s look a little more closely at this. I want you to notice a few different things. First, you’ll see that I’ve added two stages (highlighted in green) as dividers. These stages don’t serve any functional purpose, they’re just there to help me visually separate my two distinct pipelines.

The second thing I want you to notice is the stages of the second pipeline (highlighted in orange) all have the prefix P2. This is my designation that they’re part of Pipeline 2, but you easily use your own internal acronym (for whatever that product or service might be, etc).

And the final thing to point out (highlighted in purple above), is that there is only one set of Won/Loss stages. Keap, by default, only allows you to define one stage for your “Won” and one stage for your “Loss”. But generally, these are the end of your pipeline anyway, so that may work just fine. If you are requiring won or loss reasons, just make sure that you have the right options for both (or all?) of your pipelines.

Other Considerations

So, you can set up as many pipelines as you like. Right? You can stack them over and over, and each will operate independently.

However, this isn’t naturally how the pipeline was designed, so you may experience some challenges if you’re using it this way. I want to give you some tricks for making sure you are able to successfully navigate those hurdles.

And finally…

I hope you found these suggestions valuable, and feel comfortable building yourself one, two, or as many pipelines as your business needs.

If I overlooked something, or you’ve tackled this problem in other ways, please leave a comment and share your thoughts!

One of the most powerful aspects of Keap (formerly Infusionsoft) is the ability to apply and remove tags. At their core, tags are a way to segment your database so you can send targeted messages to extremely specific portions of your list.

But as your business grows, keeping your tags organized becomes more and more important – here’s a course from Keap covering a system you can use called The Keap Way.

There are a number of tagging methodologies and best practices around the Keap ecosystem, so I created the following directory of some of the popular options (I’m sure I missed a few).

But before you explore those, let me just say that having any system matters more than which system you choose. So, pick one that makes sense to you and you can stick to:

I know there are plenty of quality resources out there that I may have missed (and more being created all the time), so if I didn’t include something that you think belongs on this list, let me know and I’ll add it!

If you use Keap to sell online, you likely do that with the built-in shopping cart, or with Keap order forms.

The shopping cart is great if you want your customers to be able to browse around, but if you want to create a more focused buying experience with fewer distractions, then an order form is probably a better fit.

Keap’s order forms are popular for a variety of reasons. Not only are they a little more targeted than a shopping cart, which means you can set more specific expectations for the traffic you send there, but there is also no limit to how many order forms you can create.

The theme, combination of products, and thank-you page configuration can all be tailored on a form-by-form basis. But despite all of the advantages to using an order form, there are still a handful of drawbacks.

(To help navigate some of these limitations I use Spiffy, wanna see a quick demo?)

One feature that causes a little frustration is that when you use a Keap order form, you are designating which products, subscriptions, or options go on that order form. That means that if you build an order form with three products, your customers checking out have to buy all three.

It means if you place a monthly subscription on an order form, your customers won’t be able to select the annual subscription option instead. In short, it means you’re limiting the flexibility you give your customers on checkout.

Sometimes limiting their options is a good thing, because it keeps them focused.

But sometimes it’s not so good, because if they don’t see the option they want then it’s possible they’ll change their mind and walk away from the purchase completely (see more on abandon cart options here).

So, now that we’ve demonstrated the issue, let’s talk about the solution.

Basically, you’re going to want to create an order form for each of the options you want to give them, and then use the custom html sections of the order forms to give the customer links to the other choices. Watch this video for a complete step-by-step walk through of the process:

If you need help creating the code to link back and forth between your order forms, here’s a tutorial you can use.

Or, you can copy this sample code and adjust it for your purposes.

If you found this useful, or have questions about this solution, feel free to pose them below.

If you need help getting your Keap e-commerce dialed in, check out the sales courses from Keap Academy.