A FootPrints Workspace can easily be customized
for the sales team to track leads, contacts, and sales activity.
The Address Book should be used to hold the contact information for the
lead. Other information about the particular sale or potential sale
is contained in the Workspace fields. We recommend that each time
there is a potential sale for a particular contact, a new “Issue” be created
for the life cycle of that sale. The fields below are suggestions
for the sales team Workspace.
Fields—Custom fields
can be created to track leads for the sales team. These fields will
help with quick data entry, and help sort and report on different lead
types, products, etc.
Built-in
Fields
Title—Is used as
a brief summary or description. If desired, this can be a drop-down
list of acceptable request types, i.e. “New Lead”, “Repeat”, “Cross-Sale”,
“Follow-up”, etc.
Description—Is used for
a complete description of the activity by the sales representative for
that lead. Each addition to the description contains a time, date
and user stamp.
Assignees—The Assignee
field automatically lists the sales representatives. Please refer
to the section below on “Assignment” for more information
Statuses—Open, Working,
Request for Info, Quoted, PO Pending, No Response, Dead, Closed.
Note
Open and Closed statuses are built-in, so only the other
six must be created.
Priorities
Maximum: Set to
4
Default: Set to
3 (Medium Interest)
Words defined:
Hot Lead, High Interest, Medium Interest, Casual Interest
Workspace
Fields—Up
to 100 custom Workspace Fields can be created (no limit in SQL/Access versions)
to record information about the lead. Contact information will be
tracked in the Address Book (see below). Here are some suggested
fields for the sales team.
Product
(drop-down)—List
of your company’s products and services.
Invoice
number (character field)—If
applicable.
Sales
potential (integer or decimal field)—Enter
in dollar/currency amount.
Percentage
Chance of Closing (integer field)
Projected
Close date (date field)
Primary
Lead Source (drop-down)—List
your lead sources, like trade shows, web sites, search engines, direct
mail campaigns, referrals, etc.
Follow-up
date (date field)
Date
of Sale (date field)
Revenue
of Sale (character field)
Maintenance
Plan (drop-down field)—List
your maintenance options, if applicable, i.e. Platinum, Gold, Silver,
Bronze, None. The sales rep can select the appropriate one at time
of purchase.
Time
Tracking—FootPrints
can track the time spent by sales representative working leads, or travel
time if desired. This data can be used to create time tracking reports
for analysis of true profit of particular sales or sales types, or to
aid in expense reports.
Recommended
configuration for Sales Tracking—Enabled,
Optional, Manual. If time tracking is not desired, the feature can
be disabled.
When enabled sales
representatives can optionally enter time spent working leads.
In addition, travel time can be entered for time spent on the road.
An hourly billing rate can be specified for each sales rep. for their
travel time (see Users).
Address
Book—The
Address Book is a sub-database that contains all of the contact information
for your leads. Each record in the Address Book is called a “Contact”.
Leads are referred to as “Contacts” or “Customers”.
The Address Book can contain up to 100 fields (SQL/Access versions are
unlimited) for employee data, including Name, Company, Phone number, Email
address, etc.
Suggested
Address Book Fields
Company
(character field)
Last
Name (character field)
First
Name (character field)
Title
(drop-down)—List
of titles i.e. Manager, Vice President, Director, etc. Can also
be a fill-in character field.
Email
address (Email address)
Phone
(character field)
Street
Address (character field)
City
(character field)
State
(drop-down)—List
of states and/or provinces
Country
(drop-down)—List
of countries (if applicable)
Zip/Postal
Code (character field)
Secondary
Contact (character field)
Secondary
Contact Information (character field)
Size
of Company (drop-down)—1-49,
50-99, 100-199, 200-499, 500-999, 1000-9999, 10,000+, 100,000+
Industry
(drop-down)—Advertising,
Engineering, Financial, Government, Insurance, Legal, Manufacturing, Medical,
Professional Services, Real Estate, Software, Other
Invoice
Terms (drop-down)—Verbal,
Pre-paid, Net 10, Net 30, Credit Card
Service
Level (drop-down) – Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze. NOTE:
This field should be specified as “Internal”, or “Public Read-Only”.
End
Date of Maintenance Term (date).
Note
This field should be specified as “Internal”, or “Public
Read-Only”.
Address
Book Data—Address
Book data can be entered manually for each Contact, imported from a text
file, or taken dynamically from an LDAP-compliant contact database.
Please refer to the section on Address Book Administration for more information.
Note
The Address Book can be shared between the Sales Workspace
and the Support, Service Desk, and/or the Development Workspace. This
is appropriate if the user base is the same for those departments.
Important
Sales-related fields should
be made “Internal” so that customers cannot view sensitive data
if they have access to the support workspace, or receive email notification.
Assignment—Assignment
can be handled manually, or the Auto Assign Feature can be used to assign
one or more sales reps to a new Issue/contact based on, for example, the
“Product” field.
Escalation—Escalation
should be enabled and various rules defined to meet service levels, handle
high-priority issues, and set up follow-up reminders. Some rules
to consider:
Escalation
rules can be defined for high priority leads, i.e. Hot Lead, or a certain
dollar amount for the projected sale, etc.
A rule should be
set to send an email to the assigned sales rep based on the “Follow Up
Date” field. The criteria should include:
Name:
Follow Up Reminder
Escalation
On/Off: Choose “On”
Actions:
“Send mail to the Assignees” checked, select one or more email types
Time
Unedited: 5 minutes
Criteria:
Status=Highlight
”Request”, “Open”, and any custom statuses to get reminders on active
Issues, or “Closed” to get reminders on Closed Issues (OR highlight all
statuses except for “Solution” to get reminders on any Status Issue)
For “Follow
Up Date”, choose “equal to” and check the box for “Current Date” (do
not fill in any dates).
A second rule should
be set to send an email to the assigned sales rep based on the “Projected
Close Date” field. The criteria should include:
Name:
Projected Close Date Reminder
Escalation
On/Off: Choose “On”
Actions:
“Send mail to the Assignees” checked, select one or more email types
Time
Unedited: 5 minutes
Criteria:
Status=Highlight
”Request”, “Open”, and any custom statuses to get reminders on active
Issues, or “Closed” to get reminders on Closed Issues (OR highlight all
statuses except for “Solution” to get reminders on any Status Issue)
For “Projected
Close Date”, choose “equal to” and check the box for “Current Date” (do
not fill in any dates).
A
third escalation rule based on “End Date of Maintenance” to remind the
sales rep or maintenance coordinator when the contract comes up.
Email—Outgoing email
notification rules can be set to send mail to assignees for all changes,
or, if you would prefer, only for certain statuses. Typically customers
are not notified from the sales workspace. The email address for each
contact is available as a hyperlink that brings up the sales representative’s
email software and pre-fill the contact’s email address into the “TO”
line. Incoming email can be configured to handle both incoming email
submissions and email updates to existing Issues for salespeople to update
Issues and contacts from the road.
CCs—The sales manager
or other users can be copied on an Issue without actually being assigned.
These people will receive email notification, and can optionally respond
to the email with comments or suggestions, which will automatically be
threaded to the Description of the Issue with a time, date and user stamp.
Queues—Queues can
be made by the Sales Manager to easily track the activity of the sales
team. For example, create 1 Saved Search for each “Product”.
For example, the Criteria for a queue for a product called “Widget SuperApp”
would include “Status”=Request, Open, and all other active statuses, “Product”=”Widget
SuperApp”, Sorting “Date Submitted Ascending” (oldest at the top), Name
“Widget SuperApp Queue”, Type “Personal”. Other queues can
be made for each rep and for the manager for Follow-up date, Company,
Projected Close date, etc.
Reports—The built-in
Metric reports can be used by the Sales Manager to get important metrics
like aging reports, number of Active leads by assignee, etc. Custom
report templates can be made to show details and stats for things like:
all active Issues by assignee, all active Issues by Product, all active
Issues by Company, Priority, projected amount of sale, etc. The
“calculation” field can be used to total the projected or real sales amount
for a certain category of sales i.e. by product, date range, or assignee.
The Auto-run Reports feature can be used to automatically email one or
more reports to the Sales Manager(s) every Monday morning, etc.
Cross-workspace
Reports—The
Administrator can create cross-workspace reports to return data from multiple
workspaces, such as Customer Support, Development, and Sales. Any common
fields found in the workspaces selected can be included in the report.
So, if the Address Book is shared between the aforementioned workspaces,
a report can be generated on a particular company or contact that includes
all activity for that company or contact across all departments.
Knowledge
Base—The
FootPrints Knowledge Base feature can be helpful to the sales team.
Answers to customer’s Frequently Asked Questions, company policies, online
documents, sales, and marketing materials can be made into (and attached
to) Solutions. FAQ categories can be defined to group solutions
by product. All sales representatives will have access to
the Knowledge Base.
Users—The Sales Team
will normally use Agent licenses as described in the functionality above.
Sales representatives can set their personal preferences to view a list
of their own assignments on the FootPrints home page, as well as
set their home page columns to display important information about those
leads on the home page, like “Product”, “Company”, “Follow-up date”, etc.
Sales reps can use
their network ID and password to log into FootPrints if NT, UNIX
or LDAP password authentication is enabled.
File
attachments—Sales
representatives can attach files to particular leads. Solutions
in the Knowledge Base can contain file attachments, allowing easy distribution
of marketing materials, policies, and other files to the whole sales team.
Note
File Attachments in FootPrints are kept in the C:\FootPrints\html\tmp\Attachments
directory on the FootPrints server. Anti-virus software can
be pointed to that directory to ensure that attachments do not contain
viruses.
Surveys—Even if customers
are not configured to receive regular email notification from the sales
workspace, the Customer Survey feature can be used to gather information
about the quality of service external customers receive from the sales
team. The custom survey can be sent automatically to the external
customer each time his or her sale is closed.
Copy/Move
Issue feature—This
feature can be used to assign Issues to users in other workspaces.
For instance, a customer support agent could assign an Issue in the customer
support workspace to the sales team in the sales workspace when an unqualified
lead comes through the support center.
Splash
screen—The
splash screen option can be used to communicate important information
and alerts to sales representatives. The Splash screen can include
text, HTML, links to other sites or pages, graphics, etc. It can
be updated at any time by the Workspace Administrator.