Effortlessly Streamline Managing a Pipeline

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ladies and gentlemen members of the press welcome to today's program my name is Warren Stokes Director of Sales at a vidiian technologies and we are the developers of profit CRM profit CRM is an easy to use CRM embedded in Microsoft Outlook and it helps solve the biggest problem in CRM which is gaining end user adoption have an awesome topic for you here today and it's really about how to grow your business and generate more revenue by learning the 7 secrets of great sales pipeline management just a little bit about the program today just for some housekeeping points this program is being recorded you will automatically be sent the recording later and you can also submit questions during the the webinar through the chat control panel I will get back to you with answers to that after the webinar I have I have been the audience in sales and/or sales management for about 20 years so certainly haven't just fallen off the turnip truck yesterday I have implemented serums and for other companies five including this company and I have found that one of the key benefits of a CRM solution is helping you manage your sales pipeline so what I'd like to do first is walk through just some of the concepts and as I do so I'll be alternating between my my slide deck here and actually a live demonstration of profit CRM now the concepts that I'm going to be sharing with you today today can be applied to really any good CRM but we'll be using profit CRM as I mentioned earlier so the concepts to start off with have to do with capturing information so it's not very complicated but it does require a little bit of discipline and when we on board a new client for example we provide training and coaching and and consulting on best practices but one of them is just understanding the data structure and how to capture the key data and what to capture so for example one of the key records in profit CRM will be the contact record that's the record of a person it's important because so many things start from a contact think about it in business and in sales especially everything starts with a contact you meet a person you have a client or a prospect that you're working with and you need to be able to capture the contact information I suggest that you discuss this amongst your team but I'm gonna suggest some minimum information when you create a new contact that is the full name email address phone phone number and if applicable the company name it's kind of like must have should have nice to have there's other information that you may want to collect for example there are 20 customizable fields and profit that add to the outlook contact form that we'll be showing you and you can capture up to 20 additional pieces of information that are kind of attributes to the person as you'll see things like areas of interest hobbies what type of contact are they and so forth and they can all be used for queries and reports and so on the company record in profit is created automatically this is one of the reasons to create a good contact record to begin with the the company record also has customizable fields in it a total of 72 customizable fields are in the company record so you can really start tuning in the profit database for customized for your business in your industry and then the third type of record is capturing opportunity records and that's really what will comprise the data for the sales pipeline part of this and it's it's interesting did you know that it really only takes four pieces of information to manage your sales pipeline and produce accurate forecasts I've learned this over the years it's really pretty amazing that fourths for pieces of information if you can just keep up on them to some degree and those would be like what stage you're in in the sales process the probability of closing estimated closed date and revenue and as you'll see when we get into this further all of those become a part of the sales forecasting and sales pipeline management data points so what I'm going to do right now is go ahead and show you a little bit about how the how this works in profit and I'm just going to switch over to my outlook screen so I want to point out first of all that I'm actually in Microsoft Outlook right now you'll be able to see that there's a set of folders that if your profit users a profit user today if you're already a client you'll already be familiar with these these are the CRM folders so you don't have to leave outlook you can literally just click on a folder and you're in the CRM so for example I'm just going to give you a little bit of navigation here here's my top folder it's my analytics dashboards there's a view for my accounts and there's different lists within these folders by the way that you can create I'll come back to this I'm just kind of giving you some some overall navigation here there's a contact manager and profit and then you can manage your sales pipeline now these folders are easily renamed in case you don't know how to do this you just right-click on the folder and rename the folder some people call this a lead tracker some people call it they're an opportunity manager I refer to it as my opportunity pipeline so let's start by going in and taking a look at what it takes to actually create a contact and and then an opportunity and then we'll show you how you manage some of the activity surrounding those so I'm going to start for example by just showing you that these are just Outlook contacts I'm in a list called Warren's Hollywood contacts you'll recognize some of my friends down in Hollywood notice it's just an Outlook contact and and here's where what I was talking about kind of determining the minimum you know information you need in a contact you want full name if you somehow get it mixed up you can just click on the full name button and you can make sure that they're all in proper place and that helps when you're doing sorting and filtering but basically if you just put it in the first and last name company name if applicable you're in a business-to-business sales organization job title is nice but not necessarily you don't always get that right out of the gate but email address and phone number of course are critical extra credit if you can get their physic address because that can be used to help you identify you know where they are geographically and so forth and then as I was saying profit adds 20 customizable fields to the contact record and outlook these are completely up to you to define there are defaults of course that come with profit but these are where you can define what type of contact they are maybe you want to know you know what the lead source was or what their LinkedIn profile was if you have it what their areas of interest hobbies and so forth role so these additional profile fields are available simply by clicking on the profit ribbon and if you'd like to do what I've done you can actually show some of these commonly used buttons down here which open up you know the opportunity record or the you know the user-defined fields I was just showing you or any number of things so this is just an Outlook contact and we kind of turbocharged it with some additional functionality there's a lot of ways to create a contact I'll just show you a few of them right now of course I could just say I want to create a new contact and you can do this either in Outlook or profit it's really the same if I say create a new contact it just brings up what we call a dupe chucker let's say I met Tom what was his last name Hanks okay so I'm creating a new contact in this case though prophet introduces a dupe checker so this allows you to keep from help you help you prevent having a duplicate data in your system now it could be there are really two people with the same name or two or more people at the same name but this certainly helps prevent duplicates I can either create a new continue on with the new contact if there's if it's another Tom Hanks or in this case I can just open the record so it's really easy to create a contact that would be manually usually you do not have to create contacts manually that often maybe from a phone like an inbound phone call or something you may also know that it's easy to create contacts from an inbound email so for example if I had an email from from someone and I wanted to create a contact for it I could just drag that caught that email over my contacts folder and it will again check for duplicates now in this case that contact already exists but I could go on and contain to create it and and the content of that email by the way by default will be put into the notes of the system so that's another way to create a contact is simply by dragging and dropping an email a third way to create contacts in the system is through the import utility I'll show you this briefly this is not to meant to be thorough training on this particular part but just so you know you can also import contacts and other types of data into profit from using our import utility in the Tools menu there's an import wizard and I will show you just kind of a brief example of how you import data the first thing you do is you tell profit what type of data you're importing you can import multiple sessions at once if you like multiple data types spreadsheets if you will they're all have to be in Excel so now I'm just locating my my import spreadsheet and you'll see that it the next and then I add it to my session here for importing then by clicking next I'm in the screen where I I'm going to do what's called field mapping very simple you're just matching up the fields on the Left which are out of the Excel spreadsheet to the field names as they're referred to in profit sometimes they're a little different like it says company name here in the spreadsheet list in profit it's just simply company you can also auto map fields if they have the same name so this mapping tells profit where it's going to import the data where the those data points are going to go in the profit records then you have some options on D duping again to help prevent duplicates duplicates from being inserted into the system there's a validation step and it just imports the data so there's several ways you can create contacts and the reason I start with a contact here is that's often where you'll start by creating an opportunity which will help us then manage the sales pipeline so by the way I'm going to do it other webinars and the one in particular on more advanced contact management we're going to go right into the opportunity in sales pipeline management now though so as I was saying earlier it's easy to create an opportunity from a contact and it's a desirable way to do it because as you'll see it it links that call to contact information to the opportunity and you just do it by click clicking you say create a new contact you can that button right here and you can see that I can then create an opportunity from that particular contact that opportunity that gets created will actually just be available then for you to view either in under the contact record or in the copper tuning manager which we'll get to in a moment so this is the opportunity that I just created I would give it some kind of a description these are customizable fields all of them and I'll show you a little bit about that here in a moment as to how to customize fields in profit you would if you're a client you may have already received the training on this but the idea is that these are these are customizable fields they do the default status is active but you can create others active one and lost are the defaults the idea here is this is a record to keep track of potential business may be a new client may be just a new contract with an existing client but so defaults is active the sales stages are basically how you identify where you're at in the sales process in this case I'll say it's in proposal stage because you just request a proposal let's say the region is just one of the fields we use you can see there's probability estimated closed date potential revenue and all of these are getting customizable labels and dropdowns and such some of them drive reports though in the general tab these all tend to drive a lot of the standard reports so probability will always be probability even even though you can change the increments and so forth the estimated closed dates always a date field some people say estimated bid date or estimated you know sale date or something like that revenue these two fields are for revenue you can label them however you state your potential revenue estimated annual revenue I've seen a lot monthly revenue or project revenue things of that nature so we're just basically capturing the information that is required to manage the opportunity I mentioned that there are four fields that basically can be used to produce forecasts and manage your pipeline effectively and so those forest four fields are the stage probability estimated closed and revenue now in some businesses you may require that you capture additional information so there are additional tabs of information over here that you can complete things like where did the lead come from a referral a cold call and website lead or what have you by the way a little little business tip for those in the audience today one of the things you'll be able to do with profit is measure what works and what doesn't when it comes to like demand generation marketing and such phone outbound phone calling the lost art of the cold call and by doing that you'll see what works with what generates the most revenue so my business tip of the day is find out what works and simply just do more of it all right hopefully you're adding some value to your day so there's a lot of fields if you don't use them all you can just leave them blank and then the bottom half of this record is where you keep track of your activity very simple the whole goal here with profit as I mentioned earlier is to help with user adoption so simpler we make it the better one of the most common things you want people to do or you want to do with an opportunity is just update the activity whenever you make contact with that person so one of the things we're talking about here is basically logging in an activity now this is a predefined list of activities so that you don't have to type them in why would I want to type in that I left a voicemail 50 times a month but any types of activity that can be maybe you want to just take some notes from a meeting maybe you want to say I went on an on-site sales call and so on these activities are also available as reports and dashboards so I'm just going to point to my dashboards for a moment explain that part of managing your pipeline is that helping manage activity levels so there's 12 dashboards that come with profit and I'll just show you an example if I wanted to go in and either compare activity or drill down into certain types of activity I just go into my analytics dashboards and I add I filter it as I need to or want to so in this case this showed that shows that I scheduled 761 sales appointments last month my minimum goal is 40 so if you use KPIs key performance indicators or target targets for activities and such you can you can find it in profit so the point there is that those activities are reportable you can also run like call reports with the notes and things of that nature we'll do a more in-depth webinar on reporting and dashboards in a future webinar for you so these these activities are just part of the the record they're reportable they're also available as through the mobile app so I'm going to give you an example of I'll go into one of my screens here and my opportunity list and we'll talk a little bit about that of how you can update this from your phone for example here's a record I'm working with Hilary so my Hollywood contacts again down there and in this case I want to record some activity but I'm out in the field let's just say so what you can do with profit is you can actually just go into profit mobile app which I have on my iPhone here you just look up there's a one-click shortcut to add some notes and rather than typing it in I can just dictate those notes into the record so let me let me just dictate some notes into this into Hillary's record here and I'll show you how that works we met to review the new proposal and they did commit to signing the contract next Thursday I'll show you what just happened so that note that I dictated in my phone is actually already in the record and will you'll be able to look it up actually I put it in in this one right here I'll just show you where where that note showed up in this in this particular one so Tom Hanks as an opportunity in my pipeline and I inserted the note and there it is so you can dictate notes in from the phone it works great you can update any of the records from your phone there's about a hundred customizable fields then you can change the values of these fields drop downs put in new date fields and so on you can also create new contacts and new opportunities from your phone so let's review kind of where we're at we created a contact you there's several ways to do that all of the ways that we create contacts and outlook work with profit just remember to capture the minimum required information for your business you definitely want a useful contact parts a full name email address phone number company info etc you can use those customizable fields if you like to add more granularity to it I said the kind mentioned that the company record is created automatically and you can add additional fields of information from there let me just show you an example of a of a company record while we're talking about that so the company record is kind of like an Outlook contact card but you can see it has the contacts associated with it if you click on those contacts it'll bring up that individual contact card you can keep track of notes in history and activity with with the account this is very useful just for like account management you know things that are going on so one so called and asked about an invoice we sent the contract for them to review and so on these are just notes with your client or our company the customizable fields are three tabs you can rename the tabs to be anything you want and you can see how you can keep track of like what type of company or client they are what industry they're in or any number of things and then those are available for sorts and filters as well so the company is created automatically when you create a contact but you can also create a company just from scratch if you wish and then the opportunity record was created in this case from a contact now you can create opportunities other ways I could say for examples they just create a new opportunity starting from with the blank template and I could go in here and I could select the company or contacts that that are associated with that and this is my webinar training example for the description and we'll step that way we can see what happens with it I'm just I just created a an opportunity from the blank screen and you can see here that it is now going to be visit by the way notice when I went to save that a little warning game's up there's a required field aha so in profit you can make certain fields required so we always we have to two fields required you need to some description and you need the type of lead that it is but that would be completely up to you while very very useful I don't recommend getting too carried away with it and have 50 or 60 required fields because you'll start a little bit with that so in any event I just created that opportunity and now that opportunity can be viewed in the list of opportunities below that that in this case the company or can be viewed from the contact so that's the idea of just kind of an overview of capturing data creating a contact creating a company and creating an opportunity now there's a very important aspect of profit that allows you to automate follow up here's how it works basically you can just set it and forget it and it will generate it a kind of a drip series or series trickle series of reminders appointments and emails back out to that prospect over this period of time so it basically ensures that things don't fall through the cracks set it and forget it you'll never lose track of a deal again so in this case let me just go into my newly created opportunity here and I want let's just say I wanted to create a series of automated follow-up first of all each stage can have a different series of automated follow-up when we get a new lead here we have a series of outreach that is activated by just clicking the label which is also a button next to the stage and it will it ask me if I want to if I want to process workflow for this and I do so what just happened is a series of appointments reminders and in this case an introductory email has been automatically created pretty cool huh it picks up the first name here the company name I part of the templates I'll show you a little bit about this in just a moment on how to set it up you could still edit this it's just an Outlook email but I'm gonna go ahead and send it now notice though that I have now got a total of 14 touches in my sales follow-up the first one was the email I then have another email to follow up I usually will set up a meeting which is automated through your Outlook calendar and then a series of reminders and then a series of emails that go out in this case through May 28 so you can see that I with a click or two I set up a series of 14 follow-ups now the purpose of this is to help you make sure that leads and opportunities don't fall through the cracks very important of course you can see it's almost impossible to let this lead fall through the cracks now these will then pop up either as appointments on my calendar reminders in my to-do list or they will be popped up they will be created as emails emails get generated automatically and on that future date where they're due here you will be able to see a list of them that pop up and say these are ready to process I could process them all with the click snooze delete or just process one individually so here's one that was actually scheduled seven weeks ago I would have never remembered to send that so it's basically a queue the reason that you have to process it through the key is just to prevent you from sending an email to somebody you might have talked about talked to five minutes ago so the setting of the automated follow-up helps make sure things don't fall through the cracks by the way the emails appointments and tasks from that automated follow-up are tracked right here in profit so I'll show you a little bit about the tracking of capability of an opportunity there's the email that I just sent Brad if and you as a user you have your choice on how you can might want to track emails and an opportunity you can check the button that says auto track emails and then that would that would mean if I sent Brad Pitt an email just through Outlook that it would automatically be tracked there if he replied it would reply would automatically be tracked I can also link emails from other people to look to the opportunity and so forth the appointments that have been created this case through the automated follow-up are right here and my appointment list and you'll see it's also on my calendar so if I go into the 28th you'll see that that appointment on my calendar pretty awesome the tasks are also generated automatically you can see this was not due till March 6th so on March 6 that will pop up and it will remind me to call in this case Brad Pitt my buddy down in Hollywood so that's the idea of embedding what profit what we mean when we say profit isn't better than Outlook let's review that quickly because it's a very important point one we use Outlook contacts to we track outlook emails three we track outlook tasks and four we track Outlook appointments by the way if I were to create a new appointment email or task I could do it right from here I'll just say I'm going to create a new appointment with Brad here I'll color it a different color here and I'll just show you what happens when I put this on my calendar this was just created creating an Outlook appointment you'll now see it here in the record so in this case I could see all the appointments I've had with this prospect but that has been put on my calendar so that's the Outlook calendar integration very handy the whole purpose of being embedding profit in Outlook is because people already use their calendar they already use their their outlook emails their to use Outlook contacts typically and some people use the Outlook task function and by the way if I want to just create a task to follow up on this opportunity I can just click the tasks button maybe it's to Cobra maybe I want to and right now it's just an Outlook task form you can use color coding and categorization if you know if you don't if you're interested in doing that sometime I can I can send you a video on on how that's done but let's just say I wanted to call him and I wanted to remind her to call him later in the day today so I'll just go ahead and set that and you'll see that it pops up here in my tasks tasks tab here has not started and now it's showing me I'm gonna call I'm gonna have a reminder at 3 o'clock to call Brad and it will pop up when I deal market complete takes it off my to-do list and everything's complete awesome another aspect of of your sales pipeline is basically keeping track of documents so we keep track of emails appointments tasks contacts but all you can also link documents to a file to the record so this could be a proposal or a quote or most anything says these are all just documents where I have that I can open up by just opening up the hyperlink or clicking on the hyperlink in this case it's a quotation or a sales order form it might be that I have some other types of documents and by the way when I click Add this just brings up my Windows File Explorer you can use Dropbox SharePoint Network Drive onedrive doesn't really matter this case I have a Dropbox account so you can see here that I have a I attached a link to a document that this is in the cloud storage so now I can open it from where from wherever it happened to be and again I would encourage people to ask questions during that webinar through the control panel there and I will follow up with you after the webinar so that's another example of using profit to help track various activities and communications in your sales pipeline and there's another aspect which I'm just going to go to briefly and that is the ability to generate documents from profit and then then I'm going to go back through and I'm going to cover some of these things in a little more detail here in a moment but right now I just want to kind of get you the flow of the things that you do to help manage your sales pipeline one of them is the ability to generate documents they could be project plans proposals they could be almost anything I had term sheet it will auto-populate fields from the profit CRM record and insert them into either a Microsoft Word doc or into an Excel template and I'll show you that here in just a moment alright so I'm going to create a new proposal and I'm going to call it the webinar example when I click create it's going to pull fields from the CRM record in this case the opportunity record and it's going to create a Microsoft Word document and it's going to be populated with all of those fields there's the name Brad Pitt company name fit international and it was the city-state's up an email and throughout this document you'll see where it says pricing for Pitt international cost comparison background and goals forbidden international day and this is just a Microsoft Word document I do want to show you though by creating this document in in profit it will actually generate a link to it so that source document can be opened either from the files tab or the notes tab and this works in contacts companies and opportunities by the way if I were to want to generate a quote so I'll just generate a system quote here and I will call it a webinar quote there this is just the file name when I click create now it's going to pull information from profit and populate it into an Excel form Excel can be useful for as a template because you can change things on the fly you can have formulas built in you can even use the drop-down lists and Excel that capability so I'm literally ready now after creating that quote to send it as a PDF attachment in an email all of which I'm just doing in one smooth process here from the record and profit so in this case I'm going to say create this and I'm going to send this to Brad and here and let's see I really want to send it to Brad Pitt I'm I I'll just send it to myself for the sake of argument here alright now I can add content to this email here's the little bonus material for the folks in the audience today did you know that you can insert content from templates right into an Outlook email works great works off keywords you can see how it's almost pretty it's predicting that I want to use my proposal content I'm going to hit enter and look at that all things populated now when I send that it's just going to be an Outlook email let me go back and share with the audience today how I did that this is actually an Outlook function but of course because prophet is part of Outlook and is embedded in Outlook that works very nicely with without with prophet it's a function in Outlook called quick parts and you can create a library of content blocks of content or full full email so if I wanted to insert that content I just select it from the list but it also works off the key word that you've given that so the key word for that block of content is agenda now you notice it's predicting that I could just type the word then you hit f3 by the way if you if you don't use the auto suggest feature and there we go and I send that off to Brad and you know has an email quote all generated through profit pretty awesome so while we're in the opportunity details here I wanted to go in and talk a little bit more about the workflow and how that's set up I've had a lot of people suggest that I cover that in one of my webinars so though all of those all of those workflows and again we're referring to the emails appointments tasks and all of those follow-up items are part of the set up which has happens here in the profit Administrator I have put a little shortcut for my settings right there in Outlook but you go into the profit sales automation tab and then you basically can create your e-mails reminder tasks and appointments and then you can set them up as a series so here's how that works first I'll show you one that's already been created by clicking the edit button notice how it's picking up the first name of the of the contact I've inserted the company name here in the email so that when it actually gets processed it looks like it really is a personalized email albeit with the help of some technology so you can create as many or as few of these as you like the one week follow-up email is very simple it just is hello first-name I'm just checking to make sure you have all the information you need I gotta tell you this stuff works great when it processes it'll automatically add your Outlook signature by the way which is pretty cool now once you've created some of these and by the way I'll just show you how to create a new one let's say you wanted to create a new email template and I'm gonna call this my webinar email okay click OK this just brings up the email template the instructions are included in here but you just delete them once you've read them or if you're like me just dive in and read the instructions later not that any of you'd be like that and so here's where I create my content and again I'm a big believer in automation and shortcuts so if I wanted to create that content I could just put it into this template now now remember you put a subject line in because it's an email now when that gets processed it's going to email that this is addressed by first name to that person so that's how you create a new template you can do appointments at at same way once you've created one then you assign it the properties that you want by going selecting the item click assign and you collect a cyan workflow action you have to assign a stage to it so in stage one maybe this would be my seven day follow-up email when I click Save you'll see those now in this if I scroll down on that scroll bar on the right you'll see all of my all of my lead stage follow-up my qualifying stage my product demo stage in my proposal stage all all part of my workflow we do provide formal training on that of course many of you have already you know taken the training but yeah it's pretty awesome so the whole point of meeting your follow-up is to make sure things don't fall through the cracks and I was going to show you a little example of why that automated follow-up works so well and also why I put in you notice I had a fourth set of 14 follow-ups that are part of my workflow so I'm going to go in and show you some more analytics and I think you'll find this very interesting by the way as we're progressing through here I'm kind of jumping around just a little bit but I want to talk a little bit about these analytics getting actionable insight one of them is actionable insight about your sales process so in this case you see I'm in a dashboard I'm in my analytics dashboards folder I am in an activity dashboard and I'm looking at how many activities it takes to close a deal so that was for the last month you can put in any date range you want so you can be very granular about it interesting go for the quarter it's only taking nine activities let's see what the yearly average is so a total of you know somewhere between about seven to 12 touches now those touches consist of whatever you select here you can you can pull any of these out of here you can filter this by different departments now I don't want to confuse it but over here on the left you can see as I as I filtered by checking on these in my department sales account management client services each department can have a different data so here I am let's take a yearly average of just as my my sales department now I'm gonna filter it additionally by only picking up the manually driven sales activity so it takes up all the automation and there you can see for the year it's averaging 11 when I create an automated series for a new lead you'll see remember it created 14 14 touches when I launched that first series that's why because I don't want to be short now it's actually a very very interesting and important topic here I'm going to actually show you something a little bit of shocking information about the lead follow-up let me just go to a little bit different reference a diagram here there we go Harvard Business Review did a study and and they studied lead follow-up sales follow-up and they found out a shocking thing 30 percent of leads that are generated are never contacted at all it's not because sales reps don't try the average number of attempts to contact a new lead ing to the study is two to three attempts on the average but this study found that I found this bears out to be true with my experience that it takes a lot more than two or three attempts usually to contact delete it this study says it takes six attempts to contact ninety percent of them the whole point is is that lead follow-up is crucial and you've already invested a lot of time or work or energy and generating the leads so don't waste it make but about the only way you could ensure that you get enough follow-up is through the automation so that's the whole point of that and the analytics will help you determine that so let's let's go back and now kind of step back for a minute and talk about managing your sales pipeline by by certain criteria your sales pipeline is just a list of all of the deals that you're working on you can have different views though so I'm in my but you know the whole cool thing is I'm still in Outlook there's my hand box here's my opportunity pipeline this is what our clients like now you'll see that these are columns that have labels on them like revenue LEED rating lead type these are just the labels in the opportunity record in this case so you can see here that this has the stage the probability the estimated closed date and the potential revenue among other fields I'll show you a field that you might find useful LEED rating pot warm cool cold however you want to determine it so I can basically just choose any column I want any user can create their own views if they like and they can drag and drop columns from one place to the other move them around you can go into two different columns from from basically any of the hundred or so customizable fields or system fields now here's where you can then start managing your pipeline by priority well we all know sales as a priority because we're managing a sales pipeline so of course you might want to sort it by put ten that deal size descending notice as I start highlighting these records you'll see that some summary appears down below if you want to see what your top ten opportunities are without running a report or anything you just highlight them and you can see I've got ten deals that's the number I selected and I have 5.4 million in those ten deals I don't know which side your bread is buttered on right well that's awesome now another criteria might be let's say let's say well let's do this league rating one let's say I only want to look at warm or hot leads so you can it's just like an Excel filter you click the little Excel looking funnel button and it'll open up a very familiar looking little filter capability so you just select the values you want so look at that now I've got labeled to only my hot and warm maybe I want to narrow it down further by only my hot leads I think you see where I'm going with this now this could be a way to just create a work plan for your day but you could also use this to create like a mini blast of through profit profit by the way is and it does integrate with Constant Contact and MailChimp right out of the box takes a little setup that we have integration for that right out of the box for contacts but profit has a very unique function that allows you to send a group email from any list in profit so in this case I'm just going to send a list email out to everyone on all my hot leads ok I've just selected the salutation I'm giving an importance and I click create email now what am I gonna do here I'm gonna insert content from a template it's my thank you for your interest email and I'm going to make that the subject line and when I click send everyone on this list is going to get a personalized Outlook email from me so for managing your sales pipeline this is a very effective way to do it because you're not only being able to do a one-on-one communication but you can do one-to-many and this is true with any list and profit so again what I'm showing you is we're basically taking a list we're selecting the columns we want in it and if we've added some filters in this case the geography of Hollywood California you can then say I want to save that view that view or list and give it a name these tools save you as warnings Hollywood projects pretty cool so we've just covered a couple of key things the automated follow-up so leads don't get cold and fall through the cracks so we can set up a serum series for every lead or whichever ones you want how to sort by certain criteria like revenue potential or you can filter by any field like lead rating or lead type or or any combination of these things now I'm going to talk about a concept called the next step the next step is a powerful concept in profit and what it is is the ability to just create basically your next follow up tasks so imagine if all of your people all of your sales people in particular always remember to just jot down what the next step is from every sales call and when they put that in to the record here it creates a reminder to do it and that reminder is now shown in your tasks if you're looking at tasks here but the purely automatic part of it is it's now in my Outlook task list reminding me to do it I could have also blocked off time on my calendar or what have you so the next step field is a very powerful field and I encourage folks to start using it you know really if you did a couple of very simple things and that is when you create an opportunity they always set automated follow-up and you set your next step field you'll be amazed how things keep moving along in the in the sale cycle very very powerful so one of the things that I wanted to talk about is how this is all configured so all of those custom fields and I just want to kind of demystify that a little bit for you you will have and if your client you already do have a and somebody asked me on the webinar about can you customize the source field absolutely alright and you'll have a secure login I'll just bring it over onto my screen here you could have yeah now you have to be an administrator of profit to to do this but one of the many things you can do in here is customize the fields that you might want so I'll just take an example here this is actually our template that I was just showing you these our are our sales stages the default template has or the yeah the default template has default settings and labels in all of these but for example if I wanted to add a lead source which is one of the questions today I just go into that field and click Edit you can also change the label what-you-see-is-what-you-get notice this one is mandatory as I was sharing with you if you don't use it you can hide it and I can set it as a drop-down date or text and I can edit any of the values that he or add an item I just to add I just add a new activity or a new stage in this case if I want to edit the stage I just click the edit button very easy to make those affect to basically activate them ages the user simply has to close outlook and reopen and those customizations will have been pushed out to everyone so there are a total of about a hundred fully eighty-four fully customized fields and by the way you can change the names of these tabs to whatever you like as well the three on the right I will point out that the general tab has fixed property properties as I mentioned briefly before because it drives so many reports but you can certainly change the labels and all the drop-down lists and that sort of thing so if you wanted to track how much business you're getting from different lead sources that would be an excellent excellent thing to do is you create a field called lead source or lead type and then you can see what's working for you and again just do more of it alright so as we go through this I want to make sure that I'm very thorough here so we've covered pretty much all of this so let's let's go into a little bit more detail here and I'm going to review a few things here creating contacts this is a simple but important part of profit you can create contacts 101 ways all the ways that work in Outlook work in profit you can create new contacts just manually by saying new contact here you can create contacts via the import you can create contacts from inbound emails and by the way the nice thing about profit using the contact form here is that card scanners work natively with the outlook contact format pretty cool and there's a couple of there's a number of them on the market that are that takes a picture of a card I can still take one called kam card I'm not you know endorsing any particular brand but I found that one to be nice on my iPhone take a picture of a card it creates a contact now there is a function that I wanted to get into a little bit in terms of contacts and that is what the private lock is all about it's actually an Outlook function we use it to basically if you mark their contact private it keeps it out of profit if you mark it as private beforehand it keeps it from ever going into profit you can also use it to take it out of profit so let's show you the outlook for you so profit does a very unique thing with out with contacts a very unique thing that actually have patents on this and that is it synchronizes contacts across all devices so if I may and this is for all your profit users if you create a contact in Outlook unless you market private it's a contact and profit think of the business value of that and it's so easy to create a contact from your phone or from an importer right on your Outlook screen and what did what happens though is the profit then puts this all this and synchronizes it in the cloud so if somebody makes it updates a phone number or an email address instantly in real time it's synchronized across all devices your laptop your desktop your home computer your phone your tablets it's pretty awesome so part of the setup that we recommend and many of you've gone through this is before you profit or at some point later you simply go through and mark contacts is private now as I showed you you could see you could use the lock symbol and help them the contact each time but it's a lot quicker to just go into Outlook and use the the field chooser it's a nice little outlook feature that lets you choose any column you just drag it into your list view notice I have quite a few views up here I know this is pretty granular but I get a lot of questions about this by marking in private that way you can keep your dog groomer in your investment advisor and your aunt and uncle all in Outlook as well one other thing is that another option is creating additional folders for contacts for example I have my LinkedIn contacts in a folder profit can actually create them views by any of these criteria I'll show you that what's behind the scenes on editing or creating of you is I can change it to say I want to look at my folders I could say I want to create a view called my my LinkedIn let's just create one here these are my LinkedIn contacts now I'm gonna all I gotta do this like that folder because that's where those contacts reside so when I say synchronize with that folder right here you'll see what happens here and so I can create a view of all of my LinkedIn contacts just simply because they are in a separate folder and you'll see I have 270 LinkedIn contacts and others to get those out of out to get those out of Outlook you really need to download them from LinkedIn and there are there are ways to integrate with with systems live but that would be one way that you can create a view of context just like I did for my Hollywood contacts only that one was would be created by a folder here's contacts with hobby so I'm going to show you a little bit about the contact aspect again drilling a little deeper now into this aspect of it so one of the concepts is profit has these customizable fields sales people might want to know what the hobbies are if Joe calls me and says hey I could say hey how's your fly-fishing going then anywhere interesting lately things of that nature so those any of these fields can be used to create a view in profit a simple D of simple filtered view would be a view filtered by geography so let's just say I wanted to say all the context of in Jersey or in Washington or or whatever so these can all be created by geography for example here's my context in New Jersey all I did is I added a very simple filled filter that says I only want those that are in New Jersey now I also look quickly to create a date filter so I don't get really old stuff in my system so the point is is that you can use any field in Outlook or any of the custom fields to create views and profit a very useful view I like is my current client view gosh that's an important one I might want to reach out and send it something to all of my current clients so the idea is that you can use any of these fields to create views and you can also use any of these views to create on-the-fly filtered lists so a good example of that might be maybe I want to create a view let's just pick something here I'm gonna load my entire contact database four thousand four hundred fifty seven of them but I only want those that are marked as a prospect that's a category in profit here you know I got 2,400 so about half of these contacts or prospects now maybe I want to look at only those that are in Pennsylvania some other random notice how it picks up all the variations of PA in Pennsylvania there so I have 79 spec's in pennsylvania pretty cool maybe I want to send them all an email prophet also has a mail merge feature by the way you can just launch a mail merge just opens the Microsoft Word mail merge feature which is very cool and one other thing while I'm in this deeper into the contact area we do have about five more minutes here before we wrap up is the ability to sync to integrate with MailChimp and Constant Contact that's what that would look like if you wanted to use profit as the database and use another email system third-party email system but really going back to the main concept of this you can sort and filter by any field so you can create relevant views I have got a view called my proposal stage all the deals I've won I'll tell you it's something that's an interesting thing to track and might be a little counterintuitive but lost deals so we have fields for last reason you know what our biggest reason for not getting a deal is no decision at all but you can keep track of any number of different things you might want to put which competitor you lost it to you can then go in and do some forensics on your sales pipeline that you've lost in order to gain insight on the why you're losing deals so you can correct that and so one more pass through a little deeper level through the through the the dashboards here and I want to also point out that we are actually now on the Microsoft power bi platform so what that means is that if you are a Microsoft power bi user you can actually create your own dashboards and point it to your profit database so it's actually really cool that I'll just show you a quick example of some stuff here give me one one moment to bring that up here we go one of my colleagues Barry is quite the expert in this power bi things but we're developing lots of dashboards for our clients but again if you are a bi user you can certainly develop them yourself so what this allows you to do is take and create these visual dashboards for virtually any data in the system all kinds of interesting stuff you can create and there's a selection of over 35 different chart types and graph types and you can also create dashboards that combine other data even outside of the profit CRM database we can also embed those dashboards the custom dashboards in profit and again you haven't whatever it is that you're wanting to see visually so a real quick review of what we're just been covering here and then we'll we'll wrap up so the the seven concepts that we've been going through here and learning about our capture important data obviously but still needs a little discipline and use all those customizable fields if your business requires that so capturing key data is one of the key the key concepts here always establish that next step you'll be amazed how much that does for you set automated follow-up to sure ensure things don't fall through the cracks it'll then let you start managing your sales pipeline by your own priorities but you know revenue potential estimated closed date type of client lead ratings and so on and one simple concept which is actually amazingly simple is whenever think of it this way it's good if you all get together and agree on a simple concept and that is if it's not in profit it didn't happen and you know all it takes is when you talk to a prospect or a client you put a note in the file it's one click you could do it from your phone but then you always have your activity updated and that helps you keep track of that you know the how cold leads get so you keep them from getting too cold in it and finally using profits analytics and reports to gain actionable insights well we've reached the top of the hour here I want to thank everyone for attending and I'm going to post some contact information just for a minute here feel free to call on any of our team members or me personally I'm here to help I want to thank you again have a wonderful day and we'll talk to you again soon