Streamline your sales funnel workflow for Communications & Media

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hey everybody welcome back to build it with Tim on today's episode we're talking about funnels and pipelines and how we can move data through various stages of a workflow or a process so whether that's some sort of sales Data customer data whether you have leads and contacts and customers and you're trying to move them through different stages or maybe it's like an order process where an order comes in there's an initial intake then there's a processing they packed a shipped a delivered status the goal here is to move data through stages in order to optimize your workflow and your business practices [Music] foreign [Music] so the goal here is actually really simple we have a a group of Records right now that we're calling contacts just a general term for sales data of people who our company or our organization has made contact with and we need to then move them through a particular stage okay now the stages that we have are defined within a database option field okay I'm going to jump back to the Builder and we'll talk about option fields for just a minute here inside my data table I have a field created that I've called status and this is defined as a radio field meaning a single select okay so I can select one of the three options that I have if I need to make more options I can simply click the plus icon or I can head over to the quick edit function here and change things in batch all right but the point is is I have three different kind of options or stages that Define what a contact what their life cycle looks like as a contact okay when if when a record is created or somebody you know we make contact with somebody or somebody makes contact with us right in this fictional organization they are first defined as a contact okay then they can become a lead hey this person might actually be interested in purchasing our services let's convert them to a lead okay now ideally that person then becomes a customer so as the final stage of a customer life cycle or a contact life cycle they become a customer okay these are the stages that we want to move this particular person or this piece of data through inside of our actual business process or our workflow okay so this is purely just the data side of things okay we have these records we can change these options okay but when we're actually building out a workflow or an application we can do some some more creative things inside of the page builder that allow us to actually set up these funnels or these pipelines so that our end users of the application can efficiently and effectively work through our process and change the statuses and make sure that everybody is on the same page within the or organization about what data lives where now if we switch back to kind of this visual representation of what our end goal is where we have our data and we have our stages or our option values here that we want to change and the end goal is to move these pieces of data into the next stage there's a couple different ways that we can do that or achieve that I'm going to focus today on primarily action links okay but the different methods inside of database that you can use they're all going to rely around editing or updating records so for this first method what I've done is I've created three different pages contacts leads and customers okay and I've placed a table component on each one of these pages and they are all showing records from the same data table they're all showing records from our sample data table the difference here is that the context page with the table component on it I've changed the table component title to contacts and I filtered the data to only show records where the status is contact okay for the leads page as you might have guessed I have filtered the records to only show records where the status is lead and then content or I'm sorry customers is only showing records where the status is customer okay by doing this I've kind of defined different views into the actual raw data that we have stored to only show me what is relevant for the page that I've actually created so if I go to the leads page I don't have anybody with the status of lead so there's no records to be seen and same with the customer page now to move these records into the other views I can simply add an action link to this particular table component with a specific action defining what should happen when we click the button okay so to add an action link to my table component I'm going to open the component editor and then choose links and then Action Link that's going to create a new column on the table component which I can then customize and Define my particular action rule the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to change the actual title of the column and the button so we'll say convert to lead here I can define an icon I can change how it's formatted so initially it's formatted as a link but I'm going to change it to a button and I'm going to make it a green color okay now for my action rule this is where we're actually going to tell database what do we want to do when somebody clicks this button and in this case we're going to say we're going to update the record so update the contact record and we're going to set the status to a custom value of lead now the last part of this action rule I can show a success message for my success Behavior but in this case what I want to do is redirect to an existing page and then for my option I'm going to choose redirect to the leads page so if we look at what this rule does from the top to the bottom when the button is clicked we're going to update the record we're going to change the status from contact to lead and then we're going to redirect the user the end user to the actual leads page and I'm going to repeat the same process on the leads page because again I have three different stages in this particular pipeline or funnel and I want to guide my end users from step one to step two to step three so right now we're on step two which is the leads page and to get users to step three which is the customers page I need to do the same thing but just change some of the actual action rules uh to be slightly different right so we're going to add another Action Link we're going to say convert to customer because in this case we're going from lead to customer and we'll do the same icon the same button the same color okay the only thing that's different is the name of the button what we're updating the status to in this case we're doing it to customer and we're redirecting to the customers page okay now that we're all updated and saved we don't have to do anything on the customers page because this is kind of the end of the road okay we've converted from a contact to a lead then a lead to a customer and now this is the end of this particular workflow we don't have to do anything really on this page okay now if we go back to our Live app and refresh we're going to start on the contacts page and we can take this first record David Ross we can convert them to Elite now remember pressing this button is triggering our Action Link and our Action Link has an action rule that says update the record and then redirect the end user so by clicking that we've updated the status and now you can see I'm on the leads page okay and if I go back to contacts that person is no longer listed here because these particular components or views are filtered to only show me records with particular statuses okay so if we wanted to continue to push this person through our our pipeline then we can do convert to customer and now here they are inside the customers field right so that's how we can use action links to update our records with the values that we need in order to push particular pieces of data or records through a pipeline by updating the status and then redirecting the end user to an appropriate page now another method of doing that is actually using an edit form okay so very similar to The Action Link this is a little bit more it's a little bit more robust but it requires a little bit more effort from the end user okay so rather than using an action link on the table component itself we can actually add a different link which is called an edit link okay now this edit link is going to create a dedicated edit form that allows you to edit any field on the record that you want so by adding the edit form or edit link to the table I'm going to configure it to show it in a pop-up and that's going to create a dedicated page that contains a form that lets me edit the record I know I can do a lot of the same functions here that I could with the Action Link or in this case rather than letting people edit any particular field on the record I only want them to change the status so I've removed all of the fields and I've added just the status field to the form and using form rules I can then go to submit rules and say redirect to an existing page and I can redirect to leads thank you okay now the same thing with the leads page here I can add an edit link again personal preference I like to show it in a modal pop-up so I'm going to do that and then I need to change this form I'm going to remove all of the fields and then only add the status field and then using submit rules we're going to redirect to the customers page and this gives us basically the same effect but you'll see the difference is rather than clicking a single button and having things happen behind the scenes this requires the end user to actually change the value and it will move them manually okay now just to kind of reiterate what we've learned we've just talked about two of the most basic kind of fundamental building blocks for doing this particular workflow okay and we can use them in different ways than what I've just shown you here okay so when I was using an action link on a table component that's not necessarily the only option you have but we can we can use that same um that same technique in other areas so let's say we have our contacts and in this case we have a record detail page okay for the particular contact on that detail page maybe this is the point where we want to convert them okay so on the contact detail page maybe we're showing additional information like all of the messages that were sent um or forms of communication whatever it is maybe there's uploads maybe there's uh proposals or quotes or whatever it is that kind of pertains to your particular workflow or your business process but we can still add an action Link in other areas so inside the detail component we could do the same thing we could add an action link here that says the same thing convert to lead and we will we can still display it as a button sorry rather than a link and then our action rule can be exactly the same thing so you're going to find that the action rules and the form rules are going to be consistent throughout the application which really gives you a lot of flexibility in how you want to build these workflows out and not be tied to a very specific function okay so here we can do status we're going to update it to lead and then we can redirect to that leads page okay so what this looks like now is if we go to our contacts page we can go to The Details page and then we can right there's going to be a whole plethora of information here about this particular contact but we can then convert them to a lead and we'll take us to the leads page and from here you can repeat that process where you have a lead detail page which has a whole different set of information on it and then again an action link that converts them to a customer right but once we kind of learn these foundational tools right the action links and the edit forms with form rules submit rules and record rules everything kind of opens up to you as a someone who's building an application all right so that's it for today's episode of building with Tim thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time take care