13 Jun 2024 | Windward Software
Using the CRM for Tracking Services and Salespersons Activities
This Windward Webinar explores Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system for tracking sales activities within Windward System Five. Learn how to use appointments and tasks in the CRM to track salespeople's activities, analyze their productivity, and record customer interactions.
You'll also discover how to create and manage tasks, appointments, and follow-ups, and use the system's reporting features to monitor sales activities.
- Scott Rockins led the webinar on using CRM for tracking sales activities.
- He demonstrated how to use the appointments and task system in the CRM to track salespeople's activities and analyze their productivity.
- The CRM system can also be used to record customer interactions and keep them in a centralized place instead of having them in external places like phones or emails.
- Scott demonstrated how to create tasks, appointments, and follow-ups in the system.
- He also showed how to use the system's reporting features to monitor sales activities and analyze sales trends.
- He emphasized the importance of training staff on how to use the CRM system effectively.
- The CRM system can also be used to assign tasks to employees and monitor their progress.
- Scott also mentioned an additional module, opportunity tracking, which provides more depth in tracking sales progress.
- He concluded the webinar by mentioning an upcoming workshop on optimizing employee time tracking and reporting.
- Kyle, another participant, suggested adding today's tasks as a quick list link at the top of the CRM system for easy access.
- Kyle also mentioned the ability to see other people's calendars in the CRM system, which can be useful when someone is out sick or on vacation.
- Attendees were directed to various resources for more information, including the Windward Learning Academy
0:06
Welcome to today's webinar.
0:09
Today's topic is using the CRM for tracking sales activities.
0:14
And Scott Rockins is your presenter today.
0:16
Go ahead, Scott.
0:18
Thanks, Kyle.
0:18
And thank you everyone for joining us today.
0:22
So like the title sounds, what we're gonna go through today is how you can use the appointments and task system in system five to track the activity that your salespeople are, track their activities that are leading to the sales.
0:36
Hopefully, this can help you analyze either just what these folks do each day to make sure that they're being productive, or on the other hand, can help you, whether you're a salesperson, manager, or owner, can help you to analyze which things in sales process work and either way help you to record what's going on with your customers so that everyone can see it rather than having it in an external place like someone's little day timer, their phone or their email.
1:06
So lots of ideas here, but one thing to keep in mind is you can use this in the way that suits your business, although I'll show you one way that I think could work.
1:18
So first thing we're gonna start with is the appointment calendar and the to-do lists and tasks, just what is Scott talking about and where is this in system five.
1:29
So what I'm talking about in system five is right here in the Appointments tab, right there.
1:37
And where we're gonna start today is in the Tasks.
1:42
Now, when I first came to work at WinRID Software, I was a salesperson here, an account manager, just like all of you have.
1:49
And every time I did an activity, whether I was proactively calling a customer or I was receiving incoming calls, I would record that.
1:57
And this created a lot of data for my manager to use to track my progress.
2:01
So that's what I'm going to mimic today, but keep in mind, you can put your own spin on it.
2:06
So I'm going to pretend that I'm making an outbound call or email, and I'm going to click today's tasks.
2:15
And this is going to bring me to this screen here, which is like a to-do list area, a task list area, which will present to me the things I have planned to do today, and also as a place where I can create a log of what I am doing.
2:31
So to create what we call in system five, a task or to do item or appointment, we're gonna click this new button on the top left and create a new customer task.
2:46
We're gonna select the customer.
2:49
So in my case, I'm gonna select this hard hat construction.
2:56
And this is what a task looks like.
2:58
If you're familiar with deliveries or service appointments, the task is really the same type of thing.
3:05
It's just using a different calendar and linked to a different thing.
3:09
It's linked to the customer's record.
3:12
And these tasks are super powerful because the data that you store here is always linked to the customer's history tab, which we'll look at next.
3:21
So in my example, I'm gonna say that Hardhat Construction here is building a hospital and they need a quote to hopefully win their proposal to build the hospital, which would be lots of business for us.
3:36
So, I'm going to give it a subject up here.
3:44
I'm going to select from Hardhat Construction's contacts spike here, the project manager.
3:51
And I'm going to log an activity to say, I made a phone call and it's a sales call.
3:57
So you can see that I've got an activity here, which would be phone call or email or meeting or appointment.
4:02
You can configure these by clicking the edit button here.
4:06
And I'm giving it a purpose.
4:07
In this case, it's a sales call.
4:09
You can also prioritize your work, which I won't get into too much detail today, but we'll say this is important.
4:18
And you can color code it, which is really just a cosmetic thing.
4:23
If I'm trying to create just a log of something that happened, not so much an appointment, I wanna go over here to the left and click this to do item.
4:33
The main difference between clicking this and not clicking this is if it's off, the system is gonna try and make it an appointment with the time duration.
4:40
If it's on, it's more of an item.
4:44
So let's suppose I'm phoning Spike about this new opportunity that he has that we might be able to win business on.
4:54
Now, depending on how detailed you'd like to be, you can simply make some notes about the call down at the bottom here, if I could type properly.
5:20
I can paste an email in here is one thing a lot of people do.
5:24
Another thing people like to do with this tool is use this clock here to timestamp exactly when things happened.
5:32
So that kind of logs the time and date.
5:37
When I first came to work at Windward Software, we were really gritty with this.
5:42
And when I placed a phone call, I would hit this Now button and it would start a timer.
5:46
And it would actually track how long I'm on the phone with the customer when they call in or I call out.
5:53
Now that's extremely gritty.
5:55
I haven't met really too many people who go to that level of detail, but you have the ability to, should you want to.
6:02
This gives you really a really in-depth way of knowing what your salespeople are doing, whether it's just some notes, or perhaps you're running them on a clock.
6:16
I'm gonna create this as a to-do item.
6:19
So let's say in this conversation, I talk to Spike, I realize that we need to be able we can win this business, and I offer him a quote.
6:29
So I just say, offer to drop a quote.
6:35
And I say, I'll have it to him by Monday.
6:39
So what I'm gonna do now is create a follow-up to this task to drop the quote.
6:46
I'm gonna say, this task was completed here, so I finished my phone conversation, and I'm gonna click the follow-up button at the top.
6:57
When I do so, it will clone the task, Attach the same contact and customer.
7:02
It will leave this part free for me to choose a new activity and purpose.
7:10
Remember, both of these dropdowns, you can configure what's available there.
7:15
And I can go draw up a quote.
7:19
Maybe I'm having a busy day when I have the conversation, so I need to book a time, let's say tomorrow, to do this.
7:28
So I'll create the to-do item to draw up a quote, Change my subject a little and I'll save my work.
7:37
And this is the completed task here, I'll save that as well.
7:44
So I go home for the day, I come back the next morning.
7:48
And now I'm logging into Windward in the morning and I want to know what am I going to do today?
7:53
So if I go into the appointments calendar now, if you're using this approach, you've got to train your staff to actually do this.
8:01
I'm going to always go to my tasks for today.
8:04
I'm just gonna edit the date here, so that it reflects tomorrow.
8:09
And there's my to-do item that I created yesterday for me to do today.
8:15
Great.
8:16
So now I would have probably a list of these.
8:20
Here's an example.
8:22
In my previous role, my tasks would be set to a goal of achieving 30 completed tasks per day.
8:30
So that's 30 outgoing conversations, 30 inbound conversations, 30 to-do items, and my boss would monitor that to make sure I'm being a productive salesperson, and then we'd compare that to my sales results to see if activity is driving success, or which activity is driving success.
8:49
So that's what we're after, is track the activity, monitor the success, look for a correlation, reproduce.
8:58
So here I will open my task to perform it today.
9:02
Double-click on that task and I see that I need to drop a quote.
9:06
I remember now, hospital job.
9:09
From here to drop a quote for a customer, I can click on the customer's name right here.
9:19
It'll open their customer record.
9:22
I can go to the Invoices tab and do a new estimate.
9:28
But while I'm here in the customer record, I want to show you something else, which is the history tab.
9:35
So every customer in Windward system five that you've set up has an area that is designed to keep track of the story of their business with you.
9:45
All of you have one of these tabs in our version of Windward.
9:49
We maintain these by tracking our communications with you and use that to monitor the relationship in case someone's not in, they're on vacation, they're ill, or they move on to other work, The new person can come in and know what's going on by reading through this story.
10:06
You find the story here in the history comments over here.
10:11
These are all the tasks that I've performed.
10:13
You can see some of my examples from my practice yesterday.
10:20
And you can see the ones that I performed today.
10:25
Also from the customer tab, I can add a task right from here.
10:30
I can review the invoices I've already sent.
10:32
So in this case, to save time in our presentation, I drew up this estimate right here.
10:41
And let's say they're gonna buy these appliances for their build at the hospital, let's suppose.
10:49
Another thing you might wanna do in using our CRM to track sales progress is use this closing tab on the right-hand side of your estimates.
10:59
So if Spike at Hardhat tells me, well, they need to complete this hospital build by the end of the summer, And I'll know whether we win the business by, say, July 31st.
11:14
And my contact, Spike, says, you know, we've got a really good chance.
11:17
There's another competitor, but I think we can beat him if we sharpen our pencils a bit.
11:22
I can write down my confidence of that, and there's a way to track that on an estimate report that gives you some idea of the likelihood of you closing the business and when it should be closed by another tracking tool to track your salespeople.
11:40
I then can move on, email off the estimate.
11:44
I'll just exit out of here and cancel out of this.
11:56
And one best practice we had at Windward when I was an account manager is always have a follow-up.
12:00
Even if it's six months from now, even if it's a year from now, always set a follow-up.
12:05
Mark your work done, hit the follow-up button, And in our case, we're gonna set that follow-up to Monday.
12:14
We're gonna say, I need to actually have lunch with, so I'm gonna say, we'll call it a, I don't have an appointment here, but we'll call it a phone call, sales call.
12:27
But I'm gonna, at this time, I'm gonna turn off the to-do item, and I'm gonna schedule a time to sit down with Spike and review this opportunity on the 17th.
12:37
It's gonna take us about an hour to have lunch.
12:41
And I'm gonna just adjust the time here.
12:44
And I'm gonna save that in my calendar and I can pick a color if I like.
12:50
And I'll phone up Spike, make the appointment, and meet him for lunch.
13:02
Now where this leads us to is, well what does this look like if I'm in a business where I do have to have these meetings and I need to manage a calendar?
13:10
So if I go to today's tasks here, when I log in in the morning, and we'll pretend it's Monday, So I'll put the 17th here and here.
13:21
Oops, here's my appointment.
13:25
You can't really tell very well that this is an appointment from here other than the duration.
13:29
But if I look at it on this tab, the task book, you can see it blocked in my calendar.
13:36
And from here, I can also create more appointments.
13:38
So if you have a really appointment-based or consultative sales process, where you're visiting people's homes to see what kind of health products they need, you're having them in to consult them on what kind of lighting products they need, all sorts of different reasons, you can use this tab as opposed to that one.
13:56
Whatever works, suits your business needs.
14:01
If I double click on this appointment, it opens up the task and I can record what happens in my lunch.
14:17
Feud pricing with Spike maybe.
14:24
Three quotes, good, better, best quotes on the job to see if we can win the deal.
14:34
And I marked this completed, and as usual, follow up.
14:38
Create another task, let's say something a long ways out, next Friday, to see if of the three quotes, the buyer for the project liked one of them more than the others, and we'll make another phone call, off to Spike to follow up and see if we can win that business.
14:57
So you start to get the idea here.
15:00
What we're doing is just making sure we're tracking those little gritty activities that lead to a sale.
15:10
Now this all populates, like I was saying, in a connected way by going to the task, I click on the customer, and I go to the history comments, I can see the whole conversation there, even if I'm someone unrelated to it.
15:25
Right, like someone else using system five.
15:27
I can see what's gonna happen next, or what's supposed to happen next.
15:33
If you have customers who have renewals or contracts with you, this is a good way to keep track of to-do items for later.
15:39
You can create these for yourself, but of course you can also create these for your employees or your sales staff if you're a manager or an owner.
15:47
So you can assign tasks to other people.
15:49
And what we'll look at next is some quick ways to sort of report on what they are doing.
15:56
So you're probably used to using reports that access the ledger, access the invoices, access the dollars that have come in.
16:02
This is reporting about the activity that was taking place.
16:07
Hey, Scott, before you get into reporting, we've got a couple things to add to what you just were talking about there.
16:12
So one of the things, this is kind of more of a tip than anything, is for today's tasks, putting that as a quick list link at the very top, so it's top of mind, too.
16:26
So that's a definite good quick tip that people can use to keep the calendar top of mind.
16:35
And then the other thing that I was gonna suggest is a use case, and that is the case where, let's say that you're sick and somebody else has to take your calendar.
16:48
So the ability to see other people's calendars as well, if the settings are correct, right?
16:56
Exactly.
16:57
In fact, that's a really good point, Kyle.
16:58
When I first became a implementation specialist or trainer at Windward, we also used this calendar.
17:05
And that's exactly how we handled when someone was out.
17:08
We'd look at their calendar, dig into their tasks and either reschedule things for them or just jump in and help their client for them.
17:15
That's a good point, Paul.
17:16
Yeah.
17:19
And as Kyle's mentioning, this is the quick list along the top.
17:23
You can access this by hitting your navigator here.
17:29
Mine wants to windowize things, I guess.
17:31
Navigator, and then you hit this customize button.
17:34
You pick the thing you like.
17:37
You right click it, add it to the quick list, and then save the changes.
17:48
So the next thing we'll look at is a really simple way to review what has happened with a salesperson.
17:58
Not so much directly for one customer now, but for all customers that that salesperson is helping for a time period usually.
18:08
If I go in here as perhaps as the manager or the owner, then I can go to this users tab and I can pick the employees.
18:19
I'll add some other ones.
18:21
I think maybe this fella here is the only person I've put tasks in for.
18:24
But I can pick who I want to talk about or report on, I should say.
18:29
I can pick a date range.
18:31
So I'll pick a whole month, let's say.
18:40
And if I look at completed tasks, do I have the right person here?
18:56
I can see all of the tasks they've completed or all of the tasks that they have open, or a combo.
19:06
And this can let you see what's going on with the sales effort in your business.
19:12
As soon as you may hold them accountable to a certain amount of activity, whether that's in minutes, or in meetings, or in number of tasks completed, you can start to see how they spend their time generating sales.
19:25
And this data can be sorted.
19:30
So I can sort it by who did it here, what type of activity it was.
19:39
So maybe I see that one of my salespeople is just emailing and emailing, and they seem to have lower sales than everyone else who's making phone calls, or vice versa.
19:47
Or maybe I see that this salesperson's having lots of meetings, but not closing the deal.
19:54
Maybe it's what they're saying in the meetings, and you can coach them through that.
19:58
I can see who their contacts are, I can see which businesses they're talking to, and I can even see the subject line of their conversation.
20:08
Also, if you right click your mouse and hit the customize button, as you can do on many reports in areas in system five, there's a few other fields you can add here that might assist you, depending on what exactly you're trying to track, like the email and if you're dealing with unitized things, then the maker model of that sort of thing, or the city.
20:28
I've seen people use this, for example, with the city to see where in the city or in their sales area the deals are happening, the activity is happening.
20:41
I've seen it used, oh myself personally, to compare my activity to another sales rep's activity and compare results.
20:50
And if they had more tasks and they were closing more sales, well then maybe it's just a matter of getting busy or maybe I have more tasks but lower sales than the other sales rep, maybe it's about what's happening in those conversations.
21:03
It's worth noting too that if you integrate this part of system five into your workflows, there is an additional module you can add onto this if you find that you want even more depth where you can track the stage of the sale, the probability of moving to the next stage, to the likelihood of closing it, the closing date, the different things that are super important to this client, it's called opportunity tracking and it's an add-on that you can add.
21:32
I've helped many people add it on and my experience has been this.
21:37
Getting all of the people in the business to start using tasks in their day is the first hurdle.
21:44
You don't need the add-on until you get that happening and then there is more if you need more.
21:49
Typically this is done in businesses is where the average opportunity is a little bit larger.
21:55
And so if that larger opportunity, there's more sales effort, it's okay to spend more sales effort on it.
22:03
So I'm buying a super expensive electric wheelchair, or it's a construction build like my example.
22:10
But there's some question as to whether it's actually the fact that only you should do this if you have large sales, or the fact that you do this will lead to large sales, Kind of a cause and effect thing there.
22:22
I've seen this used by businesses that like delivered coffee cups to 7-Elevens because it's like a contract that they signed with people.
22:32
Seen it used in a lot of different ways.
22:34
It could just be useful for no other reason than if I look at the history tab, if someone needs to pick up the ball where I dropped it because I'm sick or on vacation, they can come here and look.
22:49
or it could be more sales focused and sales driven.
23:00
So that's really how you can report on tasks.
23:03
There is also additional reporting available if you look into the opportunity tracking.
23:07
But again, I wouldn't worry about the additional features that become available if you buy them until you get tasks happening or appointments happening and have figured out how that works in your business.
23:21
We're gonna be talking about this other time tracking related stuff in our upcoming workshop next week.
23:31
But before we move on to that, a few resources other than the recording of this which I think someone has asked about.
23:39
So Mike, there is a recording that will be available in our webinar archive at our website.
23:46
You can find some good content about this in the Windward Learning Academy if you search by CRM or if you search by appointments, you'll find a good list of presentations about this.
24:00
Also there are a couple really good articles, excuse me, in the customer care knowledge database, which if you're using it all the time, they are a little bit older, but they show you how to set it up and they show you a little bit about the opportunity tracking that I've been mentioning, which I believe we actually created for ourselves, to find all of you lovely people.
24:28
So that's the basics of the presentation today.
24:30
We can open it up to some questions.
24:34
And then we can talk a little bit about the upcoming workshops and how this sort of fits into that.
24:39
Do we have any other questions?
24:43
Not yet, let's go ahead and go over the workshop and hopefully while you're talking, people can put in some questions there.
24:50
Yeah, so I guess before I talk about the bundle here, the workshop that we're gonna do next is optimizing employee time tracking and reporting.
24:57
You can probably see how this part fits into it and there'll be some review of this in that workshop which is next Thursday morning from eight to 12 Pacific Standard Time.
25:08
We're also gonna cover things like using the time clock, tracking labor in the software, labor efficiency, setting up commissions, and even if you're not gonna use commissions, how to use the commissions settings to track profitability of invoices.
25:27
And all sorts of things like that that will help you organize your sales staff or your labor or installation staff.
25:34
Sort of a follow-up to managing the delivery and installation service.
25:37
We're gonna talk about reporting on it and all the different things you can do with the labor tracking.
25:43
So if you're looking for a way to really get gritty on how your people spend their time, whether that's installations or service or sales, this is a good workshop for you.
25:55
If you wanna dive into the CRM and labor related time tracking stuff in system five and get more gritty detail and reporting out of this system, these are all features that all of you will have access to with just a click of a few buttons and all can provide a lot of value.
26:14
So, I hope that some of you will join me on the 20th for that.
26:21
Also...
26:21
Yeah, so just a quick note there, Scott, the bundle is now listed at $550, because we already did a couple of them, and you're just going to get recordings, so the first two you'll still get the recordings of if you do want to get the bundle, and the price has been reduced to $550, so that's a really great value.
26:42
The next week's one is $2.99 for that.
26:47
If you wanna just get the one optimized employee time tracking and reporting, that'd be $2.99.
26:53
If you wanna get all of them, it's $5.50.
26:57
Awesome, that's an awesome deal.
26:58
Thank you, Kyle.
26:59
Yeah.
27:01
Just in case you're not 100% certain how to do that, hold on, I've got the, is it here?
27:13
We have these available for sale on our website.
27:16
So it's sales at windwardsoftware.com.
27:19
Here's the workshops and events right here.
27:22
You can see recordings of older ones or bundles or the new workshop that's up and coming.
27:28
You can always find these here.
27:30
It's also a handy place if you feel that you know some of the stuff but you want some one-on-one help with implementing it in your business.
27:38
The professional services catalog here is where you can buy time with someone from my department to consult you on, really, on anything, but we can work on these topics as well.
27:48
I've had some clients who have a great experience combining workshops with some one-on-one consulting.
27:53
They learn in the workshops, and then when it comes to implementing individual steps, they want a little bit of one-on-one help.
28:01
We had some good success with feature adoption when we used that combination.
28:05
Bring your team to the workshop, and then when you're going through the hurdles of getting them to change their activities, get some one-on-one consulting or training from someone on my team.
28:22
Doesn't look like there's any additional questions that came in, so that's, you must have done a pretty good job covering this topic.
28:29
I hope that's the case, but we would love to hear from you about how we did today, so you can scan this QR code and it'll bring you over to a survey.
28:38
We'd love to do more of these webinars and hope they're informative, but we'd love to hear more about topics you'd like to see or feedback of any kind.
28:46
Scott, that's not this survey for this.
28:51
This is the survey for our customer care team.
28:55
So if you have some feedback about customer care team, that's the survey that we have here.
29:00
Sorry about that.
29:01
I didn't explain that to you beforehand.
29:04
No problem.
29:05
So, but that's important, right?
29:07
We're looking for feedback about how we're doing.
29:09
That's our June survey, yep, yep.
29:10
Yeah, so another way to find that, and has that also been sent out a little bit by email, Kyle?
29:16
Yeah, everybody should have gotten an email a little bit earlier today about it as well.
29:21
So you can either open up the email that you got earlier today, scan this QR code, or go to windwardsoftware.com slash survey, and you can give feedback about our customer care team.
29:32
Awesome, awesome, awesome.
29:36
Well, thank you everyone for coming.
29:37
I hope I see some of you next week in the workshop or in the next webinar, and I hope you're enjoying the beginning of your spring or summer as the case may be.
29:48
Thanks everybody.
29:49
Thanks, bye bye
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