by Mark Foltz
Back to Prophet CRM Beginner’s Guide
Step 1: Select the “Contacts” Folder in the bottom left section of Outlook.
Step 2: Select the contact you want to be marked as private.
Step 3: Select “Private” in the top right-hand side of Outlook.
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Welcome to Prophet CRM Learning Series. CRM is a journey. This video series will take you through the ins and outs of the Prophet CRM.
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to today’s Webinar. My name is Warren Stokes. I’m going to be sharing with you an awesome topic and providing some training and guidance on using Prophet CRM’s Reporting Tools to Gain Actionable Insight.
So first I’m going to cover some of the context to give you some context for the rest of the program which is going to be demonstrating how to generate reports to get that Actionable Insight in Prophet CRM today.
And for those of you who are already clients, you probably know we’ve been very successfully delivering solutions since 2002. We’re a Washington based company; everything, including sales and development, is headquartered in the US. We’re most known for ease of use, easy administration, great support, that sort of thing.
I’ve been involved in sales for well over fifteen years. I’ve helped over a thousand companies select Prophet and grow their business with it. I hold a couple of patents and am tracking over 1.3 million views of these seminars and webinars on the Youtube channel
And one of the things I want you to think about is – let’s just talk about when you’re thinking about reporting – not just the what, but the “so what”? That’s what Actionable Insight does. So let’s just jump into some of the basic topics, and I’ll show you how it all works.
First of all, think of all reports as derived from some sort of data. That data, once it’s organized by column, sorted or filtered a bit, becomes more useful information. When you start really extracting useful information you can get knowledge about your business, about your sales pipeline, about your sales team, or whatever it is you’re looking at. And then you start to gain insight. But the key is, from all of this, the main value is derived from getting “Actionable Insight”.
We will be talking about several categories of reporting. First, we’ll talk about some of the basic ways of getting better & more useful data right out of the live database in Prophet – running a report, how to filter & sort to get useful data; how to export data to Excel easily – it’s an easy thing to do, most people know how to use excel, so we provide that as the basic reporting tool. I should mention that exporting to excel is a permission-based function, so if you don’t currently have that permission, talk to your Prophet administrator and have them activate that. So if you have that permission you’ll be able to export data to excel from any Prophet user. Next, Prophet’s traditional report manager gives you the ability to run reports, build your own reports – I think you’ll find that useful. Finally, the Analytics Dashboard, which offers three dashboards that come with the Prophet solution out of the box. And we can also develop custom reports.
But to talk about what this is all about, what I’m talking about when it comes to actionable insight: do you really know right now how many new contacts were created last month for your team? How many opportunities were created, one of the key things in sales? Which Rep generated the most or least activity? Which clients had the most or least activity? Do you know what your lead conversion rates are on a day-to-day, month-to-month basis? This would be useful, obviously. How many activities does it actually take to close a deal? How much revenue is in my sales pipeline? What stage are they all in? Things of that nature. This is what we’re talking about.
Now when we get into the advanced filtering, you need to know that Prophet has a lot of data in it that you can sort and filter through different ways. I’ll be showing you a couple of more advanced techniques rather than just grouping by field. One of the things we will be talking about is just how to get more data out of Prophet without even running a report. You can see all of these different data points as you start to add advanced filters.
Export to Excel is a useful function. Of course the key there is – for the data to be useful it has be viewed in Prophet, viewed & filtered, so that you can export relevant data and not just giant lists of data. You can export company data, contact data, opportunity data as well.
Prophet’s report manager, if you haven’t been in there much, is basically a tool to give you a lot of the basic visual reporting tools, You can select what report you want (there are abou thirty or so built directly into Prophet out of the box), there are report designer tools, to add formatting and logos and et cetera. I’ll show you how to run reports, sort & filter them, by data range, user, and various other filters, and how to create your own custom reports.
Finally we have, of course, the live data in Prophet, where it’s really all derived from. One of the concepts I talk about and share with people is, you know, if you’re expecting there to be so many new contacts created each month, maybe you should inspect what you expect. Are you expecting your leads to be updated very regularly? Maybe you should check that. This all applies to contacts, accounts, and opportunities – maybe you should find out if the data is complete (easy to do) – try to get a little more discipline in how the data is collected. All these things roll up into – once you set your expectations, the ability to report gives you the ability to inspect what you expect with the data Prophet reports to you. Analytics dashboards (built-in) also let you look at pipelines, activity – how many contacts, opportunities are created – team productivity data, etc.
So at the end of the day we’re talking about getting data in a useful format. I’m going to start simple and get more complex with all these dashboards and stuff. The idea here that I really want you to get is that one of the outcomes here is getting actionable insight so that you can make data-driven decisions. The “what” is the data – what is the lead source, etc. But the key question is, what do you do with this data? You can interpret trends, you can see what’s improving, what’s going up, what’s going down. Are you creating more or fewer contacts or opportunities? Where is your new business located? Business tips: You’ll be able to find out what’s not working – what’s not generating revenue, which areas are not generating any new business, but you’ll also find out what’s working. Find out what’s not working and do less of it! Why keep hammering the dead horse there? Find out what is working and do more of it – that’s my business tip of the day.
Let’s dive right into the live demonstration. Feel free to ask questions in the webinar chat – I’ll try to answer the questions live.
Prophet’s solution, as many of you already know, is directly embedded in Outlook. It’s accessed either by the ribbon or the folders in your mail – to get into the CRM I just click the folder I want. Some people leave them open in new windows, which is helpful as well. But once you’re in the database I’ll show you what we’re talking about here.
Let’s start by getting into some of the basic functions. Organizing data in list views – every time you’re in a folder, you can select different lists or views. I’m in my contact manager – I can have different lists or views there – you can see I can have my active prospects, clients, my contacts in certain geographies, and so on.
Let’s get right into some of the basic contacts, what I mean by sorting and filtering and creating relevant lists so that we might simply export it to Excel. So, one of the things is you have to choose the columns that are in the list. Across the top here there are first name, last name, company, industry, and so on. You can drag and drop these columns to get them in the order you want – maybe I want modified data here, you see I’m dragging and dropping these columns, making them wider or narrower.
The other thing you can do is choose columns from the database to add to the list – I can right click and hit “choose columns” which will bring up the column chooser. The idea is in Prophet there are up to a hundred possible fields – you can select the fields that you want and simply move them to the right which puts them in the list view. If you want them to move right (in list view) you can move them up in the chooser. By doing that you can add columns to the list view – you can save the changes to the list view. What we’re getting at is organizing these lists so that you export the right data/run reports on the right data.
Now let’s talk a little bit about basic filtering. Filtering is the ability to narrow down or reduce the number of records by some criteria. This list already has the geographic filter applied – they’re all in Hollywood, CA. How you add filters is you take any of these columns and you simply filter by what you want – like an excel-based filter. For example, I might want to go down and only want to see those contacts that are in the manufacturing and construction industries. As I add the filter it narrows the list down to only those contacts in manufacturing which, by the way, happens to be one of the customizable fields of Prophet, and I can show you how that all works in terms of customizing those fields. Most of you have probably already done it, but this allows you to get more granularity in reporting. So, real simple concept. Again, we basically just choose the columns we want, we add filters, by geography or industry or any other criteria that you want to add filters by (it’s just this little filter icon).
Let’s say I wanted to create a quick report on only those contacts flagged as manufacturing contacts. Here’s what we can do: we can select certain rows of these contacts using my keyboard, and click the “quick Export to Excel” button to export either selected or all rows to excel. That gives you the ability to select more granularly what will pop up in the excel report. There it is: we’ve got all of that on an excel spreadsheet. Of course, I know you all know a lot about excel which is one of the reasons we make it so easy to export data to excel. I do have another webinar on just excel functions, so if you want to check that out go to Avidian.com and look at our webinars. Nevertheless, the point is that we’re making it very easy to export to excel by adding simple filters.
Now let’s get a little more interesting and go into our opportunity Manager here. I’m over here in my opportunity manager folder in a view called Hollywood Projects. You may not know this but one of the things you can do is create groupings of these simply by taking the field, like “sales stage”, and putting it up into the bar in the top that says “drag a column here to group by column”. Again what I did is I grabbed the sales stage column label and moved it up to that top bar there – let me do it again to be clear. I’m going to group by sales stage – click on sales stage and drag the column up there. Now I’ve got my opportunity pipeline-group by sales stage; I can expand the grouping lists and work on them there, but it’s just a really handy thing to be able to do to organize your data grouped by certain criteria. Let’s just say I want to some other column, say Lead Type – here are all my leads that came in through the web, here are all the leads that came in through referrals or whatever – all of these are groupings of the columns that I grouped up here on the top. So that’s very useful to be able to do.
Another thing you can do here is sort by a column – very useful. Say you want to sort by most revenue or least revenue. Maybe I just want to see what are my top ten list of revenue. Notice at the bottom of the window as I start selecting records, some summary information appears – how many I’ve selected, the total value of the top ten opportunities, and the average. And again you can export that to Excel by just choosing, “export selected rows”. Maybe your boss comes in and says, hey what are your top ten opportunities in your pipeline? Click, Click, Click – you can do this, and use the “share” function in excel to send it as a PDF or excel workbook to send it to somebody on the fly. So the idea there is that I was very quickly and easily able to get the data that I wanted out of Prophet, in this case, my top ten opportunities. Simple but very useful ways to get data organized, sorted, filtered, grouped, and once you get the data you want you can export it to Excel. That’s probably one of the most commonly used reporting functions in Prophet, Export to Excel. And the fact this whole idea of the list/grid view is much like an excel spreadsheet, and if you’re in a multi-user environment, it gives you the ability (with permission) to share data as well. That’s what I mean by not having to go into a bunch of reporting to get useful actionable data out of Prophet, like the top ten opportunities.
Another useful example, what about the last modified date? I’m going to move it over and take a look – if I sort it by most recently, this shows what’s most recently active, if I sort by old stuff, I can see what contacts I haven’t touched up with in a month. These are all opportunities that you want to make sure are properly kept up to date. Nothing worse than leads getting cold, right? Let me show you another one while we’re here to be thorough. One of the fields is “probability” (let me drag that over here). Let’s look at which deals are most likely to close – every opportunity over 50 % – we can just highlight them like this after having sorted by probability. Pretty cool!
Let me show you something else that will help you group: the Advanced Filter function. This might be useful for, say, an estimated close date. If you click on the filter symbol it will bring up the available filters – various options are available, including useful features like “greater than” and “less than”. So if I want to see what might close between a certain date range, I can put those dates in, click okay, and now my 33 opportunities are filtered down to fifteen of them that are in the date range. And you can just right click and hit, select all. Without even running a formal report I can see I have 7.4 million dollars worth of business estimated to close in the date range I selected. Pretty cool!
Anyway, I’m just showing you all of the things you might think of doing before you even start going into the next level, which is the reports. I think we covered export to Excel and filtering – let me field a couple of questions. Does the modified date consider only changes to contact info, or changes to notes also? Any change you make to an opportunity that you then save, e.g. changing the status, stage, probability, or entering a note will update that “modified date”. If you’re working in company contacts, you’ll also have the same thing, where company updates – doing something like leaving a voice mail or changing an address or something – and save it, it will update the modified date. Thanks for that question. The main point is to look at your data so you can gain actionable insights. One more example, then we’ll move on.
Let’s say you wanted to just see how many contacts were created in a certain date range. I could just sort by created date, and put a filter on the created date – “available filters”, between such-and-such, say this month or that sort of thing. Pretty cool! Alright, let’s move on.
Let’s move into the report manager. Report Manager is accessible through a button – it used to be a folder but we changed it so that you can access it without a folder. Right now all I have to do is click on that button that’s called Reports. I’m going to go through some basic reports with you and then I’ll show you how to create your own reports, which is a useful thing to do. And how to run reports, sorting and filtering different ways and such.
Click on the report manager button and it brings up the report manager window. You’ll see there are these seven different types of reports. Now you will have noticed that there are default reports in all of these. The report manager is a powerful tool and I think you’ll find it very useful. You can start by just looking at some basic reports and I’ll show you how I’ve used and updated it, using the designer tool to modify the look of it a little bit. First of all you can determine who you want to run the report on. This is permission-based – the only people you see here are those you have permission to run reports on. Once you’ve selected those you want to run reports on, you’ll note there’s a orientation (landscape or portrait); two output options – basic, which runs the report and then lets you save it as PDF, Word, or Excel, or direct output to excel. Removing duplicate rows is useful for a forecast, so you don’t pick up the same item multiple times or something of the sort.
So you pick the sort order, based on the type of report – you can pick the sort order by parameters like Activity Date, etc. and then pick ascending or descending order. You can actually add up to three sorts for any particular report. But the next thing you would want to do is put in a date range – a predefined period, or you can put in a start & end date for the report – but when I generate this you can see that it’s going to pick up for example activity for the last fourteen days on the user that I chose. You can filter by account – I wont do that right now, but you can just filter; you can filter by revenue range greater than or equal to X, or so on. There are two revenue fields, reflecting your personal name for the statistic. And finally you can sort by any of the other criteria in the report – I’ve pretty much already selected all of the different activities, but I can click here to remove them, like if I don’t want to have meeting notes down here I just simply move it out of the filtered box. To add it back in you just select the field and click load.
Anyways let’s just take a look at the report. This is an activity report, based on my activity for the last fifteen days. It’s going to pick up all of the activity with my opportunity sales pipeline for the last fifteen days. It’s pulling data out of the opportunity manager, where I put in things, notes, so forth, and give me those notes. You can see here all of the various things I’ve put in in the last fifteen days. It’ll give you the customer name, rep name, revenue – you define what you want to have in your report, these are just the normal ones. The blue text are the actual entry notes.
The nice thing about this is that the person doesn’t have to create some sort of big report every month or so – rather you can just put in a note whenever they have an activity that they want to log into the system – they just put in a note. Pretty simple. Just by way of clarity here, these notes are coming from whatever I put in here – voice mail, note, etc. – thats where these notes are coming from. You can run reports like this for companies and contacts as well. This was the Pipeline Forcast. I’ll show you one other and then we’ll get deeper into this, for example how to build and customize reports.
I’ll show you one that I find very useful as someone in sales. I can put in some kind of date range here, select who I want to run this on – this is going to be a pipeline report – select who I want to run it on, sort order – revenue descending, estimated close date range – click view report. This will give me a pipeline report – here’s everything in my pipeline, with company name, rep, close date, sales stage, and the revenue that it’s worth. Now, this one has been modified a little bit – I’ve customized it a bit with a logo, colors, moved a few things around. Let me show you how I did that.
On any report, say, the basic pipeline stage report, which comes right out of the box – if I run this right now, the standard vanilla report here, then let’s customize it. Here it is, maybe we want to change some stuff around. It doesn’t have my logo in it; I might want to change the formatting. So if you go back to the out of the box report, I’ll show you how to create your own using a wizard. Rather than running the report let’s go into the designer. Let’s play around with it. You can’t break anything because you can always redo a report.
Let’s say I wanted to edit this field on top, the label, currently “pipeline stage” – maybe I want it to be called “sales pipeline by stage” instead. These other two fields are system generated, the generated date and the name of who generated it. Down here there’s a bunch of fields – IMO a little crowded, so let’s delete and move a couple of fields around – estimated close date, I don’t need the exact hour and minute, so I can go to the right and change the Output Format – let’s change it to MM/dd/yyyy – to change it to a simpler format. Revenue is okay, but maybe I want to take a few of these other fields to give myself some room – I’ll just delete those.
So now let’s add my logo to this report. I can just drag and drop stuff – you can just line things up, I’m going to left-justify this stuff, putting in different formatting. What I’m going to do here is put my logo in here. Go up here, hit picture, drag it over – it creates a picture box, which you can play around with to make it fit your logo. I’m on my box and there’s a thing here that says image, I click that and put in the Prophet logo (small) and there we go – got it in one shot! Now for some advanced fun – go to the highlights – let’s make the title highlighted bright blue. We’ve made a few changes, removed some fields, moved some stuff around – you can do more of that if you want, but I’m going to save these changes – “save file” – and now the report is customized. You see the changes to the title, logo, etc. By the way, once you’ve run a report, if you want to print it or save it, you can save it as a PDF, XLS, RTF (Word), etc. Now I can just print or email it or what have you. That’s an example of how to edit an existing report.
I’m going to tell you how to create a new report now. Let’s use the tool called the wizard – click the wizard button, which brings up essentially a report builder. First, decide what category you want the report to be in – let’s say the Sales department. Now we will name it “Webinar Training Report”. I’ll usually then right click and hit copy because in the next screen we have the title, which is usually the same thing. On the left are all the fields available in the particular report – for example, I probably want customer name (in our world usually company name). We could put in stuff like estimated close date – notice how the fields are alphabetically organized. Next, revenue number, user (the sales rep assigned), stage, and sales status. Now, I’ve chosen my fields. Let’s hit next – let’s go to the designer, and here’s that report. Now it will appear in my report manager – here’s “webinar training report”, and let’s run a report using this new template. Let’s view that report, and here we go.
Q: Can you create a report showing multiple departments. That would probably be in the realm of a custom report, but I’ll show you dashboards that would let you do that. Here’s that report we created – not very fancy, but that’s how you create the custom report. Plenty of nuances, but it’s pretty darn useful.
And so that’s what I meant by a custom report using report manager – using the wizard to create your own report. The other category of custom reports are built custom reports – you can do it yourself or contact your account manager. So lets keep going on.
That leads us to Prophet Analytics Dashboard. Prophet, if it is enabled (check with your account manager if it isn’t), has a button that can be activated to bring up your analytics dashboards. It does take a minute to load so I preloaded it. The out-of-the-box dashboards are seen here. Down here are three tabs: Pipeline Report, Activity Report, and New Accounts Report. The Pipeline Report shows you everything in your pipeline – when someone asked about the report showing multiple departments, this is it because you can show which departments you want here – I have every department I have available here.
You can see a summary of active opportunities in the date range. The Date range is up here-when you move it you can see the dates change. Let me show you what I recommend while it refreshes – Microsoft PowerBI Desktop – you can run it right off your desktop without deploying it to Outlook. With this report one of the things you can do is change the chart visualization style here – just using the out of the box PowerBI. Let’s say I wanted to change this graph to a pie graph – select it and choose pie graph – there you go. I like this because you can on-the-fly change the chart type. Again you can filter it and change the date range, departments, etc. If I do select a department over here the graph changes, and so on.
There’s pipeline, there’s activity, and there’s Team Analysis, summarizing data like contact creation dates, opportunities created, geographic location etc. This one helps you really look at the things that create new business. In sales, wouldn’t it be logical for you to be creating new contacts each month? Opportunities? Company contacts? Of course! Contacts created by job function uses our little AI to extract what the job function of the contact is.
So these three dashboards are right out of the box. Just like with custom reports we can build custom dashboards – to show things like product lines, etc. which can look at any part of the database. One of the questions here is: is it possible to enter and track emails, calls, voicemails by contact? Of course it is! And let me segue to tracking.
In Contact Manager, in the notes area, you can put in a note with an attached activity tag – that you left a voicemail, that you had a meeting, that you met with meeting notes. These are what your company has customized, or ones that come right out of the box; these are all automatically time/date stamped. You can go to activities and search activities for a given contact. Here’s a bunch of tasks for that contact, but let’s create a new one!
Look at the outlook buttons – let’s create a new task: Call – Prophet fills out the name, company, and phone number – Call Mel Gibson about Webinar. Let’s see what happens when we do this. It’s just an outlook task with a due date, colour, priority. This is just a task I created – you can see that task will be displayed in the task pane right there. The cool thing about that is that it will also show up in my Outlook task list – let’s mark it complete.
If we don’t get to all of the questions today, feel free to reach out to us at Prophet – we have lots of folks here to help you. A few more questions.
Q: Do you mind repeating how you get to PowerVI Desktop? Sure so I have it downloaded – it’s right here on my desktop – I open it straight from my desktop shortcut. I like PowerBI again because you can launch it without even being in Outlook, be anywhere and it will launch the Prophet dashboards right from the desktop.
I want to thank everyone for attending today.
Boost productivity and get the most out of Outlook with Prophet CRM. Have a look at the following topics which are covered in the Prophet CRM Learning Series. Visit www.Avidian.com
Welcome to Prophet CRM Learning Series! This video series will take you through the ins and outs of the Prophet CRM.
Ladies and gentlemen, hey! Welcome to the program!
My name is Warren Stokes. I’m the director of sales at Avidian Technologies and I’m here to share with you a very important topic: to provide some training and coaching on how to set up and use Prophet’s sales automation and workflow features.
The main idea of Prophet’s automation is that it will help you automatically follow up on leads: people you know like contacts in your database, as well as opportunities or projects that you might be tracking.
You can set up drip campaigns for your contacts or your accounts; basically, it’s set it and forget it. I’m gonna go fairly briskly through the content here just to give you an overview. Then, we’ll show you how it all works in a live demonstration of Prophet. Let’s get started!
Prophet provides two types of sales automation. One is called sales assistant: sales assistant launches a series of email reminders which are Outlook tasks and/or appointments for contacts and companies in your database. There is a function called workflow automation which launches a series of email tasks or appointments for opportunities so that’s a key distinction there. I’ll be showing you how that all works, but both of them create a series of automated actions that consist of any combination of tasks, which generate reminders that pop up in outlook appointments on your calendar, or emails that get automatically generated.
I’ll show you how that that all works as we get into it. One of the background concepts, though, is to really think through your sales automation if you’re in a sales role or a sales leadership role, you’ll want to have thought through your sales process.
Why is this important? There are multiple benefits of having a process that you’ve defined well. One of them is that it helps drive desired behaviours: it helps people move through the sales process efficiently and effectively or any other process. This isn’t limited to sales, by the way; it could be some sort of post-sale or operational process.
Also, having a well thought out process helps you scale as you add team members: you have some training capability on how to perform the processes that you want. This will also help shorten the sales cycle as you start getting the handle on how the sales process, especially the automation, works: it can shorten the amount of time it takes to get new business, which means you’re going to drive more revenue. Additionally, you end up with better forecasting, so you know where everything is at: you know “How many active quotes do I have?” or “How many proposals are out there?” “How many people have I shown our products or services to, but we haven’t gotten into the next stage yet?” and so on.
All of this is a very important background framework. You can do this on a whiteboard; you can map it out on a legal pad. I use Microsoft Physio, but it’s not important what the tool is. The reason this is important in our conversation today is that a big part of the sales automation for opportunities is triggered on the sales stages, so you need to have identified these stages and you know kind of be clear on what they all represent.
For example: stage one you get a lead; stage two you qualify the lead; stage three you present your product or service to them; stage four you get a quote or a proposal, get approval, and close the deal.
All of this stems from the steps you might have in your sales process to identify key stages: they’re the concrete milestones. You’ll know when you hit it. The whole idea is to identify these stages as key decision points, then start working on defining the actions that occur at each of these different stages; we also then agree on how many ‘touches’ should occur at each stage, then we’re going to go create the templates and automate all this.
That consists of some instructions that are built right into Prophet. I’m going to show you: there’s just a nice little user interface that allows people to create templates and then manage those templates and launch them. It’s pretty easy: you just click “create new”, select “email template”, “task or appointment” and you start creating your templates. Then, what you do is assign each of these templates the actions that you want them to take.
Now, remember I pointed out there are two types of automation. Sales assistant is what you will set up for contacts or companies because they don’t have ‘stages’ per se. So, you can set like a series – some people call it a drip series or a drip campaign – and that provides a timed set of follow-ups or touches in your workflow, which works with the opportunity function; you can set the delay days – you know, 7, 14, 21 days, or what have you – but you also set the stage, and every stage can have a unique set of automation to it. It’s pretty cool!
One other feature here is that you can choose to make actions shared which is a little check box. What that does is it publishes the templates out to your team so everyone can share the same content or design or messaging and that sort of thing. You trigger the automation, and it launches a whole series of automated follow-ups, and away you go!
So here, we’re gonna just jump right in and show you how it all works. Prophet is a CRM that’s embedded in Outlook and the way you access it is simply by clicking into the folder that you want: if I want to go into my contact manager (you’ll see I have mine on the top of my folder list) this will bring up my CRM contacts. There are two other folders which we’ll be looking at, company manager and opportunity manager, but I’m going to do the cooking show approach: I’m going to show you the finished souffle and then I’ll show you how we made it!
So, I’m in my lists of contacts here. I have many different lists that I’ve created, and that’s another training session to watch on this channel. You’re in a list, and you maybe you want to look up or look at a contact without even opening the contact. If you’ll notice, there’s a row of tabs down below, one of which is the sales automation tab. When I’ve selected a contact and I click the sales automation tab, all of the automation templates that I’ve created are available here; if I want to select a whole series I can do it right here. I can select the start date, and this is a very simple automation, in that it will just create a series of automated follow-ups based upon the dates that are in these templates here. So in this case you can see how I can go out a couple months or however long, and I’ll be showing you how we create all these in a moment, but what that does is when I click apply, it’s going to trigger the automation at all of these different stages.
For example, if I wanted an introductory email to be the first one, and I click apply, it’ll actually generate that email, ready to go; you can launch any of these emails right from here; you can see all of the ones that I have in there. I’ll show you a little bit more on that later. You can do the same thing for companies. This is how it would look if you’re in your company manager, just another folder; the difference here is that this can create a series of automations for everyone at that company. Down below here I have Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, all these people that are part of that company, so I could ‘select all’ if I wanted to create my automation for the whole group – in other words, everyone at that company – or I can just select certain automations by selecting the to-do box over here. For example, let’s say that I just want to have Angelina on my drip here, so notice here I’m only checking the boxes for her; if I wanted to add Brad, maybe I only want to have Brad get every other one of these, so I can be very selective. You can see that, visually, the checkboxes are blank or checked, and then there’s a date – or it’s blank if you’re not activating the automation for that particular person, for that particular template.
So, that’s very useful because you can set up an automated series for everyone at a company and they’re each going to get unique follow-ups; that’s the idea behind that. And again, you can set the start date – that might be useful if you know the company is going to be closed for a week over the holidays or something like that. That’s how it all looks from a contact and company standpoint.
From an opportunity standpoint, basically, you can launch a series of workflows. I’ll just pick one of the opportunities that I have here – this one is in my ‘Hollywood projects’ – and what we’ll do first is clear out the workflow, so that for the sake of this demonstration I’ll start from scratch. So, how you launch a workflow in an opportunity is you simply go to the workflow (and you’ll see there’s nothing in it).
Every stage can have a unique series of automations associated with it. Check this out: with one action, I click the label that’s also the automation button, and it asks me, “do you want to process workflow actions?” I click okay, and then a series of things start occurring automatically. There’s an email that’s been created: you can see how it picked up the first name because that’s how the template was designed – I’ll show you that in a minute. It also inserted the company’s name in the subject line and throughout, like down here it picked up that first name again. I could still edit this if I want, it’s just an email right now, but it’s generated ready-to-go. I click send; that email gets sent to that person. In this case I have another follow-up scheduled; now you can see my whole series: my first email has been done – you can see the done column, yes or no. My follow-up reminder has been set, and then I have four additional follow-ups – we call them touches a lot in the sales world – I have four additional touches, a total of six touches, with one action! Pretty cool!
Now what’s going to happen is the reminders just pop up in Outlook on that scheduled day, the emails get created automatically, and when they’re ready to send – here’s one a week from now, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, they get created and they pop up, and you choose what you want to do with them. The idea here is I might have just talked to that person five minutes ago; why would I want to send them an email that says, “Hey, I’m just checking in” or whatever? You can launch the Prophet automation queue if you want to see what’s in there, but it will automatically pop up when anything new has arrived at its scheduled date, or if you open Outlook and there’s something that was pending while Outlook was closed, it’ll pop right up.
You’ll see all your automations in here. Here’s a number of them: I could pick any one of these and say, “I want to send this person my follow-up”, or I could, if you notice these buttons down here, process all with a click; I can process one, I could snooze, or I could delete. One other little item: I could open the record associated with that lead simply by clicking up in the button there on the upper right; I could take a look at what’s been going on with that lead before I send it.
If I wanted to send one in here – you’ll see that I have one here for John Goodman – one of my options is to display it before sending. I usually do that because I just want to see it, maybe edit it, before I actually send it out to that person. So here we go: notice how it picked up the full name? Maybe I don’t want to set up a meeting right now, so I can just edit this email: maybe I want to put some other material in it. Now I’m going to add something to this subject line, “Following up again”, and click send. Now that email went to that person! Pretty awesome!
So that’s what it all looks like once it’s all set up. Now let’s go back in and talk about how we got all that setup. There are a couple of places you can get to where I’m going, but the easiest way is to look for the little wrench symbol that I’m highlighting; you just click on it and it brings up your local Prophet administrator tool. On tab number two there is my sales automation tab. You’ll see there’s three windows in it: the top one is just where my templates reside; these are templates that have been created (and by the way, if you’re just starting with Prophet, there will be templates that are examples to get you started); I’ll just show you one that’s been created and then I’ll show you how to create them.
But here’s a great example: everybody will always have some sort of first outreach; a lot of times it’s an email. If I click edit here, it will bring up the template that I’ve already created; this helps us get an idea of how it’s structured. Right off the bat, you can see that it has here in the subject line: “Prophet CRM info you’re requested for…” and in parentheses, (company name) has to be spelt exactly like that to pick that field up with no spaces or capital letters. And if you want just the first name, it’s just parentheses capital (First). Put your punctuation in as you wish, comma, colon, or whatever, and then the rest of it is just content that you’re creating here.
Now once I’m happy with this template I just go up: in the ribbon in the email template, just like in Outlook, there are ribbons, and there’s one that’s called “Prophet Template”. I just click “save template” and it will save that template as I’ve just created it. So, I’ll show you a little bit more as to how we might create one from scratch now, and then I’ll talk about setting up the rest of the series.
So let’s just say I haven’t built my templates, or I want to create a new template. Very simple: I just go over here to “new”, and I select: what type of template it is, what type of action remember it’s going to be – you have your choice of combinations of emails, tasks, appointments – so let’s say I wanted to create an email template for the sake of this. First of all, I just selected the term email. I want to create a name for that template; I like to number my templates, as you’ll see, 01, 02, 03, and so forth, because it’ll keep them organized in my setup here; I’m just going to call this “001” and call it “new email”. You’ll see that pop up here in my list here in a moment, so I just click okay.
Now what pops up is the email template itself with the instructions; that’s handy so you can pick different fields that you can populate – mainly it’s the salutation: hello (first name), (your title), (last name), that sort of thing. We give the ability to put the company name here. Maybe you want to write, “Hey, would you mind if I called you at this number?” and it would populate things of that nature. Really, the instructions are here, but I’m just going to delete them, because that’s what you’ll do, and now I’m just going to create the template. Very simple to do: I could just start with “hello” just like I would compose any email. In this case, remember what it was, parentheses (First) with the F capitalized. I use a comma in my salutations, some people use a colon, whatever.
Now, I’m going to put in my content. I could just start typing it in, “thank you for your interest in our product” or whatever. I’m going to show you just a little ancillary trick here: this is called quick parts; it’s part of Outlook. It’s a little kind of a sidebar where you can have a library of templates built-in that can be triggered by keywords. For example, I have a keyword called info, and just by typing it in it’ll pop up that template. Here’s my intro that I just put in here, which is content for the email; again, you can edit it still – it’s just an outlook email format! You can put things in, like photos or whatever, and you give it a subject line (whatever you want). By the way, you can also attach files like this one; you can see that it can be sent attached as a copy or a link – that’s just an Outlook function. I’ve created my template now. Most people have their template automatically generate when they create an email; if you don’t, you will put your signature in here. If you do have your email automatically appended you would usually just delete it from the template.
Great, now we’ve created ourselves a template, what do we do? We go up to the top where it says “Prophet template” and we say “save”, now that new template has been created! Not that hard! That’s step one, and now step two would be to tell the system what you want it to do, how you want it to behave, and that’s the assign button right up here. Now here’s where I make that distinction between whether we’re doing a sales assistance action, which applies to contacts and/or companies, or whether it’s a workflow action, which applies to opportunities.
For right now, I’m just going to select “assign a workflow action”; there’s a little check box that you could use if your company wanted to, that says “make action shared”, which publishes the templates out to everyone, useful if you want to content that’s consistent amongst your team, or messaging or that sort of thing, logos, etc., but I’m going to skip that for now. You can see, it’s picked up the title of the action, “new email” and the action type is email. Down here is the number of days of delay before it launches. You’ll see why that’s important in a moment when I show you this again, but because this is my first email and I’ve just launched the series, I’m going to put a zero-days delay; we could have ones like you see in my list here, some of these have, you know, 7, 14, 21 days delay, so you create a series, but right now I’m just going to launch it. Let’s put it in stage one here – that would make sense for an introductory email.
We’ve told it what to do, we’ve selected “workflow”, we know it’s an email. I’m gonna do a zero-day delay and I’m gonna have it in stage one down here of my opportunities. I click “save”. Now what happens is that gets launched into the setup that’s already been done (and by the way, here’s why I like to number my templates: because then I can sort them right here). In the case of these workflows, it’s nice to see them in order of the sales process, but there’s that new one, and you can see it says zero-days delay.
I just want to show you the new one that I created. Who should we do today, how about Tony Hawk? Let’s do a little workflow launch for Tony Hawk now and I’ll show you what that email did. So right now Tony doesn’t have any workflow set – if you see where I’m at in these tabs along the bottom, I’m over here in workflow – but let’s put them in stage one, and let’s just launch that. How do we do it again? Click the button, now it’s asking me “do you want to process the workflow”; I’m going to click ok, and now bingo, look at this: we’ve got that email with the attachment, everything ready to go. But again, I could still edit this, I could change it, I could put other content in it or what have you. Alright, now I can send it to the to the customer or prospect; there’s another reminder that’s been set, so the first two launched already; the reminder’s been set for a two-day follow-up. The email’s been done but I still have one two three four more follow-ups in the series on those future days. They will pop up into this little email queue and you can decide what you want to do with them; here’s one from two weeks ago – I’ll just process it, click-click, and away we go – so that’s how the workflow automation works and launches.
Triggering of the automation is a little different in the opportunities, as you saw. I’m going to go back now to make that distinction back in the contacts – same idea – but you’ll also notice that in the contact manager here I’ve selected a contact; when I go to sales automation it brings up only those templates that I have set as sales assistant templates. So again, select all or select some of them, sort however you want to view it, select a start date if you want it to be different than today, and then you click apply, and it will launch that series including any emails, tasks, or appointments.
So that is all the magic of the sales automation in Prophet. I want to thank you all for joining today’s little training session, and I look forward to connecting with you again sometime in the near future. Boost productivity and get the most out of outlook with Prophet CRM! To have a look at the following topics, which are covered in the Prophet CRM learning series, visit www.avidian.com .
