Ladies and gentlemen, members of the press, clients and prospects. Welcome to the program today. My name is Warren Stokes. I’m the director of sales at Avidian! I’m sure many of you are clients today. But if you’re prospectively just looking at investing in a CRM, I think you’ll find this topic very useful. I used to think it was kind of a dry topic, but I get a lot of attendees to these webinars and a lot of views on the videos that I post afterwards. Feel free to ask questions through the control panel in the Zoom webinar. I’ll get to as many of those as I can today, but the topic is how to Structure and Interpret your CRM data. So I’m gonna give you a fairly rapid set of concepts and topics here today, just to kind of get the conversation framed and then we’ll spend most of our time going through it. We’re gonna be using Prophet CRM for outlook today. So let’s get started.
Just a little bit of background. We’ve been developing and improving our product for many, many years now. And the main concept is that even though it’s all about data, we chose the outlook platform and the Microsoft office and 365 platforms primarily to make it easy for people to use – if you’re already a client you’ll know what I’m talking about, but what I’d like to say about this topic today is that CRM would be easy except for one thing and that’s data. So I’ve had about 15 years of sales management experience. I worked at Avidian for a little over that long; helped about close to a thousand companies grow their business. It’s Prophet. I just enjoy doing it. I enjoy helping people become successful and generating more income. It’s good for everybody.
I hold a couple of U.S. patents; have another one pending in the sales automation field, and have quite a lot of views on my YouTube channel. Check that out. And if you just go to Avidian, you’ll see learning videos and webinars posted there, and you’ll see tons of good stuff, but here’s the thing, as I said, CRM would be easy except for one thing. And that’s data. The data is the foundation for your entire CRM program. Without data, there’s no value to it, but data itself is just raw, raw, raw data. And, what we are going to be showing you how to do is kind of start transforming that into useful information. And from that, you’ll gain knowledge about your business. I got a lot of topics on that today, and then you’re going to start hopefully developing insight from all of this and the key to getting the data transformed into useful information, knowledge, and insight – what you really wanna look for is actionable insight.
And that’s what we’ll be talking a lot about today. You know, what can you actually do from the data? What kind of things can you do to improve your business? So here’s a way to look at it is just follow along with this and just think about it in terms of answering certain key questions. Maybe one of them is how many new contacts were created. Simple thing, how many new opportunities were created. That will tell you and give you an indicator of the health of your sales pipeline, which reps generated the most, or the least activity, what clients had the most or least activity. Maybe some of them are underserved, and we can show you how you can get that data outta here. How long is your sales cycle? How long does it take to get a new client?
This, all of this will help your forecast, your, your new business and your sales. And one of the key concepts there in terms of understanding and interpreting the data is your conversion rates. You could call it lead or opportunity conversion rates. That’s a very useful metric. How many activities does it take to close a deal in another webinar, we talk about automation and how we can ensure that, that you have good follow up. And you’ll find that, that kind, if answering that kind of question will help you generate more business, simple question, how much revenue is in my sales pipeline, things like that. So the key concepts of the topics today are what I mentioned earlier, actionable insight. What is it? Well, it’s basically using your data in such a way is that you can take action on it. What is data taxonomy?
It’s the ability to classify and categorize data so that you can understand what’s going on better. I’d like to think of it as some, some data is a ‘must have’ to make the whole system useful. Some of it you should have if you can get it. And others are just nice to have going through in detail, some best practices for structuring your data. But one of the key concepts is making it easy to get the data in and getting the data out in the form of reports and dashboards. And so on. Big, big challenge in data is preventing and cleaning up duplicate data. Avidian offers a duplicate duping service, if you will, a way to clean up your data and we can do it for you. We can also just advise you on a few methods, which I’ll cover today on how, how to remove duplicates and prevent duplicates right within the Prophet CRM.
But, you know, here’s the deal. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. So a big part of data capturing data is to allow you to manage the activities and, and the initiatives that you are undertaking with your CRM. Think of it as like, there’s kind of the, ‘what’, which is the data and the, ‘so what’, which is the insight you gain. So these are all very useful concepts when it comes to inspecting what you expect. Some companies don’t even have metrics or goals or KPIs. Some of you I’m sure do, but whatever it is, this allows you to really what, what I call to ‘inspect what you expect’. The data structure might vary from one CRM to another, but in Prophet CRM, Prophet CRM is a SQL database and it’s a relational database and it lets you keep track of things based upon different what we call objects.
When you’re talking about software design, for example, an object or an entity, the same thing is one of them is a company record. Companies can be associated with contacts. We have parent-child relationships, which I’m gonna get into a little deeper today, which allows you to see relationships between companies. You can see opportunities associated with companies, and by the way, I’ll be using this little kind of pointer system here with the circular concentric circles to kind of show you where I’m at context, a context is an object or an entity. And in Prophet, we happen to use the outlook contact card, but it’s really just part of the database. It does synchronize with your phones. There are mobile apps that come with it – as you probably know if you’re a Prophet user – contacts can be so associated with opportunities and any given contact can be associated with multiple opportunities, not Tru with all CRMs and context can be associated with companies of course, and context and Prophet can be associated with more than one company.
Opportunities is kind of the generic term. We use to define a tracking record. It’s an object, but it can take many different flavours. It might be as a sales opportunity or a lead. And since it’s a customizable form, you can call it whatever you wish. And in fact, with our enterprise edition, you can keep track of as many things like that as you want. Good examples might be customer service cases or IT projects or, you know, construction projects or whatever your industry is. You might want to, if you’re not already familiar with the enterprise system, you might wanna talk to us later about that, but it gives you the ability then to track, not just companies, contacts, and opportunities, but other types of transactional records. But the whole point of this is not just to capture the data, but it’s to understand and do something with it.
It’s to be able to track all of the interactions with clients or prospects, it’s the ability to see all the emails and appointments and tasks and other activities and associate files, docents, folders with which with each of these different types of entities. So kind of try to get your mind around that as we go through this, getting the data into there’s a lot of ways to do it, but really it’s pretty easy with a little coaching or training from us. I think you’ll find that. Well, one thing is that if you use outlook contacts, that’s gonna be automatically part of your database. A really cool thing about Prophet is that when you create a new contact, it creates the company record automatically and starts associating those other contacts from the same company. To that record, we do have part of our patent on that pretty cool. You can create contacts from drag and drop, an outlook function. You can import data from an Excel file. If you’ve never done that with Prophet, it takes a little, little coaching and training, but it’s actually pretty easy to do. So you might have, if you’re new with Prophet, you might want to import your customer list from your accounting system, or you might get lists or leads or various types of data, and you can import them from Excel.
You can also use that same Fu utility, the import utility to mass update records. It’s a very useful function to just update certain fields in all of the company or, you know, account records that you have. For example, we do offer website form integration. It’s part of our solution to be able to capture data from forms, you know, content forms or sales inquiry forms from your website. So talk to us about that. If you’re interested in getting that set up another way to get data into Prophet is to integrate it with your other systems, your E R P or accounting systems. We do offer a full integration service as well. When I mention the word taxonomy, it’s really just a concept for having enough data, to be able to classify and categorize your data. In the case of contacts, it’s gonna include not just the contact data, which will be the, you know, the normal first name, last name company, address city-states at the phone number, but Prophet adds 20 additional fields.
And I’m gonna be getting deep today into how to use that data so that you can sort and filter and slice and dice and get the information you need, and then take certain actions on it. But, you know, think of data in general and especially with a contact of some information you must have, there’s nothing worse than having a contact with just a first name, bill and a phone number or something like that. So you wanna get at the full name first and last name, capturing email addresses, crucial these days, of course, and the phone number. So if you have that information, you have a pretty useful contact, but it’s very important if you can, to get things like the company name if that’s applicable in your business, that’s gonna be extremely important. You should also have a job title because that helps you understand, you know, who’s who in the zoo, so to speak.
Another should have, would be a mobile, especially in these days. Mobile numbers are increasing increasingly important, and that’s something, if you can get it, you should strive to do so. A physical address is very handy for organizing the data by geography so that you can see all the contacts created in a certain state or city and that sort of thing. And you can start seeing trends with regards to their geographical location. What I call nice to have are other things like the LinkedIn profile might be a good use for one of the customizable fields and Prophet. That’s always, that’s always fun. Hobbies, interests, birthdays, spouse, spouse’s name, pet’s name, whatever things like that, that help you gain more knowledge about your contacts in the database. The company record is similar to a contact record, but it includes 72 customizable fields.
You can have fields of, obviously, you want the full company name. If, you know, if you can get it, you want a company phone number that could be different than the individual contact phone numbers. You really should get a physical address for the same reasons I just mentioned websites are always useful to have. So that’s an important industry that might be one of your customizable fields in the company record so that you can track your accounts by industry sort filter, do outreach, things like that type of company. Are they a distributor? Are they an ongoing account, an opportunity account, just so that you can have at a quick glance, what type of company are they, is it, or are they in the database nice to have, would be things like how many employees do they have that might be relevant in your business number of locations that they serve?
Do they have a parent is there a parent company and does it have subsidiaries? We’re gonna get into the parent-child relationship here more in a moment what Prophet does though, I’m gonna dig, dig deeper into the company data structure here. And then from this slide, we’re gonna just switch over and start looking at it all in Prophet Prophets here. So company records are basically a way to capture information about companies. There are 72 customized fields, and those can be set up as either text fields, drop-down lists, generic dates, or what we now call a memo field, which is a bigger text field. You can then sort filter and group your company data by all of those different criteria, including the 72 customizable fields. And it, and it’s useful to know there’s no limit on the number of filters that you can set, and I’ll be showing you that you can set 3, 4, 5, 6 filters to get granular with your data query Prophet has a very unique company relationship called parent-child relationships.
What it does is it allows you to see subsidiaries or locations, like as I’m pointing over here under what we call the child tab. And it’s also, you can also have an unlimited number of tiers to that. In other words, a child company can actually have its own child companies and be a parent to others. And that comes up from time to time. So there’s no limit on how many tiers of that that you can have. So let’s, let’s pause here on the slide deck and go right into Prophet. And I’m gonna start in the company data, since that, what that’s, what we were just talking about. So I wanna get your mind around first, you know, creating the data sets that are useful to you. So you can see that when I’m in the company manager folder that I just clicked on, there are these lists that we call views.
They’re just lists of, in this case, company data that is sorted and filtered in various ways. This particular view I’m in now shows me all of the accounts that I have in Hollywood, California. In fact, you can see these columns. The city is Hollywood. The state is California and the zip code is here. Now, if I were to show you how what’s behind that, there’s a setting here called edit this view. There are a couple of different ways to go about doing what I’m gonna show you here, but I’ll just show you the view editing mode because what that allows you to do is change the settings so that you can sort and filter by different criteria. When you first open those view settings, it’ll give you the view name, Hollywood accounts, how you’re selecting the data in this case by the user is the assignment. And I only want those assigned to me, but down here where it says additional filtering, this is a very important concept here for editing or creating a view.
And that is you can add criteria that filter. Now I wanna, maybe I’m stating the obvious, but filtering is different than sorting, sorting changes, the order and things that things appear. The filtering reduces the number of records by certain criteria in this case, there are three criteria. And notice you have the option of an and filter or an, a filter and filters require that all conditions are met. So in this case, the state equals California, the city equals H would. And the account is the account. Yes. In other words, are they an account or not? So in this case, the answer to that is yes. So all of these are accounts in Hollywood, California. I can add additional filters simply by placing my cursor here. And I could start typing in things like state province or, you know, postal or zip code or whatever.
And basically what this is allowing me to do is create additional filters. I’ll just start typing in zip. You can see its postal code and I can add equals. Now here’s an important part in slicing and dicing your data. It’s called the comparator. You’ll see that there’s a little dropdown list and it says equal not equal to greater than or equal to or starts with or contains. I like contains a lot because it’s just a little easier than trying to get an exact match, but on a postal code, you’d probably want equals that’s where I could put in 9 0 2, 1 oh, or some other filter. Now, again, this can be all conditions must be met or any conditions. So that’s just kind of a little backend on setting up these views. Another concept is just organizing, your data in such a way that it makes sense to you.
You can, once you’ve created a list like this, you can drag and drop columns. You can make ’em wider and narrower. In this case, you can see they’re all flagged as accounts. I’ll put you know things like the address or what have you, the industry, and all of these things are just, it’s up to you as a user to place them where you want in this list. The scroll bar takes you across all of the calls in that field. So really think of this as it’s kinda like you know, dynamic, Excel spreadsheet that you are all if you’re in a team environment that it creates a centralized database. Now, if you make changes to this, you, you would probably want to save them. So you can either hit F 12 or save changes to view that way.
When I edit, when I exit out of this view, like into another view or view equals lists, we call them views because there are different ways to look at it. But you can have things like maybe you want all of the accounts in a certain industry might be a, a good example. So here are all my healthcare accounts and you can see the industry or all healthcare. If I want to go back to that view, that I was just in my accounts in Hollywood, I can just navigate back to it through the dropdown. So just a few things about organizing the data and, and views that make sense to you. Now, I’m going to also show you how to add columns. It’s pretty easy. You just write click while you’re in the view, and you say, choose column. What you’ll see is the column chooser will come up, and this is how you select the columns, the data that you want in the view on the left, you’ll see the fields that are available like business model, and then on the right, you’ll see all of the columns that are in that view.
And now by moving them up with the arrow, it’ll move them to the left in the view. So you can add columns by going right, click choose columns. And that way you’re starting to get some really useful data here. Now, before I get into the parent-child relationships, I wanted to just show you a couple of examples of filtering, adding multiple filters to a, to a view. So here’s a good example. I want to just look at say accounts that are in Hollywood. So I’ve already got some filters set, but I’m gonna add another one in this case industry. So this just brings up I’m, I’m clicking on the little filter icon. It just brings up all the values in that dropdown list. So now, if it was a longer list, I wouldn’t have to just go, you know, sorting through it. I could just start typing in the value that I want in this case manufacturing.
So now I’ve created a view of all of my manufacturing accounts in Hollywood, California. So this is, this is a key part about you know, getting use insight from this. And from here, maybe I wanna send some kind of communication out to all of here’s the actionable insight. Now that I’ve got the data and it’s in a list and I’ve filtered it by state and city and industry that they’re in, I can take different actions. One of them would be to initiate a mail merge that generates a Microsoft word, mail merge for letters, you know, labels, envelopes. Some people still use that, but I could also use this to send a group email. So here’s an action that you can take. Okay, here’s the recipient list from that? I could still edit it, basically, just choose your salutation. I’m sure many of you use this function, but I’m just showing you this as an example of an action.
You can take from a list like this. When I say create email Prophet starts to com allow you to compose the email it’s addressed to the first person on this list. Now, if you’re on 365, have a platform, you may know that there are templates that are available that you can create. And we cover that in another webinar, but I’ll just show you how that might look, but you can also just type in the content. You can do things like maybe you want to insert your you know, your signature line or something like that. I’ll just go and do that and put a subject line in it. So what Prophet, what this will do this group, email function and Prophet. It’s going to send a personalized email out to everyone on that list. Pretty awesome. But that’s just an example of one of the many things you might do once you’ve got your data sorted and filtered correctly.
I’m keeping an eye on the chat and the Q and a button here. So I haven’t seen any questions yet, but feel free to, to you know, enter a question. If you have any, I’m also going to use this as an opportunity to show you how to create a completely new view. It’s also easy to do now. I’ve got a lot of different views created, but you’ll notice under the view dropdown, there’s a, an, an option called tools. And if you hover over it, you can simply do things like edit the current view, create a new view, manage views, and do various things. I’m just gonna click, create new view and I’ll show you how that works. So this is the creation of a new view. You give it a name.
You then choose the type. I almost always leave it in table grid. Forget that simple list. Don’t even worry about it, but, you know, you can choose by folder, which is an outlook function or by user assignment, which is the default. Maybe I want all those assigned to me. So I just leave that the same. Now I’m gonna add additional filtering. So I’m gonna create a view of all contexts in a certain state. And I’ll just make that Texas today, TX. Now, one thing you might do a good example of an or filter would be I’ll do state province equals, but I want Texas spelt out.
So I’m gonna change that to an or, or filter. So now, if I just say save the view and I’ll, I’ll label it companies in Texas, what we’re doing is we’re making some good use of the data we’ve captured. I wanna see all my accounts in Texas. Let’s just say, so there they are. They’re all in Texas. And because I put that or filter, sometimes the car, the card comes in, the contact comes in, or the record says Texas spelt out. Sometimes it’s just TX. So that’s a useful little function of the or filter. But maybe I want to see all the contacts that are in Houston, Texas. So this is the ability to add additional filtering to that, to that view. And now they go, you got different, you know, capitalizations of Houston, but that’s kind of nice because it’ll pick up any of them and I click, okay.
And now I could do a save view as very, so now I could go up here, save you as, and I could say accounts in Texas. Okay. In fact, I would change that to accounts in Houston Texas or whatever. So this is the idea of what you do with the data. Listen, very simple things, but while I’m here, I wanted to show you the concept of grouping. So let me just go back to my Hollywood accounts for a second. And that’s just one of my, my lists here that I use for demos. And I wanna show you the idea of grouping. So notice all of these columns, I can just drag one of them up to this upper area. And in fact, there’s a little, little note that says drag a column here at a group by that. Okay.
So I’m gonna do that. I’m just gonna drag the label just onto that grey area. And now I can see all of the contexts in certain industries, all of the contexts and, and education, all of the contexts and entertainment and so on. So that’s a grouping function, to take that group away. I just X, X out of it. Great. So let’s talk about parent-child relationships. No, it’s not family counselling time. It’s the data structure. You notice that they’re fields and columns that are available it says is parent is child. You might find that you because you wanna see company only companies that are parents. So if I open this record up by just double-clicking on it, you’re gonna see when I go to the child tab down below, two companies are subsidiaries of that, or we call ’em child companies.
Now, if I open up one of the child companies, you’ll see, it is linked to the parent C just easy to navigate between the two. So you with the record open or with it just like it is, you can also, this is very useful to do a roll-up of all of the opportunities for a particular parent company. So in this case, you can see all of the opportunities in which companies they belong to. And this is the, in this case, it’s the parent, but in this case, it’s the child. So think of it as just trying to get visibility of, of the entire customer organization in one view, in terms of the sales pipeline, while we’re here, not it’s a type of data, I’m just gonna mention it. One of the useful things is tracking things like emails. It’s a type of data.
So there’s another data point. You can see all the emails associated with contacts and companies that way I’m in a company record right now. And I wanted to point out if you’re not familiar with this, how that works, I’m gonna go here into my inbox. And I’m just gonna say, let’s say I wanted all emails from this person to be linked to either a, a contact company or opportunity record. So you’re gonna see when you’re highlighted on an email it’s a type of data, which is why we’re talking about it today. I can associate that email with context companies or opportunities. Now I put my little link as a shortcut in my quick access toolbar, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch one of my videos on outlook. But anyway, we just have a little shortcut that lets you choose how you want to deal with these emails in this person.
So this brings up a dialogue that says, do I wanna link it to an opportunity? If so, do I wanna automatically link emails from that person to an opportunity or just a one time link or even by a unique identifier, like a project name or something like that. So that ties the data, the pieces of data together, in one case, it’s the email and it might have a project name in it. And the, and the project itself, the opportunity would have, you know, the description, the description line, that project name, perhaps. So you can do it that way, but you can also choose to link emails to context companies or both the contexts and the com. So that’s a useful function. Not all versions of Prophet – depends on what you’re on – support that out of the box. You may have to talk to your account manager to get more on that, but I wanted to bring it up because it’s a key part of the database.
It’s not just contact, company, and so forth. It’s the activities in ’em including things like notes, by the way, which you’re probably familiar with the whole idea of, you know, logging in interactions through the notes function. And if you’re not familiar with it, you can custom, you can create customized note entries. Like I did a quote follow up, you know, I sent a quote, I, we had an onsite visit. I took some notes and this, this is part of your database too, which is automatic, which is the, anytime you put a note in its time and date stamped as the user that put the note in and whatever they’ve flagged it in terms of activity type. So the tracking of activities is also part of the database. So look at it that way. I mentioned earlier files now, Prophet just it’s really simple because when you click to add a file, it just brings up windows file Explorer.
I’m gonna, I’m gonna talk briefly about D ways data is stored for, for files. One of them, if you’re on 365 and you SharePoint, then you can actually have them synchronized with your local docents here. So if, if I wanted to put a PowerPoint under that, that customer, you can see that it created the hyperlink for it. Now if you’re on 365, you may also want to use one drive, which gives you a local copy of it, which is pretty nice. I, I prefer that. So anyway, you can link any kind of docents to this as that you wish. I’m not gonna get into sales automation today, but what I am gonna do is talk a little bit about the opportunity data now. So let’s talk about opportunity data. So in opportunity manager, you’ll see all of the opportunities in different lists here.
You can also see the opportunities for any given customer or contact in, in the, in the contact manager or company manager. Well, let’s just go in here for a moment and start talking about what’s important in an opportunity. So first of all, it is a customizable form. We’re gonna get to duplicates in a moment. I have a question about that and I’ll show you that in just a moment, Jim but in this case, I’m in, an opportunity it’s, it’s an opportunity for the model flu 10, apparently it’s a flu capacitor for a time machine. It looks like whatever description you give it. In fact, some people call this a project that’s a customizable feature. They call it a lead, a prospect. The default term is an opportunity, but the description, by the way, that’s where that unique identifier might reside.
Like if I was linking all emails that had the term flu model flu 10, and then those emails would be tracked automatically to this, the status is all customizable and, you know, it’s gonna default as an active opportunity and then you’re gonna move it to different sta statuses status is the outcome. Don’t confuse it with stage one, lost on hold active. The stage though really is valuable because it lets you keep track of where things are at. And I’m, I’m sure most of you are, have used this to some degree, but I do wanna point out that it’s not just limited to the sales stages. You can also put post-sales stages in there for things that happen after the opportunity is closed. And one let’s just say, but all of this data. So, in my mind, there are basically four pieces of information that are really important to me managing your sales pipeline.
And even though you might have 2030 pieces of information in here, you don’t need them all to, to effectively manage your sales pipeline. So those, those things are in my mind, what stage you’re in the probability, the estimated close date and the potential revenue with those things, you can generate a, a, a forecast and that’s subject for another, another part of this, this webinar today. It’s more what you can do out of it. And one of them would be to generate a forecast. What do I got in my pipeline that I think might close this month, this quarter, next quarter, or what have you? So we’re gonna show you that here in a bit, but those four pieces of information are very valuable, not however to deemphasize some key information, like where did the, what type of lead is this?
Where did it come from? Is it a website lead? Is it a referral? Is it a cold call? You know, what type of lead is it? Maybe even what type of sale it is. We have various types of sales that we do here, expansion, new sales, renewal, and so on. If it’s a web website lead, where did that originate? And you, you can have in your, your webmaster we’ll know how to do this, but when the leads come, it can actually flag, you know, where it came from. And that becomes useful because you can start interpreting this data to figure out what’s working and do more of it. Or if something isn’t working and you’re investing in investing money in, you know, some sort of lead vendor or something like that, then you can decide not to do it based on the data you get out of this system.
But don’t overcomplicate it, think of an opportunity as just having, you know, four or five pieces of information, you really must have to be useful in an opportunity. You can also make certain fields required, although don’t get carried away with that. Cuz if you do it too much, it’s a little bit counter to user adoption, of course, is very important. But let’s just say, now that you’ve got some opportunities going on, what are we gonna do with them? Well, the same concepts apply that I showed you earlier in that you can create different lists. And like I showed you before, in this case, it’s lists of opportunities. You can group by just dragging it up. One of these columns is up to the grey bar there and you can see how they’re grouped by sales stage. So if I just wanna now go in and I wanna look at all of the deals that are in stage four, easy to do.
If I wanna look at all the deal deals that are in stage two, I can see it. So that’s the grouping again, but you can also do it for opportunities. So it’s a useful function, but sorting it and filtering the data itself is one of the most important things you can do, you can always go into the edit view and change the settings, like even the sort settings, but you can also just click on the columns. But before I get into that, I also wanted to point out, this is a relatively new feature that you can choose. How many records do you want to display? Now down here in the lower left, you’ll see there’s a little dropdown when I’m in a particular folder view. In this case opportunities, I could display a hundred, 200, 500 a thousand or all the reason we, we enhanced the and added this feature is that Prophet is unique in that it lets you view any size of lists that you want most CRMs in effect, very similar to how Google works.
You get 25 results per page. Take an action on a list longer than say 25 records like sending an email or something. Well, that’s kind of goofy. So we let you choose. Now the downside of that is a very big list, like a thousand records or more can take a little bit longer load time. So just keep that in mind. But in any event, I have 50 records here and I wanna sort them, an easy thing to do is you can just click on the column that you wanna sort by. And it’s just kinda like an Excel column. If you click it again, it sorts it descending. So that was a generic field. So now this is all of my deals that I’m looking at from top to bottom.
What question does it answer? What, what is the interpretation here? Well, maybe I wanna just look at my top 10 deals or whatever, and I want us to get a quick view of what they are. Well, one thing, Prophet summarizes them down here for me. Okay. I notice again, if I’m just selecting and as I do that, you’ll see, it’s adding to that summary at the bottom 7, 8, 9, 10. So I’ve highlighted 10 records right there. The total value of my top 10 in the pipeline is $525,000 in change. The average deal size is 52,000 without even running a report, which we’re gonna get to here momentarily. We’re gonna wrap up with some of the reports and dashboards. So, well that’s useful. I don’t have to run a report, but while we’re talking about that and I’m in a list like that, you can always just click the Excel button in this case.
I only want to export selected rows because those are the ones I highlighted. I’m just showing you this a little precursor to our reporting part of the webinar. And it simply creates an Excel report of that exact data that you just chose pretty awesome because people know Excel, you can slice dice, do you know, pivot tables, charts, and graphs, and Excel all day long. And we make it really easy to do. I will point out though that the ability to export to is a permission-based function that your Prophet administrator has to give you so export to Excel while I was just there move columns around drag and drop, add new columns to it. You know, you can write click twos, columns, the same sort of thing that we did before. And it just basically lets you create unique views.
You can save them and give them different lists. Like, you know, closing this month is a useful one, you know you know, opportunities in Texas, in this case, you know, my Hollywood opportunities. And so you can create as many lists like that as you wish. If you wanna send out emails from here, you can not all CRS let you do this, but I can select some, all of these opportunities in my pipeline and send everyone an email blast just like we did from the accounting side. And this just simply lets you create a personalized email to everyone on that list. All right. So one of the questions was having to do with, let’s see the question was de-duping, so let’s switch it back. Let’s just kind of switch gears and, and talk about duplicate prevention and de-duping.
Before even getting into the detail here, Avidian does offer our company does offer de-duping of the Prophet database. If for whatever reason, you are knee-deep into this or years into it. And you know, you have a lot of duplicates and hadn’t been too diligent about it. We offer a duping service. So reach out to your account manager or even me, I’m always happy to chat with anyone after the webinar if you’re interested in our duping service. But we’re just gonna go in and I’m gonna just see if I have any D’s right now. I usually don’t have a lot of ’em, but I’m gonna look up, I’m gonna also use this as an example to do, to bypass the filter view here. And I just wanna go into advanced search here. Okay.
So what this is gonna do is show me all of the contacts. We have a D okay. So here’s a duplicate in here, Anthony Hopkins. And one of them has some categories set. One of them has a job title, one of them doesn’t I’m gonna look at ’em, but the Prophet has the ability to Dedupe automatically, but there is one last thing or one kind of overriding thing is that if you’re looking at the context, trying to make sense of which one’s the best contact, well, you just open it and save it. Now I can just select the duplicates, that is in the database. And if you see them there, you can, you can, you can obviously tell that’s a do and I’m just gonna select them both and right.
Click and say merge context. So what this is gonna do first, it’s gonna show you what it’s gonna do, by the way, notes are always appended. Nothing gets overwritten in notes. So don’t worry about that. But blank fields are automatically populated the populated fields. And the reason we did that last save and close was if there’s data in both contacts, then it’s gonna, the most recently saved one will override. I click merge. And this is a way to, to De-dupe. Now I could have had five of those contacts in there and I could de-dupe ’em all in one shot. So hopefully that answered your question about how to Dedupe. Now it turns out you can also Dedupe records in the company manager same way a Prophet does not allow exact duplicates, but let’s just say you had two companies, one was spelt slightly different than the other like right here, see how that one says, batwoman fashion products, and it has a space in it.
And this one doesn’t, this might be the old LLC Corp thing, you know, sort of scenario, you do the same sort of thing. And you wanna, you know, wanna go in and look at ’em you can, and then it works the same way in that the last one saved we’ll override the others. So let’s, dedoop a company here while we’re at it, select the companies that you wanna merge together, right? Click merge companies, and then we’ll have the companies merge in this case. It’s also noticed picking up categories. So, it’s gonna merge categories as well, and it’s gonna have that same business logic. And we boom, just successfully duped the company. I love it when a plan comes together. So that’s duping while we’re at it, I’m gonna also talk a little bit about well duplicate prevention. So Prophet has an import utility, and that has a duplicate prevention function.
But also if you’re just creating a contact manually, like so new contact, and if I wanted to say I’m gonna create a contact here. This is the contact builder, but it’s also your duplicate checker. So you can just start creating the contact. And in this case, it’s checking. I got a lot of Tony’s in the database, so there are hundreds of them. But if I start typing in the last name, you can see how it’s gonna detect if anyone has that exact match for first and last name. In this case, there is a match. So this prevents you from creating duplicates. In this case, I would simply open the contact. I wouldn’t create a new one. If, if you go you can kind of probably tell my age group by some of the demo contacts I have here. My son was a big skateboarder.
He’s like 40 now though. Gave it up. Okay, well, anyway, the whole point here is you can, you can use Prophet very confidently to create contacts and it’ll help prevent your duplicates. So that’s a pretty awesome thing. We are now going to segue into the wrap up here, we’re going to segue into reporting. I mentioned that you can always export to Excel and when you click that green button, you can choose all or select a row. So that’s, it’s always an easy way to create a report. Super easy click-click. You got yourself, a nice report. Prophet also has a report function. It’s kinda like the traditional report writer. And then in here is where you can do things like maybe you wanna look at your pipeline and do some forecasting. There are different things here, but there is a very useful one that is called forecast adjusted for probability, put in your date range, choose who you wanna forecast on one or more people.
Click view our preview previews, just to show you the first two pages. And this is a great way to see what, you know, what you’re gonna do with that opportunity data because you wanna have a report that shows you the health of your pipeline. For example, now, in this case, you can see that it shows all of the reports, the opportunities that you have, they’re all in the proposal stage, how many you expect to close, what it would be adjusted for probability. And while I’m in here, I’ll show you that with the designer tool, not to get too deep into this, but this is where you can, you know, do things like change colours put, you know, move logos around or, you know, move sponsor around and stuff like that. So I have logos in a folder here, and I would just pick whatever one I want. I’ll just say that one. That’s a little too big for that, but that’s how you would add a logo to a report. You can also create your own reports. And this just gives you, the report builder to the report category. If you have multiple departments, you choose the department. Otherwise, there’d just be one.
You give it a name, you choose the columns you want, and then later you can format it so you can build your own reports. On most, of the data here, there are also a couple of different analytics options, which create dashboards. There’s a little button here that brings up, a simple dashboard that shows you the three out of box dashboards and some it’s nice. Although I’m gonna show you what I prefer as the desktop version of this. Essentially what this is doing is it’s querying the Prophet CRM database through the cloud. And it’s creating a report of types, in this case, it’s called a dashboard. I haven’t loaded this for a while, so that’ll take a, just a second here, but what that’s doing in this case, it’s gonna show me three things. It’s gonna show me the opportunities.
The, in other words, the sales pipeline, it’s gonna show me the activities. So it’ll show you a sales pipeline and things like your funnel you know, revenue by user, by date, by the estimated close date, we talked about conversion rates, briefly conversion rates by sales rep and things like that. There’s also an activity dashboard that comes with Prophet, right outta the box. It does have to be enabled but that’s available with all of all versions in what we call the sales CRM or the enterprise. So you can then use this to filter and slice and dice and sort and filter the data. So there’s an activity dashboard. And, you know, think about it this way. Maybe it’s important in your business that people are general rating like salespeople are actually doing sales activities, a novel concept. But I find it interesting that not everyone gets that.
So this just lets you kind of benchmark your activities, like how many activities by user or by time or by activity type. And then there’s also a dashboard that comes with Prophet. That is a dashboard that’ll show. You kind of entity creation. We talked about entities earlier, how many contacts were created? How many companies, how many opportunities, who is creating ’em, who’s creating what mix of those? Prophet has some kind of AI fuzzy logic that extracts classifies contacts by job function. Not always the job title, but you can see VP manager, owner C level director and that kind of thing. And then on the right, there’s a little mapping function that shows you contacts created by geography. Then you can drill up and down to show by city or just region and that kind of thing.
So these are the three dashboards that come with Prophet and it’s really all intended to help you answer those key questions we started off with, right?
And here’s what I’m talking about at the end of the day. It’s the what and the, so what. What do you do with it? What makes some reps more productive than others? What lead sources are producing the most or the least revenue? and, you know, all data is just not as useful unless you watch the trends. That’s why I’m a big believer in watching trends and interpreting trends as your sales pipeline improves. Are you creating more opportunities this quarter than you were last quarter or last year? Are you creating more or fewer contacts? Where geographically is your new business coming from, all of these things are answering the, so what of it all. A little business tip for you today is to find out what’s not working and cut back on that stuff, find out what is working and do more of it, hopefully, that will help you get more value out of your CRM.
So I’m just gonna keep this posted here for another minute or so. Feel free to contact me or your account manager and let us know how we can help. We’d be delighted to help you with your CRM journey. Thank you all, and have a good rest of the day!
