The primary use case for a CRM system is, of course, to manage customer relationships. Most programs that exist today are optimized for performance in this space: essentials like tools for tracking sales and integration with common marketing software tend to squeeze customer relationship management software towards a very narrow function within the overall needs of a business.
[Read more…] about Using CRM Systems in Unique Ways
Ladies and gentlemen, members of the press, welcome to today’s program. My name is Warren Stokes, your host and presenter today. I’m Director of Sales at Avidian Technologies, the developer of Prophet CRM for Outlook. I’m sure many of you are existing clients of ours, but there are also some folks that are probably considering Prophet as their contact management system. So we have a really important topic today. Actually, it looks like it’s one of the more popular topics I’ve broadcast in quite a while: I would like to share with you some of the best practices for effective contact management.
So what I’m going to do today is I’m going to give you some of these concepts and explain what we’re going to go into detail on, and then most of our time will be spent actually showing you how it all works. We’re going to be demonstrating this in Prophet CRM, so we’re going to cover actually quite a few topics, so we’re going to try to get through this in about 45 minutes.
One of the big questions that I run into is, “what is a contact?” You’re going to see that it’s not quite as simple as it sounds. We’re going to show you how to structure and then interpret the contact data in your CRM. Simple things like how to create contacts, companies, and so forth in the system, working with views. These are basically lists that you can create that will give you the ability to organize your data. How to export data to an excel file using search functions. How to find things. Then I’ll show you some of the ways that Prophet helps you prevent duplicate data from getting into it and how to clean up data if it happens.
So, as I said, one of the questions that comes up is what is a contact? Well, the reason it’s not as simple as it sounds is several things. It’s the record of a person, so that’s a noun, you know, the person. It could be considered the record of a company and perhaps the people associated with it, but it can also be referred to as an action, you know, to make contact or do outreach in various ways. A phone call is a type of contact as a verb, and there are different types of phone calls. You can have calls coming in, make outbound calls, leave voicemails, but they’re all some form of contact. Another word for that is touch. A meeting is a type of action to make contact. They can be in person, you know, zoom meetings or team meetings, which are very common these days.
One of the things I want to emphasize is that contacts are one of your most valuable assets. Think about it, your sales contacts, your prospect contacts, even vendors and other contacts, having a centralized database that everyone can access and share is one of the key value propositions of having a good contact management system. Now we’re not going to get into a lot of the other parts of the CRM, such as opportunity and lead tracking and so forth, today we’re going to focus in on the contact aspect of the system.
But just to get you oriented on how the data structure works, companies are a type of contact but they actually have people associated with them. So you can have a company with child relationships, or subsidiaries, whatever you call them, and those subsidiaries could have other companies under them. Those are actually Outlook contact cards, and whether you sync them with your local contacts or not, we still use that format because pretty much every device on the planet syncs right out of the box with Outlook contacts.
But the whole point is, we’re not going to get into opportunities today, but the whole point is to be able to capture all your contact data, keep it in a central place, and then track all the activities and information associated with those contacts and companies. Today we’re going to be looking at contact data and company data, and we’re going to talk about and show you in real time how you actually get contacts into the system.
The Outlook contacts themselves are part of the system unless you mark them private, which is an Outlook function. Company records are created automatically. It’s pretty cool actually. You’ll see how that works. We have a patent on that. The drag and drop from inbound emails is also part of the system. A lot of things happen via email, so we have made it very easy to create contacts from inbound emails. You can create contacts from the Prophet mobile apps and there’s also an import function where you can import data from excel and that’s also, by the way, used for mass updating records. We have website form integration to create contacts and or leads. We can also integrate with accounting or other systems to, you know, integrate contacts from those systems. I’ll be posting my contact information and our customer service information at the end of the webinar, so if you’re interested in any of those other topics, please feel free to reach out to me.
Creating company records is pretty simple. You can create a company just by using the new company function. You can create companies just like you can contact people from the mobile app through the import utility, but here’s a very important thing about all of this stuff and that is what I call the data taxonomy. What it really means is that you want to be able to have enough data to classify, categorize, and organize your contacts in useful ways, so Prophet adds 20 customizable fields to that Outlook contact and that gives you the ability to sort and filter by different criteria.
Here’s a very important thing that I wanted to share with you. Think of your data as very important and actually the basic Outlook contact or the contact record drives so much in a CRM. I like to think of it this way. There are certain things that you just can’t do without. You really must have a full name. I hate it when you do see a contact and it just says “Bill”. That’s just not very useful. So full name, of course, is a must-have. Phone number, of course, is a must-have. And it’s nice to also get other information.
So the next level down is kind of what you should have if you really want to get it right. You should include a company name if it’s applicable, you should include job titles, and you should include your mobile number, which is very important these days, so you should include it. You don’t have to have it, but it’s nice to have. You can include some of the customizable fields in Prophet, such as linkedin profile, hobbies, interests, etc. Data taxonomy is much the same way. The things you must have are pretty obvious. It should include things like the physical address, same sort of deal. A website would be nice. What type of company might they be? Are they a distributor? Are they an OEM? Are they a partner? All those are customizable things that are nice to have. What size are they in terms of the number of employees? How many locations do they have? What revenue streams do they have?
So I want to switch very quickly over to the actual demonstration here, but I wanted to focus in on a really key thing. Remember when we talked about how a contact can become, um, can be looked at as an action? So Prophet has built right into it the ability to have a customized list of contact types, so activity types, as we call them, typically a phone call, a voicemail, an on-site visit, and again, customizable so that you can make it a you know, click function to make it easy to enter.
So let’s just switch gears and let’s go into Prophet and we’re going to start by just going into Outlook, so you probably already know that Prophet lives in Outlook. You’ll have a set of folders over here on the left that are your Prophet folders. You can just click on the folder and it’ll bring up your last view of contacts that you were last in. It remembers your last view and in this case, I’m in a list of contacts in Hollywood, California. You can also have them open in Prophet. You can also open in separate windows. You can also have them open in separate windows like you can have them open in separate windows. You can have them open in separate windows so you can have your inbox, your contact manager, and various screens open at the same time.
So let’s get into that a little bit. I wanted to show you how these views are created and how to structure your data in a way that makes sense. The first thing you’re going to have two views is my contacts and all contacts. Many of you have already made or created your own personal custom views. I have one that’s a prospecting view, and so this one is organized by geography. Let me show you about this view here and this will go to creating any view and organizing your views. Over here on the far right of these tabs where I have general notes, opportunity and so forth, you have your own custom fields. You might want to know what type of contact they are. Are they a prospect, you know, a student, a current client, or what have you. Again, all customizable. You might want to know whether they’re a qualified lead, maybe have their linkedin profile, where did this contact come from, or you can have things that are very useful in sales or you know, relationship management.You can have These fields can be drop-down lists, date fields, um text fields, or what we call a memo field, which is just an expanded text field like a bio field.
So the point here is that you can use these additional fields here like lead source. Let’s say I’ve created a list that’s all filtered by first of all the geography, so you notice all these contacts are in Hollywood, California zip code 90210. I’ll show you how those work in a little more detail here in a moment, but then you can use these columns to filter by those criteria, like let’s just say that I wanted to see all of the contacts in Hollywood, California that originated from cold calls. Well, there you go. It’s a very simple list that you can create by adding a filter and notice that this is just like an excel filter. If you look at it, you just have the little check boxes. To clear the circular filter, you just click “clear filter” just like in excel.
So how do these columns get in here? There’s two ways to do it. You can right click if you’re in an existing one and select “Choose columns”. In the column chooser on the left will be the columns that are available and, remember, there’s a lot of them that you might not have in any particular view. Let’s just say country. If you want to move it into your view, you just select the right arrow and it’ll move it to the bottom of the list, which is the far right. Now if you want to move it to the left, you just move it up a ways here and you can see that what I’ve just done is I’ve added a column and I’ve moved it about halfway through my view here and that column that I’ve just created is a column called “country.” So now you can see that that’s all loaded up and you can filter or sort or filter by country, you can filter or sort or filter by country, you can filter or sort or filter by country, you can filter or sort or filter by country, so you can filter or sort or filter by country, so you can filter or sort or filter by country, so you can filter or sort, right click, select save changes to view.
So let’s talk a little bit about a very fundamental but yet very important thing today, which is the creation of your list. Some people call these lists views, same thing. So let’s just click this little button. It’s a little bit of a red pencil and a piece of paper, sort of an icon, and it says edit this view. So I can edit a view that way. For example, how are you going to select your contacts by folder or by user assignment or what kind of context you want? So this is just your view setup and again, how I got there is that I usually choose the and filter. So the criteria are that all contacts that match all three of these filters are going to be displayed in that list. Pretty cool. If you make it an or filter, that would mean anyone that’s either in California, or Hollywood, or 90210 zip code would be displayed. But that’s not quite as useful as a filter, so we usually choose the and filter. One of them is to create a new view and manage other views.
But let’s just show you how to create a new view. It’s super easy. You just click create new, it brings up some default columns, but you give it a name and I’ll call this my webinar example view. How about we just create a new view for you here? All right, so this one I don’t think I need a description, but you could put one in. By the way, this is just whether you want a simple list or a table grid.
Now, let’s take a step forward and talk about the significance of data taxonomy. Here’s an example.So let’s say you’re doing some prospecting and you want to create a big list. So this is where we can get into importing. You can actually import lists into the Prophet. You know, that’s sort of a lost art these days, but how that works is you create a spreadsheet and I’ll show you an example of one, and you have certain fields that you want because it’s going to help you sort and filter these contacts that you’ve created.
So what would we do to get a contact list like this? We would first get our data in an excel format and I’ll just show you some examples of that. So here’s one that has both contact and company data in it. Notice down at the bottom of the file that one of the worksheets is labeled contact. One of the worksheets is labeled company. So here’s one that has both contact and company data in it.
Your users are your Prophet users, so you can pre-assign them and it’s very useful to do in an import. You should usually have someone assigned to them, otherwise they’re kind of orphaned contacts upon import and then only an admin can find them. You can put notes in here. One little one little tip on that, um, I’m not sure the reason for this, but it’s a useful tip is that if you start putting notes in a contact.
So let’s go ahead and show you how to import companies into Prophet. The main thing about company import is that you can’t have any exact duplicates. This is one of the important things about company import. You can’t have exact duplicates of company names, which might probably make sense. But you can have contacts and companies. So let’s go ahead and import contacts and companies into Prophet. The first thing you have to do is create an excel file, save it, and then run this import tool The import tool is found right up here under tools and it’s just a four-step wizard where you import the data, select the file that you want, map the fields, and automatically it all starts happening, so that’s how that would work.
Let’s get back into the various ways that you can create contacts in the Prophet, and I’m keeping an eye out for any chat questions or q&a that’s going on here. So first of all, anytime you create an Outlook contact, unless you mark it private, it will be created in Prophet. Another way to create contacts is by dragging and dropping from an inbound email, which I can show you. You can also import and create contacts from the Prophet mobile apps, and for that matter, if you’re syncing your phone with Outlook and you have Prophet, you can actually create just a native contact on your phone.
There’s another function of creating contacts which has to do with importing contacts from a website, so let me give you an example of that. So if you have a contact form on your website like this right here, “contact us” or “business email phone number”, we can set that up or you can use our open api for this.” So you can create contacts from a form on your website. That’s a pretty cool function. And finally, we can do integration with your accounting system.
So let’s just go back to a really simple function of creating a contact from an inbound email. Let’s say I just got an email from Anthony and I want to create a contact from it. Now what Prophet does is it looks to see if this contact already exists. If it does, it will show you that. So let’s just continue and say “Create New Contact.”
You can also create contacts through various different screens. Whenever you see the function that says “new” in here, I just had some kind of an error, so let me get it. Now whenever you see this new function, you can say “create a new contact.” This also has duplicate checking, so I wouldn’t create a new one because it already exists, unless maybe there are two people in your world named Anthony Hopkins.” So I wouldn’t create a new one because it already exists.
But another aspect, and this is actually a very useful thing, is that rather than creating a contact first based on the name, you can start typing in the spelling of the company and that will start bringing up companies that have that first initial, um, you know the letters you’re typing in. So here’s a little shortcut for you: you may or may not know this, but if you want to create a contact from the same company, you just open the Outlook contact and
Now what you’re going to see is when you’re in that company record, which you can access several different ways. I’ll show you a little shortcut in the contact. You can actually open the company associated with that contact and see the new one, Billy Smith, and I see Anthony there as well. You can also see here that we’re in the company record, so we segued into that company’s customizable fields, like you might want to keep track of how much revenue the size of the company is or company type You can have up to 72 of these fields. You notice how you can have them be dropped down fields. They can be date fields. They can be memo or text fields. That helps us with the taxonomy of sorting and filtering.
So what we’ve just covered in contact is actually all applicable to the company record. So when you click on the folder or have the folder open called company manager, you’re going to see a list just like we had before. Notice that you can sort or filter by any of these. Let’s say I wanted to look at only manufacturers, so again, like an excel filter, I’ll look at manufacturers. This list is already filtered by geography, so this is all the manufacturers in Hollywood.
One thing you can do is just log in your activity and remember that we talked about this earlier with one of the concepts of contact is to contact someone by phone, leave a voicemail, etc. These are your customizable activity actions. I did a continued outreach and whatever you guys want, your administrator can set this up. Basically, it’s just so that you don’t have to type in repetitive things. I sent a quote, I left a voicemail, and so on and notice that the time and the date and the username are stamped in there automatically.
Now this is very unique and it’s not a blind copy, it’s not like a mass email, it’s actually going to create an individual personalized email for everyone on this list. I could just type the email just like I was composing an email to one person, or you may know that there’s both quick parts which are a type of template and in 365 you can actually just insert content from templates. So I’m just going to insert a couple blocks of content here, I’ll put in my signature and all.
Now I send that once a day when I’m ready to compose. The first one in the list alphabetically gets sent and you’ll actually be able to see it in your scent items. You can go inspect it if you want. I don’t usually do it, but I do inspect my emails before I send them. There’s no exact limit on what you can send in Prophet. 50, 100, 200 at a time or whatever targeted list. But Prophet also has integration built into it with mailchimp and we have a new constant contact integration coming out.
So what that means is you can keep your data in the Prophet and keep it centralized and organized, and you can subscribe those contacts into various lists. You can do that through the company folder or the contact folder. Let me take a couple of questions. One of them is, “Can I get more detailed info on making contacts from forums on our website?” Yes, Rosemary. Thank you for that question. I will definitely take care of that. I will get right back to you.
So we are in a list of companies and one of the things I wanted to show you is how the parent-child relationship works. I have a few companies in our database here that have a parent-child relationship. What that means is that a company can have related companies that we call child companies, sort of below it in the hierarchy of the data. So the parent is, in this case, the Carle Foundation Carle Clinic, Carl Engineering, and Carle Foundation Hospital. Now if I’m in a child company, you’ll actually be able to easily access the parent company just by clicking that link and vice versa. You can go back and forth. The main thing is that it gives you visibility of all the companies that are related to one another. And a very important thing is that if you are in a parent company’s view and a list, you can actually see opportunities for either just that company or all the companies that are under that parent company. The ability to track emails is pretty awesome just to kind of keep track of your very large customers so that you can have visibility of all of the roll up if you will. A couple of other functions here that I wanted to go through which apply to contacts and companies is the ability to track emails.
So let’s just go back in and let’s just look at some accounts here. So here in the activities section, this tab down below gives you the ability to track emails, appointments, and tasks for anyone related to that particular company. So if I click on the email and click search here, it just organizes all the emails that are sent to or from anyone at that company and puts them right into the con the company view here. So these are the emails that have been sent or received to or from anyone at that company. So that’s just go back in the company. So let’s them.
So how does that work? Let’s just go into my inbox and I’ll show you an example of that. Let’s say I get an inbox from, oh let’s just do Anthony again just for the sake of it, and let’s say that I wanted this contact, this contact, to be linked to a contact or a company. You’ll see up here in the Prophet ribbon a little link symbol. I use it all the time. So in this case, I can say I want to link it to automatically link it to any company, but in this case, I’d probably link it to his company. Click link, we’ll link that email once, making it shareable amongst the team. Click auto link in any email to or from that person will be linked to the company record and thus be shareable when you’re looking at a view of the activity under a company. Same thing applies to appointments and tasks.
So let’s let’s talk a little bit about getting company records in here. You can do it from the import, which I briefly showed you the concept of, or you can also just go in here and say “new company.” That just creates a new company from scratch, and it will, basically, then you add contacts to it or what have you. You can create companies from the mobile app. You can also create them through the import, as I said.
So one of the simple things you can do is any time you’re in a view, any time you’re in a view filtered or what have you sorted and filtered a certain way, like I could sort this view or filter it down by certain types of companies, and let’s just say I only wanted you to know several different categories of companies, so I’m in that list. I need to point out that this is a permission-based function. If you go to do this and it says it’s
I wanted to talk a little bit about searching. So let’s say you’re in a list and I’ll just go back into my main list here, one of my main lists, and I’m going to show you several ways to search. One of the ways is you can search any column. It’s just like excel, you click the little filter button and it says search and I could actually look for the woods. Okay, so this just lets me search for a particular record, so you can do that with any column again. Maybe I just want to look at the word “OEM” if it’s a long list, and there you go. So you can, in other words, search by clicking this little filter icon on any column.
Another type of search is the view search that’s up here and so this might be okay. I just put that term in there and out of all of those those company records, I found the one that had well, it could be more, but this one is the only one that has the term lebowski in it. My lebowski manufacturing, John Goodman, and all those wonderful people. Okay, one of my favorite films by the way. So you can clear that search.
Now another thing you can do is you can search for con records and include a search of the notes. This is pretty interesting. I’m going to just type in a term. It’s quite a uni. So if you type in something like “meeting” or “convention”, it will display those notes, but it doesn’t actually display them. Let me find a note that actually works there. What I’m looking for is just some sort of unique note that I can, oh yeah, here we go, um, I’ll put in the term Madagascar. Okay, type in your search term with notes and it will display any records in that list that have that term in the notes area of the company. In this case, the company records. So that could be fairly handy in case you want to look for like a project name. So here in Lebowski Manufacturing, you can see down here in the notes that it will have that term “Madagascar” in it.
Okay, let’s say I want to look up Carle Clinic and I want to bypass the list I’m in just to save a little time here. Well, I can find that record just through an advanced search without notes in that case. So we’ve got column search, we’ve got a search view, we’ve got search without notes and we’ve got search with notes, all working great. Another one is the ability to do a global search. So if I click on this search icon, which you’ll see in the Prophet ribbon or various places, and then you put your search term in here, like “mel gibson,” which is actually a friend of mine, sort of, you can see that here’s the contact, there’s the company, and there’s all the opportunities related to Me.
So here’s another unique thing about global search is you can actually search for images, um, or other things in documents and it’ll, in other words, outside of the Prophet database. I did an image search and I found Mel Gibson’s image on my computer. Pretty cool. So that’s the searching function. Another unique thing about global search is you can actually search for images, um, or other things in documents and it’ll, in other words, outside of the Prophet database.
Anyway, one of the things you can do is generate documents. It’s called file gen or generating files. You can have this right from the list view. You can say “I want to generate a proposal for this person.” So this will generate a proposal document that’s based on a template and it’s going to autofill information from the company record and, in this case, the contact prepared for this person for Carl Clinic. There’s the address that Yep, and see how it’s auto filled wherever that field name is in the template, it just auto fills it into the with this file gen function. Very useful. If you create a file like that, you’ll see that it’s going to be linked to the company automatically.
Let me just show you what those templates look like. I think that would be a useful thing to do here, so let’s just go in and look at my file gen templates. So a template looks like this. It’s either a word or an excel document. We’re doing word today and it just simply has the field flags like contact name, company name, in these square brackets in the word document and then you just save it to the location of your choice. In fact, you can see if I click on tools here, you can see template file location, so you can decide where those templates are. In my case, it’s just on my local drive, but it could be a shared drive or you can default to saving where you want those files saved to. It could be a call report, or it could be some sort of invoicing system, or it could be anything you want.
I know we’re reaching the top of the hour but okay, I got a question. That search button on the left is Prophet and your computer. Yes, go back to that. Just to quickly clarify, if I click that search button, you can see how it will search your computer as well for anything related to your search term. That’s why we call it a global search. It is Prophet, and it is Outlook contacts.’s emails. It’s all this cool stuff. So let’s talk a little bit about more reporting and then we’ll wrap up here. So there’s three types of reports: the export to excel, which I showed you; there’s also various types of reports built into this tool called the report manager, and there are about 30 or so that come with Prophet, but one of the useful ones is just to create a kind of an activity log of, um, you know, your contacts for your companies and you can customize this to your liking.
So if I wanted to go in here and change that image there, I can do that. I’ll just show you that little rope briefly here and let’s say that I want that to be one of our logos. Let’s just say that this would be like your own company logo. I’ll just do 15 days and you can generate that report in excel or what we call basic, which allows you to save it in different file types.
So you can create a new report using this wizard and all that is you give the report a name and you choose the columns you want and then you can format it further once you’ve got that report built and then finally there are dashboards that you may or may not have access to depending on your plan that you have with us. Um, I won’t get deep into those, but it’s nice to say that you can have all of your activities for contacts and companies in a graphical format so that you can see just overall call activities or various whatever you’ve got a new report.
I do want to thank everyone for joining today’s session. I want to post this contact information for just a few minutes. If I haven’t answered your questions or your outreach during the webinar, please feel free to reach me or your account manager. I want to wish you a very safe rest of the day and we’ll talk to you again on the next program. Thank you.
Greetings and welcome to the program today! My name is Warren Stokes. I’m your host and presenter, and we have a very popular topic today: how to get started with Prophet CRM! Now, this is going to be useful for anyone who is just getting started with Prophet for the first time, but it also serves as a great refresher on some of the basics, and for those who are just curious as to how it all works. So welcome to the program!
This is being recorded – a video will be made after the webinar today. The topics cover all the things about getting started with Prophet CRM – stuff like how to prep your computer, how to get your contacts organized and prepared, installation, setting up views and lists, etc etc – you know, just getting started with Prophet. And very importantly, just how to start managing your contacts effectively. I’ll show you through the slide deck and through a live demonstration.
Basically, on the computer prep, all you really need to think about is having a fairly modern computer with, hopefully, Windows 10 on it (though we also support older versions of Windows). And you need Outlook, either standalone or as part of Office 365. 32 bit is fine but 64 bit is better – has to be a PC unless you’re going to jump through some hoops to run it on a Mac. If you have a Mac, contact me separately, we’ll get you sorted out on that.
One of the key things to start with is to prepare your contacts. One of the key concepts that Prophet uses is the ability to mark contacts as private – it’s just an outlook function. There’s a little lock symbol on an outlook contact – you can also put them in a list view by adding the column “private” into your outlook list using the field chooser. You can just go down the list and check the box for all of the contacts that you do not want to be in Prophet; if you miss some you can go back and mark the contact private – that’s just a way to segment the contacts so you don’t end up with your dog groomer and aunt and uncle in the CRM.
On a new installation, the first thing you have to do is create a password. I’ll also make this slide deck available – simply email me later, and if you want a copy of it you can have it or just watch the video. But it’s on Prophetondemand.com , and you go there and you’re going to see a sign-in screen where you put your email address in. A little shortcut, click “forgot your password” because you don’t have a password yet – this will give you a link to create a password.
It’s pretty painless to download the software. Go to our website, avidian.com/install/client and download the software – it does require admin rights unless you happen to want me to show you how to install it as a non-admin – don’t worry about that too much right now.
Close Outlook and then run the file. It takes you through all the normal little windows install stuff – terms and conditions – it goes through some setup stuff and then at the end you’ll see a button that says finish. It’s going to launch you into this page here which is your initial setup, and all you’ve gotta do is put that new password in, along with your email, and away you go.
You are going to be launched into Prophet, which will automatically open Outlook. It’s going to put you into the contact manager. You may or may not see any contacts in here – depends whether or not you are already part of an implementation of Prophet – but basically it’s going to launch you into a view called “all contacts” – and I’ll show you all this in a moment, so essentially what this has done is added a set of folders over here in your folder list. They might be fairly deep down but you can move them up and add them to favourites. I’ll show you how to do that but essentially you’re done installing and now you’re ready to either sync your contacts or just look at all the contacts that might already have been assigned to you
Setting up views is a key part of it. Think of a view as just a list, we call them views. To create a new view you go to “contacts”, hover over tools, and just say “create new”. This is a very important concept – setting up views. You can set them up by geography, assignment, etc – so you can give the view a name – in this case, this one’s called “Hollywood Contacts”. Optionally you can give it a description if not obvious. Then you set this – “select contacts by” which is assigned to me or you, assigned to specific users or all contacts, but that happens to be an administrative function, only you’d have to be a Prophet admin to bypass all of that.
It’s simple to add, you know, views by city, state, you just go to “additional filtering” once you’re in that view. “Options”, set the match here to this filter or another filter – all criteria must be met, so in this case state that they must be in the state of California, city of Hollywood, then you select your comparator, I use the term “equals” – up to you, equals is an exact match, contains works as well – and if you don’t know what that means just ping me afterwards in terms of what a comparator is when you’re filtering.
The next thing you could do is choose the columns that you want in the view. These are just the columns in the list, and on the left are all the columns available, including all the custom fields. You just use the little right arrow to move them to the right, move them up, move them to the left – that sort of thing. Then you choose your sort order – maybe by most recently modified date, or oldest modified day, or state/province – and then your view will look something like this.
Now you’ve got your list and it’s all of the contacts that meet that criteria. Voila! You’ve got yourself your first view, and you can replicate that throughout Prophet. You use the drop-down list to navigate between views – I’m going to expect that most of you will have multiple views here. For example, I have one called “prosp” – my current prospects – you get the idea.
So you set up these views. This works the same way for the company manager and the opportunity manager – we’re mostly focusing on contacts and companies today, but we’ll talk a bit more about getting data into Prophet. So all of your Outlook contacts come over natively right through Outlook unless you mark them private. The company records are created automatically if there’s a company name in the contact – that’s really handy. We’ll also associate the contacts with the same company name to that company’s record.
Here you can drag and drop inbound emails to create a contact. You can import data from excel – another topic I won’t cover today, but it’s not that hard – you can use that import utility to mass update records. We also offer website form integration to capture contacts and leads and such. You may or may not be interested in an ERP integration or an accounting system integration – those are add-on services we have.
And I’m going to go through the searching in some detail because really, it’s all about finding things. Searching is how you find things. There are three types of searches. There is the search of view, the advanced search, and a really handy one that allows you to search for records that have certain notes in them, which can be handy if there’s something specific like project names, and you wanted to find contacts with that in there. Then there’s a very powerful global search function which does all sorts of things, including finding contacts or companies, but it can also search and find things like images, documents, emails – very powerful! Though it also tends to generate a lot of results.
Then we’re going to show you how to manage your contacts. Basically, “check for missing data” – there’s a handy function to filter by null values to find that; cleaning up duplicates is handy and very important, which is why we have nice functions in Prophet for that. This is where it all culminates, why are you doing this? Well, it’s not just to have lists – it’s to use these lists to perform important tasks like making outbound calls – maybe you want to create a list of contacts to make calls out to, or to send email blasts, or maybe to prioritize your activity by some criteria – there’s a lot of different ways you can use them. It’s also very useful to track how many new contacts you’ve created, or your team has created, or company accounts created, etc.
You can export from Prophet as well. If you want to export to excel – this is a permission-based function – your administrator will have to give you rights to export to excel. But let’s go in and show you how this works. So right now I’m just in my email, where Prophet lives. Remember we talked about the three folders that were created – I’m going to show you what it looks like to prep your contacts.
You would go into a view of people. I’m going to perform a filter search here – say, all my contacts that I have in Hollywood – and we change it to a list view. I’m going to remove the column, first of all, to show you how to add it, because it’s not a default column. So here’s what you do to add a column, any column, to your contact list. Notice where I’m at down here in my people folder.
Let me sidetrack for a minute. There’s a secret little three buttons here, and you go to “navigation options”. Most computers and outlook instances come with “compact navigation” with little icons – I prefer the words. Uncheck compact navigation, so it’s all spelt out.
Let’s go back and put the column called “private” in here. YOu just have to hover over a column header. Right-click and find the field chooser. Once you’re in that field go to “all contact fields” – find “private” – and you’re gonna see that I can just drag and drop it to my column up in there, anywhere – you can put it between a couple of other column headers, and there you go. Now we’ve added Private in there, so I can go through and mark contacts that are not intended to be in the CRM private.
So that’s the idea of getting your contacts organized and set up. Let’s now assume you’ve just installed Prophet. It’s going to launch you into a view called “contact manager”. Before we go too much further, find the “Avidian Prophet” folder and put it in your favourites.
So again, it’s going to launch you into contact manager, a view called “all contacts”. So what we’re going to do is create some different views. I’ll go and load my view. One of the unique things about Prophet is that it lets you load lists of virtually any size. Many systems like google search retrieve, say, 25 records at a time; many CRM’s work that way. We elected to not limit the size of the list. Just bear in mind that if you have a really large list of contacts it could take a little time to load.
But in any event, I’m in a view called “all contacts”. I’m going to show you the view that I was showing you earlier. I went in and created certain filters – you can see this little icon that says “edit this view” – well, when you click “create new view” it works the same way. I’m going to show you the “cooking show approach” – I’ve already created the view, so you have the choices. User assignments is a good one; I used comparators to get Hollywood. I could add other filters just by putting my cursor here. Other criteria – which columns do you want? Let’s put in “modified date” by moving it with the right arrow to the list, and you can move it around.
So what I’ve just done is added a column, “modified date”, and put it over to the left. You can just drag and drop to move the columns around. You can hit F12 or right-click and say “save changes to view”. You can add columns through the “edit view” button, or shortcut by right-clicking and saying “choose columns” to bring you to the same view as before. Pretty awesome!
Now, one of the reasons you want to set up views like this and choose the right columns is so you can create filtered lists of all of these types of contacts. For example, in my prospecting views, maybe I want to create a filtered list by state. You can see that I can just start typing it in – I typed in part of the word “California” and found all of those – I can create a list based on criteria. Now there are other filters like type of contact and so on that you can add and there’s no limit to how many filters you can add. Let’s say I add a city – maybe San Francisco – and so I’m just adding more and more filters – narrowing down, you can see I only have nine of those types of contacts in San Francisco. So that’s one of the things you can do with Prophet, create these very valuable lists.
Now there’s a number of things you might do here. Let me clear the filters. Let’s say I wanted to search somebody’s last name – I type “Adams” in here and it’s going to bring up all the contacts who have “Adams” in the name. Pretty cool, simple to do. Clear the filter and away you go.
Now let’s go back to the Hollywood contacts because I want to show you how to do something really fun. Let’s say I want to shoot out an email to everyone that’s on this list. I can simply right-click or select them with my keyboard – I could select some or select all. One of the handy things in Prophet’s basic contact management is outreach – I can right-click and send a group email, which I can still edit – choose between HTML & text, I usually do HTML, which is on by default – this gives you the ability to personalize the email by adding a salutation like hello, “firstname”. “Importance” is an Outlook function – puts a little red exclamation point on the person’s inbound email box. Then you simply do, “create email”. All this does is brings up the first email, where I can compose the email that’s going to be sent out to all these contacts.
You may know that Microsoft 365 has a function called templates. I could go over there and pick content from a template. You can see all these content blocks I’ve got here – you can add as much as you want. Of course, you can simply type stuff in as well, use the “signature” function, give it a subject line, double-check, and send them out – be doubly sure there are no typos (you can inspect it before you click send again).
Now all of these emails are being generated out to that list of contacts. It takes about half a second per email, which is why, practically speaking, this tool is not useful for sending out thousands at a time. But it’s very handy for sending out ten, fifty, one hundred – no exact limit.
Now, one thing that just occurred was, whenever I do that, a note was put into the file that shows time and date, who sent the email, what the type of activity was (in this case the automated note says it’s a group email, tagging with the subject line). It’s also something you could run reports on if you wish, but it just gives you an idea of what’s been going on with that contact.
Continuing on that idea, one of the basic ideas throughout Prophet is this whole notes area. It’s pretty simple – fundamentally, it helps you manage your contacts. I’m in this area down here on the bottom where it says general notes. In another webinar, we’ll get deeper into customizingProphet. Suffice it to say that your administrator for Prophet (or you, if you are one) can create these customized activity entries – the whole point of this is so you don’t have to type things in all the time. It puts time, date, modified date, type of activity, etc – so you can just put a quick note in, “left the voicemail”, “did a quote follow up”, etc., just a handy way to log your activities in here.
We’re going to cover opportunities in a different session, but one of the things you can do is just look at emails, appointments, or tasks – I’ll just do emails – this will just simply search all emails sent to or received from that person. If you’re in a shared environment, this can be set up so that people can see common emails that are in the system/database – if you would like to set that up just reach out to us.
You can also see things like appointments or tasks set for that person. Notice I don’t have any setup – another thing you can do is set an appointment with somebody – just going to say “meeting with Mel Gibson” – this is just an OUtlook appointment, I use colour coding a lot – and I’m going to save that meeting. Now down here in my activities, you’ll actually see it, but the cool thing is, it’s actually on my Outlook calendar. By putting it into Prophet it actually puts it here on my Outlook Calendar! Pretty awesome!
That’s just one of the Outlook integrations that we have. So again we’re just in Contact Manager – let’s search the view and add a little spice to this. We did a fairly recent update that added the ability to do an advanced search, which also gives you the option of searching through the notes in the contacts. I’m going to just use the term “Madagascar” – kind of a unique word – and this is going to find all contacts with “Madagascar” in the notes somewhere. It can take a bit of time to do a search on that but might be useful for looking for project names or things of that nature. And there we go – a LinkedIn invite talk about “Project Madagascar” – there it is, I left a voicemail about Project Madagascar.
There’s an interesting function called Global Search, really just going up a level. You click on search – notice you can select different types of data, which is why it’s called “Global” – it’ll even search local documents, spreadsheets, and things like that. Let’s pick “contacts” and put Mel Gibson in – let’s go over here and look at images – notice it found the picture of Mel Gibson embedded in his contact. Pretty cool!
I will often just search Prophet data if I’m looking for someone and I don’t want to go outside of the world of Prophet – this will just give me Prophet data that’s related to Mel Gibson. You can see here, there’s opportunities, contacts, companies, and other types of records, just by searching in the Prophet database.
So these are some of the search functions that you’ll find handy throughout Prophet. I wanted to get a little bit more on creating contacts. Look at that, I just got an email from Anthony Hopkins. So one of the things you can do is take an inbound email and use the Outlook function to do a drag and drop. I’m going to drag it and drop it onto my People folder. Prophet introduces a duplicate checker, that’s a big thing. But it gives you the chance – maybe there really are two Anthony Hopkins in your world, so you could create a new one anyways. But in this case, I would simply open that contact instead of creating it – hope that makes sense.
But let’s say I wanted to create a new contact, maybe there wasn’t a match. I click “create new contact”. It’s warning me again that contact like this exists, and it creates the contact card for you – it’ll put the first name, last name, email address in automatically. You’ll often have an amail signature – notice that I’m not even copy-pasting, I’m just dragging it. I’ve created a new contact – it gives you another, the third, warning, I’m going to say “Create a Brand New Contact” – the reason I’m doing this is that I wanted to show you how you can use the deduping function in Prophet.
We’re going to see that sometimes you’ve accidentally got a dupe in there somehow. Well, there’s a nice feature in Prophet that lets you fix that. One of the concepts here is that you can choose which one of these is the overwriting contact. There’s business logic built into this function, but the way it works is whichever one you save and close last will show up as the override. Now I’m going to select these duplicates and right-click, “merge contacts” – it’ll fill empty fields from one contact to another, append notes (not overwrite them) – there you go, you’ve successfully “un-duped” that contact! Pretty Awesome!
With companies it will work similarly – for example, these two companies are the same but one has space. Let me check to make sure we have the right one – yep – I put in a note to make absolutely sure we’re updating the record. Now we’re going to do a company merge, same thing. Remember it won’t overwrite notes, and in case you’re worried bout it, we’ve successfully de-duped companies.
Let me check my chat – no chat messages, awesome. I’m just going to post my contact information for a couple of minutes, any questions?
Q: When saving a view, how do you save it to include filtering options that have been selected?
That’s a very good question. Let’s just say I was in the contacts view – let’s go in and say we only want California. Over here on the right you can hover over tools and it’ll say “save view as”, give it a name, “Prospecting CA” and now that view will be saved. Thank you for that question, that was a great one.
All right, so I’m going to post my contact information. Thank you everybody for joining the session today, really appreciate it. Just let us know how we can help, and hopefully, talk to you soon. Take care, and have a great rest of the day.
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 .
