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
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 .
