Sales Tracking and Contact Management

A FootPrints Workspace can easily be customized for the sales team to track leads, contacts, and sales activity. The Address Book should be used to hold the contact information for the lead. Other information about the particular sale or potential sale is contained in the Workspace fields. We recommend that each time there is a potential sale for a particular contact, a new “Issue” be created for the life cycle of that sale. The fields below are suggestions for the sales team Workspace.

  • Fields—Custom fields can be created to track leads for the sales team. These fields will help with quick data entry, and help sort and report on different lead types, products, etc.
    • Built-in Fields
      • Title—Is used as a brief summary or description. If desired, this can be a drop-down list of acceptable request types, i.e. “New Lead”, “Repeat”, “Cross-Sale”, “Follow-up”, etc.
      • Description—Is used for a complete description of the activity by the sales representative for that lead. Each addition to the description contains a time, date and user stamp.
      • Assignees—The Assignee field automatically lists the sales representatives. Please refer to the section below on “Assignment” for more information

      • Statuses—Open, Working, Request for Info, Quoted, PO Pending, No Response, Dead, Closed.

        Note

        Open and Closed statuses are built-in, so only the other six must be created.

    • Priorities
      • Maximum: Set to 4
      • Default: Set to 3 (Medium Interest)
      • Words defined: Hot Lead, High Interest, Medium Interest, Casual Interest 
    • Workspace Fields—Up to 100 custom Workspace Fields can be created (no limit in SQL/Access versions) to record information about the lead. Contact information will be tracked in the Address Book (see below).  Here are some suggested fields for the sales team. 
      • Product (drop-down)—List of your company’s products and services.
      • Invoice number (character field)—If applicable.
      • Sales potential (integer or decimal field)—Enter in dollar/currency amount.
      • Percentage Chance of Closing (integer field)
      • Projected Close date (date field)
      • Primary Lead Source (drop-down)—List your lead sources, like trade shows, web sites, search engines, direct mail campaigns, referrals, etc.
      • Follow-up date (date field)
      • Date of Sale (date field)
      • Revenue of Sale (character field)
      • Maintenance Plan (drop-down field)—List your maintenance options, if applicable, i.e. Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, None. The sales rep can select the appropriate one at time of purchase.
  • Time Tracking—FootPrints can track the time spent by sales representative working leads, or travel time if desired. This data can be used to create time tracking reports for analysis of true profit of particular sales or sales types, or to aid in expense reports.
    • Recommended configuration for Sales Tracking—Enabled, Optional, Manual. If time tracking is not desired, the feature can be disabled.
    • When enabled sales representatives can optionally enter time spent working leads. In addition, travel time can be entered for time spent on the road. An hourly billing rate can be specified for each sales rep. for their travel time (see Users). 
  • Address Book—The Address Book is a sub-database that contains all of the contact information for your leads. Each record in the Address Book is called a “Contact”. Leads are referred to as “Contacts” or  “Customers”. The Address Book can contain up to 100 fields (SQL/Access versions are unlimited) for employee data, including Name, Company, Phone number, Email address, etc.
    • Suggested Address Book Fields
      • Company (character field)
      • Last Name (character field)
      • First Name (character field)
      • Title (drop-down)—List of titles i.e. Manager, Vice President, Director, etc.  Can also be a fill-in character field.
      • Email address (Email address)
      • Phone (character field)
      • Street Address (character field)
      • City (character field)
      • State (drop-down)—List of states and/or provinces
      • Country (drop-down)—List of countries (if applicable)
      • Zip/Postal Code (character field)
      • Secondary Contact (character field)
      • Secondary Contact Information (character field)
      • Size of Company (drop-down)—1-49, 50-99, 100-199, 200-499, 500-999, 1000-9999, 10,000+, 100,000+
      • Industry (drop-down)—Advertising, Engineering, Financial, Government, Insurance, Legal, Manufacturing, Medical, Professional Services, Real Estate, Software, Other
      • Invoice Terms (drop-down)—Verbal, Pre-paid, Net 10, Net 30, Credit Card
      • Service Level (drop-down) – Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze. NOTE: This field should be specified as “Internal”, or “Public Read-Only”.

      • End Date of Maintenance Term (date).

        Note

        This field should be specified as “Internal”, or “Public Read-Only”.

    • Address Book Data—Address Book data can be entered manually for each Contact, imported from a text file, or taken dynamically from an LDAP-compliant contact database. Please refer to the section on Address Book Administration for more information.

      Note

      The Address Book can be shared between the Sales Workspace and the Support, Service Desk, and/or the Development Workspace. This is appropriate if the user base is the same for those departments.

      Important

      Sales-related fields should be made “Internal” so that customers cannot view sensitive data if they have access to the support workspace, or receive email notification.

    • Assignment—Assignment can be handled manually, or the Auto Assign Feature can be used to assign one or more sales reps to a new Issue/contact based on, for example, the “Product” field.
    • Escalation—Escalation should be enabled and various rules defined to meet service levels, handle high-priority issues, and set up follow-up reminders. Some rules to consider:
      • Escalation rules can be defined for high priority leads, i.e. Hot Lead, or a certain dollar amount for the projected sale, etc.
      • A rule should be set to send an email to the assigned sales rep based on the “Follow Up Date” field. The criteria should include:
        • Name:  Follow Up Reminder
        • Escalation On/Off: Choose “On”
        • Actions:  “Send mail to the Assignees” checked, select one or more email types
        • Time Unedited: 5 minutes
        • Criteria:
          • Status=Highlight ”Request”, “Open”, and any custom statuses to get reminders on active Issues, or “Closed” to get reminders on Closed Issues (OR highlight all statuses except for “Solution” to get reminders on any Status Issue)
          • For “Follow Up Date”, choose “equal to” and check the box for “Current Date” (do not fill in any dates).
        • A second rule should be set to send an email to the assigned sales rep based on the “Projected Close Date” field. The criteria should include:
          • Name:  Projected Close Date Reminder
          • Escalation On/Off: Choose “On”
          • Actions:  “Send mail to the Assignees” checked, select one or more email types
          • Time Unedited: 5 minutes
          • Criteria:
            • Status=Highlight ”Request”, “Open”, and any custom statuses to get reminders on active Issues, or “Closed” to get reminders on Closed Issues (OR highlight all statuses except for “Solution” to get reminders on any Status Issue)
            • For “Projected Close Date”, choose “equal to” and check the box for “Current Date” (do not fill in any dates).
          • A third escalation rule based on “End Date of Maintenance” to remind the sales rep or maintenance coordinator when the contract comes up.
  • Email—Outgoing email notification rules can be set to send mail to assignees for all changes, or, if you would prefer, only for certain statuses.  Typically customers are not notified from the sales workspace.  The email address for each contact is available as a hyperlink that brings up the sales representative’s email software and pre-fill the contact’s email address into the “TO” line.  Incoming email can be configured to handle both incoming email submissions and email updates to existing Issues for salespeople to update Issues and contacts from the road.
  • CCs—The sales manager or other users can be copied on an Issue without actually being assigned. These people will receive email notification, and can optionally respond to the email with comments or suggestions, which will automatically be threaded to the Description of the Issue with a time, date and user stamp. 
  • Queues—Queues can be made by the Sales Manager to easily track the activity of the sales team.  For example, create 1 Saved Search for each “Product”. For example, the Criteria for a queue for a product called “Widget SuperApp” would include “Status”=Request, Open, and all other active statuses, “Product”=”Widget SuperApp”, Sorting “Date Submitted Ascending” (oldest at the top), Name “Widget SuperApp Queue”, Type “Personal”.   Other queues can be made for each rep and for the manager for Follow-up date, Company, Projected Close date, etc.
  • Reports—The built-in Metric reports can be used by the Sales Manager to get important metrics like aging reports, number of Active leads by assignee, etc. Custom report templates can be made to show details and stats for things like: all active Issues by assignee, all active Issues by Product, all active Issues by Company, Priority, projected amount of sale, etc. The “calculation” field can be used to total the projected or real sales amount for a certain category of sales i.e. by product, date range, or assignee. The Auto-run Reports feature can be used to automatically email one or more reports to the Sales Manager(s) every Monday morning, etc.
  • Cross-workspace Reports—The Administrator can create cross-workspace reports to return data from multiple workspaces, such as Customer Support, Development, and Sales. Any common fields found in the workspaces selected can be included in the report. So, if the Address Book is shared between the aforementioned workspaces, a report can be generated on a particular company or contact that includes all activity for that company or contact across all departments.
  • Knowledge Base—The FootPrints Knowledge Base feature can be helpful to the sales team. Answers to customer’s Frequently Asked Questions, company policies, online documents, sales, and marketing materials can be made into (and attached to) Solutions.  FAQ categories can be defined to group solutions by product. All sales representatives will have access to the Knowledge Base.
  • Users—The Sales Team will normally use Agent licenses as described in the functionality above. Sales representatives can set their personal preferences to view a list of their own assignments on the FootPrints home page, as well as set their home page columns to display important information about those leads on the home page, like “Product”, “Company”, “Follow-up date”, etc.
  • Sales reps can use their network ID and password to log into FootPrints if NT, UNIX or LDAP password authentication is enabled.

  • File attachments—Sales representatives can attach files to particular leads. Solutions in the Knowledge Base can contain file attachments, allowing easy distribution of marketing materials, policies, and other files to the whole sales team.

    Note

    File Attachments in FootPrints are kept in the C:\FootPrints\html\tmp\Attachments directory on the FootPrints server. Anti-virus software can be pointed to that directory to ensure that attachments do not contain viruses.

  • Surveys—Even if customers are not configured to receive regular email notification from the sales workspace, the Customer Survey feature can be used to gather information about the quality of service external customers receive from the sales team. The custom survey can be sent automatically to the external customer each time his or her sale is closed.
  • Copy/Move Issue feature—This feature can be used to assign Issues to users in other workspaces. For instance, a customer support agent could assign an Issue in the customer support workspace to the sales team in the sales workspace when an unqualified lead comes through the support center.
  • Splash screen—The splash screen option can be used to communicate important information and alerts to sales representatives. The Splash screen can include text, HTML, links to other sites or pages, graphics, etc.  It can be updated at any time by the Workspace Administrator.

 

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