Managing Opportunities & Jobs

As sales people, your responsibility is, and livelihood depends on your ability to generate profitable sales. It's about creating and managing relationships with your current customers and developing new relationships with potential customers. An acronym we hear often is "CRM" (Customer Relationship Management) e-manage views CRM differently than most. CRM is not just a marketing campaign or a part of a lead but is part of the entire process of doing business and interacting with your existing and potential customers. 

e-manage is constantly developing new ways to simply the way sales people manage their relationships and business. The goal is to eliminate redundancy of data entry, automate processes as much as possible and make it so you do not have to everything in your head. 

Managing Opportunities

Below are a couple questions to get you thinking about the different sales opportunities you have. 

• What are the different types of opportunities you should be monitoring?

  • Examples - New Construction, Websites, Bid sites, etc. 

• How do you most effectively manage your pipeline and potential opportunities?

  • Examples - Phone calls, emails, face to face, etc. 

Today Tab, Current Opportunities - a list of all active sales opportunities

• Next Touch Type - The next touch you have to make in the sales process

• Next Touch Date - The date of the next touch which automatically shows up on your calendar

• Notes - so you don't have to remember what you did last and what you need to next

• Sales Stage - Where you are in the sales process of your project

• Project Status -  so you can monitor the status of where the project

• Probability - The probability of closing the project which can be updated as you go through the project cycle

• Estimated Sale - Can be entered in manually and will be automatically updated when with the most likely quote figure. 

Action Item & Note Alerts - You will receive Alerts letting you know Action Items are completed or rejected. You will also receive Alerts for Notes that are sent to you which you can reply to. Action Item & Note Alerts have to be acknowledged for them to go away. 

Open Actions - Your Open Action Items is a list of every Action Item out for your projects. You will see Actin Items that you may not have submitted. Internal personnel can update Action Items with a % completed and expected completion date so you see where your projects are at any given time with one click. 

Leads - Is a list of contact with a potential opportunity. This is where you manage your leads and send emails, schedule appointments and start a project once qualified. You can also use leads to manage important people you want to touch on regular basis. 

Calendar - All your schedule appointments are shown on your calendar as well as Current Opportunities with the Next Touch Date set and Notes that have a Due Date and set to Show on Calendar. 

Favorites -  This is a great place to keep you most used Companies, Contacts and Projects. Save projects you are constantly in for quick access. If they are no longer so active you can remove them from your favorites. You can organize your Favorites by creating folders and naming them whatever you want. 

Managing Jobs

Below are a couple questions to get you thinking about the things you need to manage when a project is Booked. 

• How do you keep track of you Jobs once Booked?

  • Examples - Product get ordered, Acknowledged, Customer is kept up to date with Status, Installation is scheduled, Punch Lists are not lost, etc. 

• What are you doing to build on your customer relationship after you completed a Job?

  • Examples - Post Job follow-up, Future product releases, service, using them as a reference, etc. 

Today Tab, Current Backlog - The current Backlog is every project that has been booked. Once Booked the project turns into a Job and comes off of the Current Opportunities. It will remain in Backlog until it is invoiced for final. 

Alerts - Alerts for Jobs work the same as for Opportunities. Action Items that are Completed or Reject will show up as well as notes. 

Open Actions - Same as above but for Jobs. 

Today Tab, Vendor Acknowledgements - This will show you all your projects with Acknowledgements so you can review them yourself and see when it is Acknowledged to ship. 

Today Tab, Received Product - This will show you what has been received. 

Today Tab, Jobs Installing - When a Job is put on the schedule it will show up in Jobs Installing and show the dates and Installation Type. 

Today Tab, Open Project Invoices - this will show every invoice that has a balance.

Today Tab, View Portfolio - Portfolio is where you can search completed projects that are references and run a report to view pictures for the project which can be printed or email to a client. Portfolio is basically a case study as you can also add a description.