Manage leads in Apptivo, increase effectiveness of your sales process

Entrepreneurs, small business owners, and salespeople all deal with the process of acquiring new customers for their business.  Many teams are completely unprepared for the task of managing each of their potential clients in a manner that can deliver them the utmost quality of service.  This is why all companies who do any sort of services business should employ some sort of customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Now that we’ve covered why this is important, what exactly am I talking about???

I am about to show you how to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your entire sales process!  My company leverages the Apptivo platform to manage our leads, so that is what process I will be walking you through today.  First off, you will need to have your business registered for Apptivo before following this tutorial.  Just head on over to their website and sign up.  Don’t worry, it’s free.

So let’s get started, shall we?

First off, here is the scenario:

You are a small business owner, who also wears the hat of a salesperson at this phase in your business.  You are constantly in contact with potential clients, and constantly promising various things to each of these leads.  Once you start really becoming successful, maintaining your large number of leads gets exponentially more difficult.  Many times you will mix up proposals, forget to follow up with a lead, or even miss an appointment!  To counteract this, all of your sales leads can be stored in a central system, which manages their information, a list of upcoming appointments, follow up reminders, as well as a place to store notes or documents of agreements and promises you have made with the client.

You’ve just gotten a call from a business who was reviewing your website, and is interested in your services.  You two had a short conversation that was promising, but in the end the client was still in the decision process.  You end the call well, with talks of a return call in the near future.  What to do now?  Let’s get this information into our system right away so nothing is forgotten!

Sounds great, but what do I do?!

1. Log in and select your firm
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2. Go to the My Apps page and select Leads
   1. If you haven’t added the App yet, go to “All Apps” and add the App first, you only need to do this once.
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3. Now we want to add the lead to our system, so hit that create button!
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4. Fill in all of the information you have available.  Make sure to take good notes on what services the lead is interested in.  Also add any phone numbers, or other contact information you have available.
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5. Now that our lead is created, we can be assured the information is safe and cannot be forgotten.  But we also want to make sure we have a clear picture regarding the status of the lead.  So let’s go ahead and select the lead from your Leads App main page.
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6. Now that you can see the details of the lead, click on over the to activities tab.  From here we can log any discussions we’ve had with the client, appointments, or we can set up follow up reminds or to do’s for later on regarding this client.  For now, let’s go ahead and click on the Call Log button so we can document the conversation we just had.
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7. Now we just punch in when the call happened, and some details regarding what we spoke about, and save!
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8. Great, now anyone in the company will have the information available to work with this client.  Very handy if the original contact is unable to work for some reason, you don’t want to lose this lead!
9. Finally, to make this process complete we want to make sure we convert this lead.  The client indicated they needed a couple weeks to decide, so let’s schedule a follow up call with them at 2 weeks, just to remind them we are still ready to take on their project.  Click on the Task button located right next to Call Log.
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10. Now just fill out the details of the task, and don’t forget to set a reminder date!
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SUCCESS!!!

Now you are taking control of your potential business, and doing everything you can to make sure you stay organized, and make the most out of your sales efforts.  No more missed appointments, or uninformed conversations, squeeze every bit out of your potential sales!

I hope this tutorial helped you out!  If you have any questions, or if I missed anything please let me know in the comments!