Avidian is aware that the majority of businesses that use the Internet do so to help them find not only customers, but also products and services they need to build their businesses. Many web publishers rely on RSS feeds to provide content for websites including links and headlines and Avidian intends to capitalize on these capabilities.
The RSS news feed will be combined with advance Search Engine Optimization techniques to make the company a major player on the Internet. Prophet CRM is widely known for providing easy contact management and effective sales automation solutions to small and medium size companies. The CRM software is designed to operate within Microsoft Outlook and is easy to install and very user-friendly.
Businesses that are using Prophet CRM software are reporting increases in conversion rates, sales and profits. The question then becomes, what do you do with this data? We talked about, you know, setting some KPIs. Well, one of the KPIs could be simply how many contacts you created this month, last year, this week.
Maybe you want to see when contacts were last updated or accounts were last updated with less information. So you can easily go in here and simply do a sort or a filter by date and you can see the contact updated date.
If you want, you can go in and look at what those activities were. You know, you can go into the notes and things like that. Maybe you want so many new contacts created in a certain period of time.
Maybe you want people to have a certain number of meetings or update leads or opportunities within a certain time frame. Just as an example, you can easily create a view that shows all of the contacts that were updated in a certain period of time, either by just sorting and scrolling or you can actually do a filter here.
And Prophet has a lot of built-in filters that let you analyze the data without even getting into any real reports here. So I can say, see any contacts that were modified or updated between, you know, a month ago and today, whatever. You can put in a date range and then now you can view that data. So I had 24 contacts that were updated in that date range, so I had 48 contacts in this list. Again, just a little filter if you want to start getting some data out of Prophet, which is kind of the segue into our next part of the conversation.
Well, here they are. Take another example. Maybe you want to look at opportunities by value because you know the whole goal is to drive the value of your pipeline. So I can just go into my opportunity manager, which, as you may know, is just a folder in Outlook here, and I can sort my opportunities by largest to smallest. Here are my top 10 opportunities in my pipeline right there, worth 10 million dollars. What if my boss asked me, what do I have going on? Again, if I wanted to run a report or just generate some sort of report on that, I could say I just want to export those top 10 rows that I just selected.
I could now file-share or send this to somebody as an attachment or a PDF and away we go. All of it was simply Microsoft Office. It teaches you how to make some useful knowledge out of useful information. Another thing might be that I want to see how many opportunities were updated.
Just like we did with the contacts, I can sort or filter by date range and I can see how many opportunities have been updated in the month of October, for example, or some other time frame. Again, you can just select or you can use the filter button, which is just like Excel. Now, these are entirely up to your company as to how you define them. Every company is different. We have defaults. We have a lot of different industry templates.
So, for example, if I wanted to go in and look at my sales pipeline by stage, there are a couple ways to do it. I could just sort that list by stage. But I could also filter, which is like an Excel filter by the way.
You can just start typing in the first few letters of it. This is an obvious thing to do. And again, you can do that for any stage. And that is a key part of developing a successful CRM strategy. But these stages I was talking about: they can each have their own set of automated actions.
So in stage one maybe the action is to send an email and create several follow-ups. This is part of the sales automation, and increasing adoption is making it easy to use, right? So this just created that first email for me from a template. And we do have videos and training on how to do this. I got the introductory email. I could still edit it. So literally with one action I created six touches: an intro email, a reminder to call them, and four more follow-up emails, and all of that serves to drive the sales process forward.
A simple little thing. Many of you probably already use this. But imagine if your sales team members always set out to establish the next step with the client or prospect, and when they put a date on it, it automatically reminds them, or it can automatically remind them with an Outlook reminder. Otherwise, why are you reporting on it?
So you might be asking what makes some reps more productive than others. Are they planning more meetings? Are they creating more contacts? What are they doing? Getting more deals to the proposal or quote stage? What lead sources are producing the most revenue? It would be a really good part of your CRM implementation strategy to try to understand and then drive more leads to the sources that are working for you.
It might be that some people have a much healthier pipeline on average than others, and you might want to understand why that is.
Where is it geographically located? So there are a number of reporting tools in Prophet, and to wrap up I just wanted to kind of bring this all back together with the visuals of some of those tools.
One of them of course is just to be able to easily export filtered sorted lists and from the database right out of Prophet get an Excel sheet. People like Excel. They can use it all day long. We can and do provide training on this if you want to create your own reports. These create kind of traditional reports. I want to center in on a report format that I like a lot. You can run this from any of your devices or even deploy it to the web. So for example on the lower right here this is my funnel.
I have 16 deals in the demo stage, 16 deals in the proposal stage, five awaiting payment, two have reached the project stage and so on. And the whole point of this is to help me inspect the health of my funnel pipeline. You can see who has revenue by user. You know how much revenue is in the pipeline by user.
You can change the date ranges on the fly here, you can filter it by any of the criteria in the report. And with our help you will be able to determine whether or not your CRM strategy is being effective. I have a question over here about Google Maps. But look at this. How many active opportunities do we have in this range that we think we might close? How many were lost? You can see how much value that represents. Another one is activities.
Activities drive sales. How many call activities were generated? How many emails were generated? How many of those automated workflows were generated? How many companies were engaged? Remember KPIs? You can see things like how many new contacts were created, and it can be filtered by the user.
That would be the Prophet users. You can see how many company accounts were created and how many opportunities were created. You can also see that we use a little AI and fuzzy logic to determine the kind of job function that extracts things from the job title and so on in context and tells you if you are getting the right kind of contacts by job function. Since this is the kind of scheduled end of our webinar, I did have a question about one of the topics, whether you can see prospects or customers on a Google map.
By the way, again, we have a lot of training materials online that you can access. This is a great one for structuring and interpreting your CRM data and all the Outlook training stuff. There are lots of resources there for you all. Well, it is the scheduled wrap up time for our call today.
I want to thank you all for your time. Be safe. The whole concept here is about taming your Outlook inbox, managing your time, and essentially being more productive. This demonstration and presentation relate to Outlook and Microsoft environment, but many of the concepts do apply to older versions of Outlook. I want to start with a question: did you ever wonder why some people get more done than others? Hmm, why might that be? When I was in high school I had a civics teacher.
His name was Bernie Richter. He was very well known in the community as being a successful businessman as well as a teacher. Richter, how does one become successful in business? And that stuck with me for all these years. But how do you do it? And a little side bonus is probably being able to share some of these tips with your friends and maybe impress them!
And how to transform things like emails into contacts transforming emails into tasks and appointments, just super easy. So the first part that I wanted to spend just a minute on is understanding what Outlook is all about. Why is Outlook one of the most popular productivity tools in the world? If you look at the statistics, there are hundreds of millions of users. And one of the key things is email, but what is email? Reading email replying to email dealing with email. And probably the second most common function of Outlook usage is just managing your time.
And speaking of getting things done, the task management in Outlook is really powerful. And finally, you probably know Outlook contains a contact management database. Before we jump into the presentation, I wanted to explain a little bit about the differences between the Outlook desktop version of Outlook and the Outlook desktop version of as it relates to So if you do one of these four things when you get an inbound email: number one deal with it whatever it is, reply to it, you know create the task or whatever is associated with that; but the number one thing is to tame your inbox you got to do one of these four things: deal with it, delegate it which means you know delegate it to others , delay it which might be a valid tactic for some things , or delete it.
So the power of the 4ds. Using color is awesome. I use it a lot. Not everyone relates to color as much as other folks, but I use color a lot in categories and emails in my calendar; even in my contacts. And it just gives you a visual flag of things, like what is this contact about. Are there clients?
What are the categories on your calendar and how do those work and what do they mean? Color coding your tasks so you can see by maybe you want to prioritize them with color schemes so using color is a key thing. One of my favorite things. So the key thing in taming your inbox is managing that high volume. But the power of rules lets you essentially auto route emails into certain folders based on certain criteria. Are you spending your time generating revenue or having a bunch of internal meetings?
But now the environment offers yet another way to use templates. The nice thing about these templates is they follow you around.
But this is a very nice feature of the environments giving you templates for emails and such. And so you can take an email and turn it into a contact or a task or even an appointment. It creates the entire meeting invited to whoever you want by default the details of the meeting can be embedded in the notes area here.
The title of it you can have the location. I call it you know you can call it whatever you want but I got a new order email. Click click the button and it creates that email that I would be creating manually every time.
Hopefully, I get a lot of orders so this one saves me a ton of time. So the concept of this is pretty simple but you do have to have a little understanding of how it works.
When you create a new quick step which is just clicking new you give it a name. You can flag it with importance or various other flags that are part of Outlook.
You can give it importance. So again how that was created is if I just go up to my menu here and I just say a new quick step. Click there. It is awesome. Using color to get more organized conceptually I wanted to kind of add some detail to this all my items here are color-coded. Those are my tasks. So a couple of things first of all how to layout your screens here. But again I combined it. How did I do that? I just went up here to view my ribbon and I just put my to-do bar.
I go to my calendar view and I just add tasks to my bar over here. Pretty simple. So there are three little dots here by these little icons. What you do to change that is you click on them and go to navigation options and I just unchecked compact navigation and voila now it says mail calendar people and tasks. Much more understandable. One other little thing about that is you can add you can define how many items you want to display there.
I like to go to the regular words spelled out. Well, first you can manually color code things like appointments. Website content is something that I do sales calls, internal meetings, webinars, and things like that. Okay, how did I do that? I go view settings and I do conditional formatting. And I already have one called a sales call.
Now you know you could notice that you can search for the words in the subject and nodes or using other fields here or even by attendees and things like that. Bright blue! So this is how you would automate the color-coding of your calendar. Pretty cool! So you can also color-code tasks.
You can see many of my tasks are color-coded. They have a meaning to me. Purple is the follow-up. I can manually do this. I can add others or you can have more than one color code on your tasks or appointments and things like that.
Again same idea where are you spending your time following up, making you know follow-ups on sales or whatever. Are you ready? Some people say well if I have a task I just put it on my calendar. But you see tasks have a unique property in that they persist when I go into next week or next month the calendar is all changed.
Just a little tip for you there if you get a whole bunch of red tasks you know you got to get caught up. Just a little business tip for you there.
The concept of color can be used in a lot of different areas. One of them would be to color code your contacts. So this one I could see as a client I could add another one if I want client in services area save and close. So you can use color-coding in contacts as well and those are called categories in Outlook. You can also put the categories in your list view just to kind of get organized around those. Now by the way a little sidebar on how to get coins into your Outlook contacts works with actually any Outlook list view.
But how I get these in here is I just hover over one of the top column headers and I right-click and I use the field chooser. You know home phone maybe I want to put that in there you just drag and drop it up there. And that that puts it in your column you can make it wider and that sort of thing so the idea of color-coding categories works throughout Prophet throughout Outlook. And those are a couple of the most common and your contacts are the most common things that you would use for color-coding.
Okay, so the idea behind the rules is that it auto routes emails into certain folders. So how do you set this up? As you can see here I have rules for automatic replies.
I have rules for you to know emails from certain people or various things like that. And all I want is if the subject contains requests for quotes. I want it to do certain things now. It might be to play a selected sound, it might be displaying it in an alert or it might be to hear my main point is to move the item into a folder.
Okay so I just created the rule and you can see it right there. So I click ok. Since I had that rule running there are none but you get the idea. Where is it going to go? Over in the request for a quote. And by the way when you see the little bold numbers that means you have a new item in there.
So I just got a new request for a quote. Image Source: Nimble. With this tool, you can combine contact information across social media profiles, email contacts, and meeting notices into an Outlook-based CRM.
Nimble also has tagging and segmenting functionality that keeps your CRM data and inbox organized. Image Source: Keap. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner looking to upgrade from spreadsheets, Keap is a viable option for maintaining your client data.
Image Source: Zoho. For teams that rely heavily on their marketing organization for lead generation, Zoho CRM has you covered. This tool has a social media integration that tracks leads generated on social. The Zoho Outlook plugin keeps customer profiles up-to-date and easily accessible from Outlook. Image Source: PC Mag. If your sales team uses Outlook and prefers to manage CRM data from a mobile interface, you may want to consider Pipedrive.
This platform offers robust lead tracking and deal probability functionalities. Their mobile app connects directly to Outlook, which is particularly helpful for reps who rely on mobile apps to manage deals. Scale-ability and the capability to mold to a lot of different companies business models. The vendor is good about fixing issues quickly but sometimes difficult to distinguish between an actual error and a company specific business process. There are a ton of purchasable add-on's from third parties that can and do make this a wonderful software if you have the money.
Slow to implement vendor driven Idea's Network from user ideas. The product feels extremely slow once you get used to running the system and is glitchy because of the method chosen to release updates and advancements.
Vendor Runs a continuous improvement program with multiple releases a year so as they are designing new features at the same time they are cleaning errors and glitches rather than waiting a long time for advancements and a rock solid release.
This could also be considered good and bad if you need an advancement, you don't have to wait! Since this software can mold to a large variety of business models it can make training difficult and long due to the complexities of the software's advanced features. Industry: Staffing and Recruiting.
Overall very positive experience. The support has been great. We now have an easy to use CRM that lives in our email client that is always used. The CRM is an integrated part of Outlook. If you didn't know better, you'd think it is a feature of Outlook. It's only available on PCs.
There are so many possibilities that it can be overwhelming. Thanks for posting a review! I'm happy to read that you find our product helpful and easy to work with :. Industry: Marketing and Advertising. It lets you get going quickly and creating contacts and opportunities on the first day. We did a few hours of training and problem-solving from Avidian with a shared screen, which helped, but is a bit pricey.
The program is easy to manage and customize to your ever-changing needs.
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