As David Sandler says: ‘You cannot fail at prospecting unless you fail to prospect!’
Even with the best of intentions, however, accountability to prospect remains a problem: it’s a problem for sales people to make sure they do enough of it and for sales managers to follow up on their sales people’s commitment to do it.
Here’s how BWise can help sales managers follow up on commitments made by sales people to prospect. (Yes guys, that means picking up the phone and making calls to your best prospects, over time, until they either buy or tell you to ‘go away’! )
Step 1: Ask your sales team to use the BWise Activity Manager to record calls to their top prospects.
Why record prospecting calls in the BWise Activity Manager and not your CRM? To keep your CRM clean and filled only with real opportunities. Ask your team to only enter the prospect into your CRM once an appointment is set. The BWise Research team will continuously update the prospect data in BWise, letting your sales people focus on making calls, vs. wasting time updating prospect data.
(For the sake of brevity, for we’ll assume your team has been trained on how to use the BWise Activity Manager to record their prospecting activity and is actively doing so! To view a 10 minute video tutorial on how to record Prospecting Activities in the BWise Activity Manager, click here.
Step 2: View the # of appointments your salespeople set (which they record as ‘Completed Calls’ in BWise)
Here’s a step-by-step guide:
- Login to your BWise account. (here’s a handy link for you to do this right now!)
- Click Activities Manager.
- Click the Completed tab. (you would click the Follow Up tab to create a report of follow up prospecting calls vs. ‘Completed’ activities that resulted in an appointment)
- Click Find. The Find Activities window will pop-up.
- Select User to a single, named user or leave it set to All Users if desired.
- Enter Completed Date range. (leave this blank to display ALL appointments recorded)
- In the Results section, check Set Appointment (Note: these Result values may be customized to match your preferred terminology under Admin tab; to display ALL types of results, leave all Result values unchecked.
- Click Accept. A list of Completed prospecting activities will display in the Completed tab grid.
- If desired, click Exportto send this data to Excel. That way, you can produce Pivot Tables, etc. to summarize this data. This is especially useful if you have a large amount of Activities data and wish to summarize data by user, Activity Result type, etc.(Note: When you attempt to open the file in Excel, a ‘security’ message may display, as Excel may not recognize it as a ‘true’ .XLS file file. Go ahead and allow Excel to open the file. Then, be sure to do a ‘Save As’ in Excel, set File Type to Excel and Save the file to the desired folder.)
Filed under: Business Wisdom, Cool Features, Prospecting
