How to Follow up customers in GTD

[Sebastien69]

Hello everybody,

First of all, i must apology for my poor English. I've just wrote "learn english" in my "someday, one day maybe" list.

I am a "sale and marketing people", i work in fire protection and i'm selling Fire extinguishers , formation, and things much more complicated.

Each day i'm doing commercial proposal (quotation? estimate?), a lot of proposal (to much proposal), for a lot of prospects/customers.

But more important is to transform this quotation in order (command). So i need to "follow up my customer (not sure if it's correct: i call him and ask if he's ok to work with me). So i try to implement this tasks in my GTD.

Actually i, wrote a date of "follow up" for each important proposition (generally 1 week between proposal and recall). This is easy to do. But there is a problem, as i say before i'm making a lot of proposition. So i start my day with 30 customers/prospect to call... i think this is the exact opposite of GTD method... Every evening i put the day recall to next day....

I'm not everyday at the office, often in car to visit my customers. Actually i have nearly 500 tasks to do, and "follow up my customers" represent 100. I know that this is the most important part of my work, and this is surely the thing i do the worst.

How did you manage to implement this in GTD?

Thank you, Sebastien from France.

EDIT: i'm using http://www.toodledo.com/

 

[Folke]

I think probably the best way is to use a separate list or even a specialized CRM tool for the initial "standardized" phases of the sales work. For example, you could use an Excel sheet with one line per prospect and a number of columns suitable for keeping track of the current status and next step, for example the date of your last call, intended/promised date of next call, reason for renewed/postponed contact, degree of interest shown (or some other more systematic classification of where in the sales cycle you are with this prospect), and a note of whether you have also sent some written material etc etc

When a prospect gets "hotter" and if you then need to define individually customized actions for them, say, meetings to discuss particular aspects of what you are offering, or visits to reference sites etc, it might perhaps be necessary to define a separate sales project for each prospect, but for the initial "standardized" work you probably do not need to write anything at all on your main GTD lists, or you could have a "permanent project" for "Prospecting" where you make a note of miscellaneous actions that do not fit on your Excel sheet or CRM tool.

 

[Sebastien69]

Hello, and thanks for the answer.

To be more precise, I've already select the most important actions before put them in my GTD. Those "100" are about important prospects or customers i must call back (maybe just to show them some interest). I can say that they are all "hot".

Maybe should i work on an excel sheet. And treat all my "follow up" outside the GTD List.

I will try an other issue for the next 3 months:

1- i continue to plan my client reminder, with a date. this will appear in my planning list
2- when the day is coming, (1 week usually), i put the task in Next Action list.
The disadvantage is that my Next Actions list will quicly became illegible, but i can solve that by creating a new @context dedicated to "client reminder". (in fact a dedicated context is quite close to an excel sheet or crm tool)

I will also try an other thing. Keep 2 hours every Wednesday morning for the client reminder. I will consider those 2 hours as important as an appointment. This is not exactly what GTD is recommending but i always find a good reason to not call-back my customers so...

if you have another idea i'm listening.

Thank you, sorry for my English and Happy new year.

 

[PeterW]

I agree with Folke. For sales activity work you need a proper CRM system that will allow you to manage all of your customers, generate quotes, track them and follow up at the appropriate time, and retain historical information that can be mined. CRM systems provide automation and will help you drive the business. A GTD system would be too blunt an instrument to help you with this kind of work.