Organizing Incoming Leads for Businesses

Pree

Registered
Hello.

Does anyone have a proven system or methodology to organize incoming business leads. I'm currently using google sheets now, I know there a bunch of CRMs out there, but to me it's all sloppy and disorganized. I don't have a proven follow up system and therefore it causes me great anxiety even looking at it.

Any thoughts, recommendations, or suggestions would be amazing!

Best,
Pree
 

AndrewJMason

Registered
Hey there Pree,

What's worked for me best in the past is a "reverse checklist" -- That's where you have a given created checklist for the sales process (or onboarding), and then you run each new person through the process, and it keeps track of where they all are.

Maybe check out Trello or Process.St? They both have a "repeateable checklist" feature, where you can search a given person, and see where they land in a particular instance of the checklist/process.

Hope that helps!
 

Pree

Registered
Process.St is amazing for orientation, onboarding! Thanks so much for the recommendation. Activecampaign has been mentioned for the sales lead sheet
 

timlambros

Registered
Helpful conversation but if I may add a twist. I'm fortunate to have another department take leads from various sources and book first time appts for me. Same question as Pree ... I'm attempting to make each new lead/appt a "project" with similar tasks for each one - items to do before appt, tasks to do in between 1st & 2nd appts. etc.

Fairly new to GTD so just trying to see where the outside software fits in (our company makes us use Outlook) if I'm seeing onboarding new clients as a project for each one?

Am I making any sense?

Tim
 

John Ismyname

Registered
Hello Tim; I don't claim to understand your business from the inside but here is my take as to how I see it working in Outlook;

1. Lead-generators get basic information on prospects and email this to financial advisors. You could create a form but this would be more trouble than its worth. (i.e., I attended a free lecture by a seasonal investment expert, Brooke Thakery. The only catch is I had to provide my name, phoine number and email to the wealth management firm sponsoring the event.

Maybe a sales manager is Cc'd in who can audit to make sure the sales process is being followed.

2. Investment advisor converts this lead into a Outlook task to make sales calls and follow up. I keep a separate Outlook task directory for sales prospecting. While there are IT systems that specialize it this, it is a very simple process. Decades ago, I used recipe cards in a recipe box asa 1-31 Jan-Dec tickler to do this. To continue my example, a financial advisor called me who was very knowledgeable on seasonal investing. We decided to meet.

As a prospect soldifies and more information becomes known about him/her, an Outlook contact can be created and such info. can be stored in the free-form text field. (This field holds RichText, HTML so I paste a mini-form here based on the Mackay-66 system.) I store these contacts in a separate directory called "Prospects".

3. The outcome of a sales call is either another task - a follow up call or email or an appointment, which goes in the Outlook calendar. A meeting room can be assigned to be a resource in Outlook, so it's a great system to do room bookings. I met with this advisor and the eventual outcome was he manages 90% of my investable assets.

4. From there the Outlook contact is dragged-and-dropped from my "Prospects" directory to "Clients". You are going to want to call every client at least four times a year to talk about their investment portfolio's performance. Thus, you want to set up re-occurring Outlook tasks to do this.
 

Pree

Registered
I'm going to try to use this crm called nethunt. It's specifically for gmail and it looks like it could get the job done. Obviously all of you are busy but it might be something to check out to help simplify and expedite the crm process.
 

timlambros

Registered
@Johnismyname Tried doing the onboarding over the past few weeks and failed miserably.

I have 13 steps I go thru to from the moment I get cc'd on an appt schedule from our client development peeps (quite a luxury) to shredding their paper work after they are onboarded, funded and invested.

I think ideally if I could insert a checklist into the project task that would be perfect.

Any suggestions on how to do that?

Tim
 

John Ismyname

Registered
Hi Tim;
I consider you 13-step onboarding checklist to be a GTD context (@_) list. The best way to keep and organize such lists in Outlook is to create an Outlook-contact for each of your @_ items;

1. Create a new Outlook contact. In the “Full Name” field, type “@New Client Onboarding”

2. Select “@New Client Onboarding” in the “File As” selector

3. Type or paste your 13 steps into the “Notes” field. That it!



The ‘flat file’ structure of a contact makes it easy to synch it with your smartphone.
 
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