Why should you enter leads, activities and samples into My Fundraising Place?
Know where your leads are at in the sales cycle
If your leads are not in My Fundraising Place, how can you market to them? Not all group leaders will be ready to buy based on their first interaction with you. In most cases, you will need to have multiple touch points with your leads so you can move them through the sales cycle. If you don’t track this information then you won’t know where they are at in the sales cycle.
Shorten the sales cycle
Tracking activities in My Fundraising Place allows you to learn from the past which will help you make better business decisions and shorten the sales cycle. If you don’t track this information until they are ready to become a customer then you have no way of figuring out what works and what doesn’t work.
Activities are important to track so you can determine things like:
- On average, how many times you need to interact with a group in order to get a sale?
- What touch point plan is the most effective for closing the sale?
Scaling your business
As your business grows you may need to add employees. Having this information in My Fundraising Place is extremely important for internal communication and communication with your leads and customers. Your employees could be lost if the information is in your head or on a piece of paper.
If the information is in My Fundraising Place, your employees will know exactly where each lead or customer is at in the sales process. If the information was NOT entered into My Fundraising Place, they would have no idea what touch points had happened in the past which could lead to a lot of their time being wasted.
Having employees enter this information will also give you more visibility on how they are performing!
Group addresses are needed to take advantage of:
When you enter activities and samples in My Fundraising Place we track the last activity date and the last sample date for the group. These dates can be very helpful when you want to filter your data. Here are a few examples of how you could filter off of these dates:
- You want to find all leads that haven’t been sampled in the last year and schedule an appointment with them
- You want to create an email list for all of your leads that haven’t had an activity since 2014
- You want to clean up your group list by finding all groups that haven’t had an activity since 2012
Being able to filter by these dates is already valuable in My Fundraising Place today. These dates will become even more valuable to you as we add Smart Lists (saved queries), improve on our mapping tools and add customizable workflow (which will help with automation).
*Lead Tips:
- Make it a policy that every new lead, no matter what, gets entered into My Fundraising Place.
- Develop a plan on how to market to your leads
- You don’t have to treat all leads exactly the same. Hot, warm and cold leads may have different touch point plans.
- Disqualify leads if there is no potential
- Perform spring cleaning on your contacts & groups every year
- Develop an “aging system” by setting contacts & groups to “Inactive” that haven’t had an activity for a specific period of time
*Activity & Sample Tips:
Create a plan on how to track different types of customer interactions. If a sales rep only tracks some of his or her activities, you will never have complete visibility into the total effort that it took to get that customer.
- Here are a few questions for you to think about:
- If a sales rep leaves a voicemail, do you track it and create a follow up activity?
- If you had an appointment with a lead, do you copy & complete it to a new activity as part of your follow-up plan?
- When you get a referral, do you enter the new contact’s information and create an activity with them?
When to use Activities and when to use Notes:
- Activities should be used to capture information that is time sensitive and further action is needed to complete the interaction. Activities are where most of the day to day information is held in My Fundraising Place.
- Notes should be used to capture information that needs to be associated with a date but does NOT require further action. Example: If a contact was going on vacation for 2 weeks and didn’t want to be contacted. This doesn’t require further action, but is something that needs to be recorded and related to a date.
Sampled Flavors
- Not all flavors that you sample have to be your default sample flavors. The “Is Sampled” check box on each flavor in Settings/Products controls which flavors show up by default when you enter sample information on an activity. So if you sample Cinnamon and Apple 99% of the time, you could set these two flavors as the only “Is Sampled” flavors and they would be the default flavors. If you had to sample a flavor other than Cinnamon or Apple then you can click on the + button to add the flavor when entering the sample quantities.