Sales Tracking

This part of the guide deals with how to set up your Manage360 site to get the most out of the sales tracking capabilities. This guide will cover how to create new customer accounts, how to customize and run your sales pipeline, how to deal with new leads and follow-ups, and how to run sales reports.

Before starting this section, make sure that you have gone over the previous section which covered the initial configuration.

SALES TRACKING SETUP

Before you begin creating Accounts and Opportunities, there are a few things that you should set up first. You don’t need to think too hard about this configuration at first – once you go through the process of creating a few opportunities, you will have a much better idea of how you want to organize things.

Here is a quick checklist of items to set up for this section:

• Account list:
  • Start from scratch, or import an existing customer list. If importing from QB, see our accounting connector video. If importing from a spreadsheet, see the account import utility guide.
• Settings:
  • Account Ratings:
    • A custom category that you can use to categorize your accounts by their customer value.
  • Payment Terms:
    • Your payment terms get applied to a customer (account) and will appear on your proposals and invoices. Common examples are Due upon receipt, net 30 days, etc. If using the accounting connector with QuickBooks, the Manage360 payment terms should be identical to your QuickBooks terms. If using QuickBooks Desktop, your payment terms can be found from Lists > Customer & Supplier Profile Lists > Terms List. If using QuickBooks Online, they can be found under Sales > Products and Services.
  • Opportunity Types:
    • Using Opportunity Types will allow you to categorize your opportunities by the type of sale. Common values include Residential Construction, Residential Maintenance, Commercial Maintenance, Full-Service Maintenance, etc. You will be able to sort your Opportunities by type as well as report on this category.
  • Lead Sources:
    • Define where your customers/new leads come from. Can set up separate categories for different types of referrals, advertising campaigns, trade shows, etc.
  • Sales Phases:
    • This is your sales pipeline. Define the steps in your sales process here. These can be different for every company and change based on the nature of how you use Manage360 in your sales process. Typical workflow goes from the initial call to completing the sale, with additional steps for opportunities placed on hold or requiring follow up.
  • Outcome Reasons:
    • This section is used to define the reasons for the 3 outcomes of a sale: Won, Lost, or Not Qualified. In Manage360, a Won Opportunity/Estimate becomes a job – we have submitted a proposal to a client, and the client accepted the contract. A Lost Opportunity/Estimate reflects the opposite; the contract was declined and we will not be doing any further work on this Opportunity/Estimate. Not Qualified implies that the customer was a bad fit for our company, or other extenuating circumstances meant that a sale was not possible. Here are a few outcome examples:
      • Won: Price
      • Won: Reputation
      • Lost: Price (too expensive)
      • Not Qualified: Distance (client is too far away)

Make sure you go through the above list to get a general sense of the items included. As we learn how to create, use and report on customer accounts and opportunities, you will begin to see exactly how you can utilize these categories and configuration options to get at-a-glance updates of your sales pipeline and advanced analytics of the leads going through it.

GETTING ORIENTED

THE HOME PAGE #

The Home Page of Manage360 is the place to manage tasks. From here you can create and manage the entire list of tasks in your organization. You can create tasks for yourself or for others. This enables you to easily assign something like a client follow-up to a salesperson as a task, which ensures that they will get a task on their dashboard and optionally send them an email notification about their new task. We will cover tasks in detail in just a moment. To get back to the Home Page from somewhere else, click on the Home button or the Manage360 logo in the top left corner of the page.

TASKS #

A Task is an activity that needs to be accomplished within a defined period of time. An assignment of a task is under the responsibility of an assignee which should have a end date defined. Marking the task as completed should only be done upon completion of a task.  Tasks can be linked to Accounts, Opportunities or Jobs which creates the task under the appropriate area.

To view your Tasks click on the Home button; the My Tasks view will open by default.  This view displays tasks that have been added by you or for you by other DS|Manage360 users.  You can change your view to the All Tasks view or any Custom View you have created by selecting the View drop down list.

All Tasks are either Future, Overdue, or Completed and to quickly identify this their Due Date is color coded as follows:

• Future Tasks (black)
• Overdue Tasks (red)
• Completed Tasks (grey)

CREATING CUSTOMER ACCOUNTS

Entering new customers into Manage360 is a foundational step in the system – every sale begins with a customer, so your first step is to create an account for that customer. To create a new account in Manage360, navigate to the Contacts > Accounts menu. This area is where all of your customer accounts can be found. From here you can search for accounts, use views to filter your list of accounts down to certain cities or regions, and update certain settings for accounts in bulk like the assigned sales person or email later/print later preferences for invoices sent to QuickBooks. For now though, we will hit the blue “New Account” button in the top right corner.

When creating a new account, there are some required fields which we must enter to move forward. The account needs a name, of course; you may name your accounts however you like, but typical formats are LastName, FirstName for residential, and the company name for commercial. We next need to enter the address, phone number, and salesperson. After that, there is only one more requirement to create this account: a contact.

To understand the difference between accounts and contacts, you can think of the account as an entity that we are selling to (like ValleyViews HOA, or “The Smith Residence”), and the contacts as the people we actually know at the account. These could be employees of the commercial account we are doing business with, or they could be homeowners for a residential account. Either way, we need at least one contact to be entered. Give the contact at minimum a first and last name to move forward (if you named the account using LastName, FirstName format, you will notice the name has already been entered for you). If you want to add more than one contact, select the green “Add Contact” button below. You can select one contact to be the “primary contact” (the person you see by default in certain places in manage360 where the account’s primary contact is referenced), and optionally have a separate contact be the “billing contact” (by default, the person’s name that shows up on the invoice). You will have the option of showing all contact names on the proposal if you are doing an estimate for a residential customer, so don’t worry too much about assigning the primary contact.

Fill out the rest of the details account details as required. Below is an explanation of some of the special categories on the account details tab:

• GPS: we use Google Maps to mark the waypoint of where a customer’s address is located on a map. If this waypoint does not work for you for some reason (perhaps it is a large property in a rural area and the waypoint is far from the area you are working), you can click the “override” checkbox and enter in a custom latitude and longitude.
• Region: This is a custom category for you to enter. It is extremely useful for reporting and scheduling. Since we already have detail like City and State/Province, you should make the region into some smaller, custom geographic areas. Typical examples include breaking your working areas into things like “Zone 1, Zone 2”, “Northeast Side, West Side”, “Uptown, Downtown”, etc. You will then be able to do things like schedule according to regions, see the amount of leads by region, etc. To create new regions, go to Settings > Regions.
• Community: Text field to record the name of the community/neighborhood zone.
• Status: the account status is automatically assigned based on certain criteria regarding the account’s activity. Keep in mind that it is possible for an account to have more than one status at a time, so an account with an open job and an open opportunity would be “Active and Prospect”. Here is a summary of the various statuses:
  • Lead Only: this account has no opportunities and no jobs. An unused account.
  • Prospect: this account has an open opportunity. Potential sale.
  • Active: This account has an active job. A current customer.
  • Inactive: This account has had at least one job in the past, but all jobs are closed. A historical customer.
• Account Type: there are only two options here, Commercial or Residential. You can set the default sales tax rate for commercial vs. residential accounts by going to Settings > Configuration, and create new tax codes by going to Settings > Taxes.
• Account Rating: a custom category. Typical examples include things like “Five Star Account” or “Delinquent Account – Does Not Pay”. The objective here is to quickly indicate the account standing. You can create new account ratings by going to Settings > Account Ratings (first option on the settings menu).
• Lead Source: indicates where the customer heard about you. If you want to have businesses that often refer clients to you, or special marketing campaigns entered as lead sources, go to Settings > Lead Sources to enter them. You can further elaborate on the Lead Source by filling out Source Details.
• Private Notes: use this for top-level reference notes for the account. Activity log style notes like emails or phone calls are best entered in the Journal instead of here.

BILLING INFO TAB #

Once you have filled out the account details to your liking, you should move on to the Billing Info tab so we know how to bill the client. From here, you can enter a custom billing address that is separate from the main account (jobsite) address, or link the billing info for this account to another account. Linking the billing info to another account is typically used in situations when you have a client that owns multiple properties (each property is a separate account, but all billing info gets routed to the main account), or if you are dealing with an HOA.

You may also define the sales tax rate for the account here, which will affect the tax rate at which taxable items come on to estimates created for this account. As mentioned above, you can set default sales tax rates for commercial vs. residential accounts in Settings > Configuration, and also create new tax codes in Settings > Taxes.

Payment Terms is a field that will be displayed on any invoices made under this account, and this detail will be pushed to the Payment Terms field on the invoice in QuickBooks if you choose to send it over to QuickBooks. Payments Terms is a required field in QuickBooks, so if you are linking QuickBooks with Manage360 you should make sure the payments terms you have in Manage360 match exactly with what you have in QuickBooks. You can create/edit your list of payment terms in Settings > Payment Terms. You can also optionally show the payment terms on your proposals.

The final thing to check out on the Billing Info tab are the two checkboxes under Invoice Delivery. These two options, Print Later and Email Later, match with a field that appears on invoices in QuickBooks – so you only need to think about these checkboxes if you are linking Manage360 and QuickBooks together. If you have “Print Later” set on the customer’s account, then an invoice you make for them will also say “Print Later”. If you send that invoice over to QuickBooks, it will also say “Print Later”, and be added to your list of invoices to be printed.

THE REST OF THE TABS ON THE ACCOUNT #

There are several other tabs available on the account page – if you can only see details and billing info, then you have not saved the account yet, and the additional tabs will appear once you hit the save button. Below is a quick overview of what you can expect to find on these tabs, and more detailed explanations of the things contained within these tabs will be covered elsewhere.

• Tasks: view all tasks that have ever been associated with this account. You will see all historical tasks here – whether they are new, old, overdue, complete, or incomplete. Tasks will be covered in more detail in the next section of this guide. This tab is also located on opportunities and jobs. It is always found alongside the journal tab.
• Journal: view all journal entries ever associated with this account. This includes journal entries for things that are tangentially related to the account, like journal entries for all the opportunities and jobs that have been created for the account. It essentially behaves as the account activity history, from the perspective of an audit log and an activity log. The journal will be covered in more detail in the next section of this guide. This tab is also located on opportunities and jobs. It is always found alongside the journal tab.
• Opportunities: view all opportunities ever associated with this account, open or closed. You can edit the sales phase/due date of opportunities here as well. Opportunities will be covered in more detail in the next section of this guide.
• Construction/Maintenance Estimates: see all estimates ever associated with this account, including old versions/revisions, as well as open, manually archived, lost, or won estimates.
• Jobs: see all jobs ever associated with this account, whether they are maintenance jobs, construction jobs, or non-contract jobs.

NEXT STEPS

Once you have everything set up, you will be ready to create opportunities for your accounts. Check out this video for a complete overview of the workflow for creating and managing your opportunities and sales pipeline.