CRM Playbook - Amazon S3 · ProsperWorks CRM Playbook This document is divided into three parts. In the first part, you can learn about the CRM concept, it’s building blocks and

CRM Playbook Complete edition

Compliments of:

Marni MelroseNovaturience, LLC(800) [email protected]

About Marni Melrose

Marni was the world leading implementor of Daylite by Marketcircle for 10

years. After that she built custom CRMs when Citrix asked her to be a

Preferred Podio Partner. She knows CRMs!

ProsperWorks CRM Playbook

Contents

1. An introduction to CRM

2. Understanding your sales workflow

3. Using Prosperworks CRM to manage prospects and

customers

4. Using Prosperworks at your company

5. Common metrics to measure your sales

Version: 150820-1100


This document is divided into three parts. In the first part, you can learn about the CRM concept, it’s building blocks and what the benefits are for different stakeholders at your company. The second part talks about how CRM works. The third part is about Prosperworks CRM, and some best practices and recommendations to get the most out of Prosperworks.

Every section in this Playbook is packed with practical information about CRM. At the beginning of each section you’ll find these icons to indicate which audiences can benefit in particular from reading that section.

Sales Employees who are responsible for sales and demand generation activities, e.g. sales reps, account executives, sales managers, etc.

Leaders Stakeholders in charge of the business side of running an organization, managers and executives, including the CEO.

Tech Employees in charge of installing and managing systems at the company, including IT managers, operations managers etc.


1. An introduction to CRM What is CRM

CRM stands for C ustomer R elationship M anager, a system to keep track of the data about customers and your company’s interactions with them. Let’s take a look at the meaning of the words in CRM;

Customer Technically a customer is someone you have done business with, for a CRM this category is much broader and includes prospective, current and former buyers of your products and services.

Relationship In extreme cases companies do not have a relationship with their buyers, or at least none of the parties think of it that way. In this case, the parties conduct a transaction and move on. Filling up your car with gas or buying a hotdog at the street corner are very transactional purchases, and one would not describe them as a business relationship. The fact is, however, that most companies do want to build a relationship with their buyers, where there are interactions well before and after the actual purchase happens. The word Relationship expresses the dynamic and ongoing nature of this connection between buyer and seller.


Management Sales oriented companies want to positively influence their relationships with their customers by pro-actively seeking ways to engage and re-engage them. These interactions - often referred to as “touches” - build awareness in the customer’s mind and affect their purchasing decision making process.

Overall, a CRM is database that tracks information about customers, their interactions with your company. This data is then analysed to understand the nature of the relationship with a particular customer.

The benefits of using a CRM

If you are considering using a CRM then the first question you ask is “Do I need a CRM?” The following questions will help you make that decision.

Do you have a sales team? If there is more than one person doing sales at your company then you will need a centralized database to keep track of sales activities. You could argue that you don’t need a CRM for this, and you can get away with using sticky note or a contact manager, but if your team members ever find themselves nagging other team members for a particular name or phone number then you will appreciate the value a CRM can bring.

Are you using paper, sticky notes, or spreadsheets to track sales? We have seen sales being tracked using a variety of tools: anything from sticky notes, to notepads, to tasks in Outlook, all the way to complex Excel


sheets. While you can get by with these tools in a startup environment, where they will fail are scalability and complexity. These tools are really hard (if at all possible) to use with a growing team or when sales grows rapidly. Also, they say nothing about the dynamics of the sales process, they don’t capture the history or provide insight into the connections between the data points. Do you have long sales cycles (several months)? For certain companies, closing a successful deal takes months (or even longer in some cases) and a lot of interactions (“touches”) with the customer. The key to success here is consistency across the touches: timing them properly and always picking up the conversation where it left off. A good CRM captures the details of each interaction so that you can be prepared when the next interaction happens. It will also remind you of upcoming activities and provide context. Do you have lots of leads coming in? Sometime the sheer volume of leads poses a challenge to sales teams, funneling thousands of contacts into a system that then lets you search, tag, and review them en masse. A good CRM will let you take in, store and manage large amounts of data from multiple source without a glitch. If you have ever tried to do that in Excel, you will know the difference. Do you have high speed sales? The opposite of long sales cycles is when sales happens in a very short period of time. It is arguable whether you need a CRM for these “transactional” sales cases, but our experience is that there is tremendous value in capturing this data. The high volume of them make them suitable for sales analytics to understand buying behavior and sales trends. Also, this database can be your target list for additional marketing and sales efforts.


Does your financial software capture customer information? In many cases, the company’s financial software (sometimes referred to as ERP system) is where customer information resides. The problem with this is that salespeople may not have access to this information, and the data may be incomplete. Financial applications are usually not designed to capture information CRMs do, and the data they have is incomplete or inaccurate for sales purposes. In an optimal scenario, customer data flows from sales to finance, as salespeople capture customer information in CRM first and then the data is pushed into the financial application (see Integrations later in this document).

If you have answered “yes” to any of the above questions, or have encountered these problems before, then you need a CRM.

Who at my company can benefit from using CRM?

In order to make the decision to use a CRM, the different team members at your company have to be aware of the benefits a CRM offers to them. Sales For sales reps and account executives the benefits are

➔ Centralized and portable database of all their customers ➔ Track sales deals ➔ View past sales activities ➔ Manage future activities ➔ Search data


For sales managers

➔ Track sales rep activities ➔ Monitor sales deals and pipeline across reps

Management CRM helps standardize sales data entry and sales reporting which then provides the possibility to establish and track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for sales. Management can monitor these KPIs and have visibility into the performance of sales. Marketing CRM data is a great source of customer insight for marketing.

➔ Measure the impact of marketing campaigns ➔ Mine customer data for customer behavior patterns and understanding the

company’s funnel Customer service Using CRM data, Customer service (CS) can have a better understanding of the customer’s journey that eventually led to the purchase. This insight puts CS reps into a better position to respond to service requests better, by understanding how the purchasing process went down. IT For IT, the single biggest benefit of a CRM is using it as the “single source of truth” for all customer related data. It reduces the number of requests for custom data queries across departments and eliminates the headache of removing duplicate customer data.


Finance Finance will find that a CRM leads to better quality customer data across the company, and that CRM will give financial people visibility into customer data that an ERP does not capture.

Why use Prosperworks as your CRM (key features)

Prosperworks is a 100% cloud based CRM that was built using the latest web and mobile technology combined with decades of knowledge about how good CRM applications work. Prosperworks CRM offers the following unique benefits:

Works with Google Apps seamlessly Prosperworks has been built for Google Apps users, and works with it in close integration, providing a seamless experience between the two systems. In the background, Prosperworks connects to your Google Apps account and pulls data from your

Emails (subject and body) Contacts

Events


Files (links in Drive)

Additionally, Prosperworks offers integration points with Google Apps

Chrome browser integration lets you use Prosperworks right from your Gmail Inbox

Google Apps single sign-on, login with your existing username and password

Add CRM users from your Google Apps domain

Initiate Hangout calls from your CRM

Create new Calendar events

Create new emails in Gmail

These integrations pull data from Google Apps into Prosperworks automatically, so that you can spend more time with your customers and less time on data entry.


Unique CRM functionality Prosperworks offers many features that are unique in the CRM market.

➔ Multiple Pipelines : You can create deals in multiple sales pathways (called “pipelines”) and differentiate between them accordingly. Pipelines can be assigned to organization units, territories, etc.

➔ Visual Pipeline with Drag-and-Drop : Pipelines are displayed in an easy to understand, visual format, and opportunities can be moved between stages with a simple drag and drop.

➔ Projects : A module dedicated to Projects lets you track non-sales

related activities such as customer success, delivery, deployment, training, etc.

➔ Optional Leads Module : Depending on what your sales workflow is like, you may or may not need the Leads module. In Prosperworks you can turn it off, if you do not need it.


➔ Tagging: Use custom tags to label and search for data throughout the system.

➔ Email Tracking: See when your recipients have opened an email you sent.

Chrome extension for Gmail When using Gmail in a Chrome browser, you can install the Prosperworks Chrome extension. This plugin brings Prosperworks CRM right into your Gmail Inbox and allows you to work with your CRM without leaving Gmail.


This extension lets you view and edit existing CRM data as well as create new entries. The sidebar “senses” the details of the email you are viewing and offers data based on the content of the email.

If you are not using the Google Chrome browser yet, here are a few reasons why we think you should:

➔ It is automatically updated for security. ➔ You can log in with your Google Apps account. ➔ Sync your browser setting across devices. ➔ Gmail feels right at home in Chrome, including desktop notifications. ➔ A complete Chrome extensions marketplace. ➔ … Did we mention the Prosperworks Chrome extension ?

Built in intelligence

➔ Auto sync with Google for Work : Prosperworks syncs with your Google Apps automatically right after you turn your account on. You don’t need to set up anything.

➔ Suggested contacts : We analyze your email correspondence and make suggestions for contacts to be added to your CRM.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/prosperworks-crm/albpjpoeipdaegjahdcjodcgfepninop


Handles complexity Deals can get complicated. Prosperworks handles that complexity through connecting Companies, Contacts, Opportunities, and Activities on the data level. Then you can easily navigate the web of these entries and understand the structure of every deal.


2. Understanding your sales workflow Sales workflow self-assessment questions

In order to get the most value out of your new CRM system, your organization has to align its sales workflow with its CRM capabilities. Ensure that your team members understand how your sales process works and how to make CRM the backbone of all sales efforts. On a very high level, to understand your sales workflow you have to understand where your leads come from, how they make it to CRM, how they flow thru CRM, and what it takes to close the deals successfully. Start with an inventory of existing sales resources and practices at your company.

Sales team Take a note of all your team members who are in sales and customer service roles. Those employees who are at the office all the time will constitute your inside sales team, and for our purposes here, customer service will be considered part of inside sales.

Consider this : Tech support and customer service are a terrific source of upsell opportunities for your existing customers. Usually, they are the first point of contact when your customers have questions or problems. Your support and service staff have a great opportunity to build relationships with your customers, learn about their needs, and recommend additional products and services from your selection.


Inside sales staff conduct many of their customer encounters over the phone or through email. Evaluate the efficiency of your office technology to make sure they properly support your team (properly working computers, fast internet connection, good quality phone service, etc.) Outside sales staff are on the road, visiting customers, and holding meetings at their offices. For them, mobility and ease of use are the key requirements for technology. Modern outside sales teams are equipped with data enabled mobile devices and applications (such as the Prosperworks mobile app) designed specifically to support sales on smart devices.

A note on team culture : Collaboration is built on team members sharing information liberally. Fostering a team culture where everyone relies on a well maintained CRM and sharing information is a means of collaboration, not a data entry chore. It also leads to higher customer satisfaction and therefore healthier revenue.

Existing systems and practices Make a list of the systems that are currently used to manage sales. Include in the list all databases, applications, and spreadsheets as well as offline tools like notepads or sticky notes. Consider Outlook and email inboxes as part of the current sales tracking system if these systems are used to track contacts or deals. When it comes to the current systems,

➔ Do they support collaboration ? How easy or hard is it to share data using these existing tools?

➔ Are they scalable ? If you were to add more staff or increase the number of sales deals, will your current systems handle the increased volume?

➔ Are they mobile ? Can your travelling employees have access to the same data that they do in the office?


➔ Are they safe ? Do your current systems protect you against accidental or intentional data leaks and destruction?

Then take note of all existing practices of how the current systems are used.

➔ Is there written documentation of your current sales workflow? Are these documents maintained? Will a new employee be able to understand how sales works from these documents?

➔ Are your sales practices equally understood by all your team members?

Deal flow

➔ Lead intake and qualification : Make sure you can identify all sources that sales leads can come from. This includes all your online assets (website, landing pages, chat, forms) as well as offline sources like sales meetings, events, conferences, etc. Do you have a clear framework to assess every lead and make the determination whether to pursue the lead or to mark them as useless? Write up a couple of questions that you can ask to prospects and from their answers determine if a) they have the required budget to buy from you, b) the person you are talking to is the person who will make the purchase, c) they indeed need the solution your company offers, d) are ready to buy from you within a reasonable amount of time, e) what their key objections or concerns are regarding the purchase. Keep in mind : Just because a Lead is not ready to buy from you does not mean it is a bad lead. They could just be in an early stage of the buying process and not ready for purchase yet. When setting up your lead qualification framework, make sure you separate bad leads from those who are simply not ready. Put them into a separate category and consider marketing to them using email, newsletters, or other low touch marketing efforts.


➔ Follow up routines : Few sales happens on the first one or two encounters. On the other hand, properly timed contact efforts help establish a relationship with your prospects. The keys to good follow ups are persistence, timing, and relevance. Persistence: Always be on the proactive side and initiate contacts, rather than waiting for prospects to get back to you. Timing: Time your follow ups so that your prospect will find them a natural extension of your previous conversation. Relevance: When you initiate a contact, be prepared. Know who your prospect is and their context, and lead the conversation with information that they need.

➔ Cycle length: After a Lead has been qualified and turned into an Opportunity is when deal management begins. Understanding how long and complex your sales cycle is helps line up your sales efforts and stay efficient even with several deals in the pipeline. The Opportunity cycle starts when an Opportunity is created and ends when an Opportunity is closed. A cycle length of days or weeks is considered short. Deals that take several months to close are considered to have long sales cycles. The cycle length determines the velocity of your deals; with short cycles your sales team has to crunch through a lot of deals all the time, and managing a large number of concurrent deals can require a lot of multitasking. On the other extreme, long sales cycles demand plenty of follow ups and investment of your team’s time.

Action plan


Use your answers to the above self-assessment questions to lay out a plan to create a more consistent sales workflow. We highly recommend creating a sales manual that captures at least the essentials of your sales workflow. Such a manual will help all your team members to adopt and maintain consistency in their sales efforts, and it will also help the onboarding of new team members.

Basic sales concepts

In order to discuss your sales workflow and put your CRM to the best use, we need to look at how sales works in general.

Lead

In short, a Lead is an unqualified buyer. You may know a Lead’s name and contact information, but you have no information about whether they are ready to buy from you. Do they have a true intent to buy, or are they simply educating themselves? Are they willing to spend the money it takes to buy from you?

Lead qualification and conversion

Lead qualification is the process of gathering the necessary information to determine if a lead is a solid potential buyer. This process will depend on what and how you sell, and can be as simple as asking a few questions.

Person and Company

A Person is an entry in CRM about a contact person. It stores the contact’s information such as name, title, phone numbers or social media profiles. It is important to note the differences between a Lead and a Person.


Lead

Person

Purpose Unqualified prospect

Qualified prospect, can also be a Vendor or other type of partner (not a buyer)

Contains details about the Company? Yes No (see Company)

Contains details about the sales deal? Yes No (see Opportunity)

Required? No, using Leads is optional in CRM

Yes, it is an essential building block in CRM

A Company is an organization a Person works for. It contains the details of the organization such as address or website. Please note that a Person does not have to have a Company related to them. On the other hand, multiple People can be related to the same Company.

Opportunity

An Opportunity is a sales project or deal. It captures the subject of the sales discussion in a data entry that is separate from a Person or a Lead. This


distinction is very important because an Opportunity stores information about the deal that a Person’s entry does not capture.

Watch out for this common mistake : An Opportunity is not a person, it is the sales project that you discuss with your contact. Actually, there can be multiple Opportunities associated with the same person or client.

Information that an Opportunity stores:

➔ Stage : Each Opportunity can have its own stage depending on where it stands in the sales process, e.g. “Sales presentation” or “Quote sent.” Also, when a deal is won or lost, the stage is updated to reflect this fact. The stages can be customized to match the stage names you use in sales. Very often a percentage value (Stage probability, Win %) is assigned to each Stage that expresses the likelihood of the deal closing successfully. As a deal evolves thru the sales stages, its likelihood of winning increases. This likelihood is then used to calculate the “weighted revenue” from the deal, which is value * Win % * 100.

➔ Close Date : Opportunities can be assigned a Close Date, a day when the deal is expected to be completed. By assigning a Close Date, you are placing the Opportunity in a specific time period. A Sales Forecast for that period will include the revenue expected from that Opportunity.

➔ Value : The sales revenue expected from the deal. Also, Opportunities are unique in that they can be related to multiple other entries in the CRM.

➔ Multiple stakeholders : There can be more than one Person involved in the negotiations about a sales deal.


➔ Multiple deals : One Person can be in charge of multiple sales projects as a decision maker.

For more information read this Knowledge Base article: Opportunities pipeline .

Pipeline

A sales Pipeline represents all your Opportunities in your CRM at a given moment, considering the values, close dates, and stages of every Opportunity.

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204357835-Opportunities-Pipeline-and-Opportunity-Task-Indicators-


Sales pipelines are important for the following reasons ➔ You can have multiple pipelines at your company, for example a wholesale

and a retail sales team or product and services arms of the same company. ➔ When multiple employees or teams nurture sales deals, the pipeline

represents their combined efforts. ➔ Pipelines are used to estimate sales revenue (sales forecast).

Forecast

A Sales Forecast is the estimation of the value of a pipeline: the expected revenue from all the deals (Opportunities) in the pipeline over a period of time. The forecast timeframe is usually a month or a quarter. Several metrics can be used for sales forecasts (see the chapter Common metrics to measure your sales ) but the most common calculations are total pipeline value and weighted pipeline value. Total pipeline value: the sum of all opportunities for a given time period (e.g. quarter).


Weighted pipeline value: multiply the value of each Opportunity by its Win % and add them up for a given time period (e.g. quarter).

eighted pipeline value pportunity dollar value ($) likelihood of win (%)w = ∑

O *

Keep in mind : For pipeline forecasts to work reliably, the users of your CRM have to enter the the Close Date, Value, and Win% fields meticulously, as these data points place the individual Opportunities in the right forecast category.

To reveal sales’ true dynamics you have to look at the speed and direction of change in pipeline values over time. Single readings convey little information about the performance of sales activities. For example, running a report for the quarterly weighted pipeline value every week will, over time, provide insight into how the pipeline grows and how new deals entering the pipeline affect the overall forecast.

Sales funnel

The Sales funnel (the “Funnel”) is a representation of all your future and current customers, grouped together based on their status in the buying cycle. In a CRM, prospective customers enter the Top of the Funnel when they are captured as a Lead, they get to the Middle when they are qualified as an Opportunity, and reach the Bottom if the Funnel when their business is successfully closed.


In many cases, sales work does not end when a deal is closed. Companies that are smart about their demand generation look for ways to re-engage their existing customer base. This comes from the simple calculation that keeping existing customers satisfied and re-engaging them is usually cheaper than acquiring new ones.

A good CRM system will not only allow you to track leads, qualify, and then close them, but also look for opportunities to re-engage customers to upsell and cross-sell. As always, good data entry in your CRM is key for these sales efforts.


Activities In CRM parlance, a sales Activity is any action or interaction related to a specific Lead, Contact or Opportunity. Activities can include emails, phone calls, to-do tasks, meetings, or the sending of documents. The idea behind tracking activities is that a trail of activity logs will allow team members to pick up where a sales conversation stands. Also, tasks can be used to manage follow up activities. As you will see, Prosperworks let’s you track many of these activities, some of them automatically (emails, meetings) , others thru manual data entry (phone calls, tasks, documents).


3. Using ProsperWorks CRM to manage prospects and customers Key building blocks

Leads

As discussed before, Leads are unqualified prospects. In Prosperworks the use of the Lead module is optional, and it is disabled by default. To make the decisions whether to enable the Leads module, consider the following:

Do you have to qualify Leads? When you receive a new sales request, do you have to determine whether they are ready and willing to buy from you? Do you have low quality Leads? Do you receive leads where the contact information may not be complete or accurate?

If you answered Yes to either of the above questions, then you should use Leads in Prosperworks. Putting your Leads in a separate module first will keep them separate from your valuable prospects and contacts stored in the Person module. To enable Leads, your administrator has to

1. Go to 2. Click on Customize Prosperworks → Lead management 3. Check the box


Even if you do not enable the Leads module, you have additional options to separate prospects from customers

➔ Use the Contact type dropdown list on the Person page

You may also create a custom entry, such as “Lead” for this dropdown.

➔ Use custom tags to tag a Person

Lead conversion

When a lead is qualified it is then converted into a Person in Prosperworks. If the Lead contains a Company name then a Company will also be created. At the time of the conversion you can decide whether you want to create an Opportunity as well. When a Lead is converted, the Lead entry is removed and its information is moved to the corresponding Person, Company and Opportunity.


If you have custom fields in Leads, and want to preserve that data after Lead conversion, you have to create the same custom fields for Company, Person and Opportunity.

For more information read this Knowledge Base article: Leads

People, Companies

The People and Companies pages are the essential building blocks of your customer data in Prosperworks. On a Person’ s page you can enter the most common contact information such as phone numbers, emails and addresses. While only a first or last name is requiredto create a new Person entry, it is highly recommended to gather as much information about a Person as possible.

Zero data entry CRM: Prosperworks gathers information about your contacts in the background, automatically. It looks for contact information from your Google Apps as well as from public sources, like social network profiles. This way you have rich customer data in Prosperworks, without data entry.

While it seems obvious, establishing company-wide minimum data collection standards goes a very long way towards valuable CRM data. A full name will help address the person the right way in all communications and a working email

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203036105-Leads-Overview


address will be necessary to send them any written correspondence and gather social media information. Needless to say, at least one phone number will be necessary if you ever want to give them a call.

Social profiles : once you create a new Person, Prosperworks will search for social profiles for the Person and add them to their CRM page automatically

The Company page is specifically for organizations and data about them. When it comes to relating People to Companies, the connection is established through the Company field on a Person’s page and through the related People on the Company page. You can connect a Person to a Company through either one of these ways

➔ Fill out the “Company” field in a Person’s page to link the Company to the Person.

➔ Add a new Person from the Company’s page and link the Person to the Company.


This is how the connection between a Person and a Company is shown in Prosperworks.

Opportunity

Opportunities are entries of their own in Prosperworks. Since they are often confused with Leads and contact Persons, we’d like to keep emphasizing the difference. The Opportunity is the sales deal, and the Person is the contact


person you are negotiating with. Details of the sales deal/project go into the Opportunity, and details about the the contact go into the Person entry. By keeping the Stage and Close Date values up to date you are automatically moving the Opportunity forward in the Pipeline. The Value field helps with reports on sales forecasts.

Customizing Opportunities : The Opportunity stages, associated Win %, and Pipeline can all be customized in Prosperworks. For details see the the chapter Customization .

Pipelines

A pipeline is the “container” for Opportunities that have the same set of stages. In Prosperworks you can have multiple Pipelines, each customized with its own sales stages to match the needs of different business units. An intuitive drag and drop screen helps you display your pipelines visually and drag Opportunities between stages with a simple click. To switch to the visual


pipeline screen go to Opportunities and click on the Show Pipeline View icon at the top right corner.

Customizing Pipelines : For details on how to customize Pipelines see the the chapter Customization .

Activities

Activities show up in the Activity stream in the middle panel of Prosperworks as well as under the related entries section on the right hand side. Emails and calendar events get automatically associated with contacts in Prosperworks. This association is done in the background, based on the email address of the email sender/recipient and the event attendee.


Calls , meetings, and notes can be logged manually in the system by adding an entry to the activity log.


Tasks (to-dos) are created manually or using the Automated Actions feature, For Tasks you can specify a reminder, which will be sent to you in email at a time of your choice.

For more information read this Knowledge Base article: a How does Prosperworks Task sync with Google Calendar . For Automated Actions, please visit this Knowledge Base article - Automated Actions - and also the section in this document

Files can be uploaded or linked from Google Drive and Dropbox.

Projects

Project entries can be used to track team efforts related to customers outside of traditional sales cases. You can use Projects to connect Companies, People, and Opportunities with Activities. Just like other pages in Prosperworks, Projects can have custom fields. Customizing Projects makes them suitable to be used

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204357875-How-does-ProsperWorks-Task-Sync-to-Google-Calendar-

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204357875-How-does-ProsperWorks-Task-Sync-to-Google-Calendar-


outside sales. You can use them to track customer support cases, delivery, deployment, and installation projects, etc.


4. Using prosperworks at your company Recommendations and tips for common scenarios deploying and using ProsperWorks at a company.

Installation, configuration and customization pathway

Account deployment

Prosperworks is 100% cloud based, meaning that there is no software to download and install. When deploying Prosperworks for your company, you will have to complete some of the following steps.

The first user to sign up from your Google Apps domain will become the account owner, and an administrator of the account. This user can invite other users from the domain, and optionally make them administrators as well.

For more information read this Knowledge Base article : how to invite other users to use Prosperworks .

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203669759-Invite-Your-Team-to-ProsperWorks

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203669759-Invite-Your-Team-to-ProsperWorks


Once users have an account in Prosperworks, they can sign in using the web app at app.prosperworks.com . They can also install the Gmail Chrome extension to use Prosperworks from inside Gmail. For users on the go, the Prosperworks mobile app is available for iOS and Android devices free of charge from the iTunes and Google Play stores.

Choose your Admins carefully! Administrators in Prosperworks have powers that you will want to limit to a few people only. Administrators can make changes to system wide settings and grant admin rights to other users. They can see all data in the system, including emails, even if those are restricted.

Interface overview

Web app

The web app version of Prosperworks is accessed using any web browser on your desktop or laptop computer. To access Prosperworks from your browser, go to app.prosperworks.com and sign in with your email/password or your Google Apps user name. The benefits of using the web app are ● It gives the most comprehensive access to all your data and CRM features. ● It is available from any modern browser on any computer with an internet

connection.

http://app.prosperworks.com/


There are three levels of details in Prosperworks. The Main menu slides out from the left on every page by clicking the menu button in the top left corner.

From the Main menu you can navigate to a List page that lists data from a single module of the same kind (e.g. Opportunities). These List pages can be customized by changing the order of the list and by adding and removing data columns.

For more information read this Knowledge Base article about: Customizing your list views

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203669779-Tailor-Your-List-Views-with-Customizable-Columns


The third level of detail is looking at the page of a single CRM entry. On this page, the screen is divided into three areas. The left hand side panel shows the details of the entry you are looking at. For example, on a Person’s page the contact information and other data fields are displayed here. In the middle section, a panel displays the activity stream related to the entry. This is where Tasks and Emails are displayed and where you can manually record activities like phone calls, notes or meetings.


Gmail extension

Accessing Prosperworks through the web app is convenient, but it is the Gmail extension that unlocks the true power of using Prosperworks and Google Apps together. The Gmail extension pops up in your Gmail inbox next to your emails and displays CRM information based on the email you are viewing.


The extension not only displays context sensitive CRM data, it also lets you add new Leads, Persons, Opportunities, or Tasks to Prosperworks. If you use the Gmail extension, chances are it will become your primary way of using Prosperworks on your desktop browser.


Also, the extension creates new buttons inside your Gmail and lets you set a reminder for an email or relate it to a Person.

The Gmail extension is a Chrome browser extension, and to use it you have to:

1. Install and use Google Chrome Browser The Chrome browser installation link: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/desktop/index.html More information about the Chrome browser https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/browser/ About Chrome extensions: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/browser/

https://developer.chrome.com/extensions

https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/browser/desktop/index.html


2. Install the Prosperworks Chrome Extension from the Chrome webstore Webstore link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/crm-for-gmail/hpfmedbkgaakgagknibnonpkimkibkla Knowledge Base articles about the Gmail extension Overview | Install | Uninstall

Mobile app

A free native mobile app is available for both Apple iOS and Android phones. They can be downloaded from the marketplaces at these links:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.prosperworks.android

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prosperworks-zero-input-crm/id941438829

The mobile app provides as rich functionality and experience as the web app, but in a format that is optimized for mobile use. It requires little to no training, as the functionality is similar to that of the desktop version. The mobile app is the perfect way to access Prosperworks CRM from your smartphone while on the go.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/crm-for-gmail/hpfmedbkgaakgagknibnonpkimkibkla

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202325859-How-do-I-Uninstall-the-ProsperWorks-Chrome-Extension-

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201211389-ProsperWorks-Chrome-Extension-For-Gmail-Overview



https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203024005-How-to-Install-the-ProsperWorks-Chrome-Extension-for-Gmail



https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/crm-for-gmail/hpfmedbkgaakgagknibnonpkimkibkla


Strategies for using the web app / chrome extension / mobile app If you use Gmail in Google Apps for daily work then you should consider installing the Gmail extension and use it as your primary method to interact with Prosperworks. To help come up with the best adoption strategy, here is a side by side comparison of the three pathways to Prosperworks.


Web app Gmail extension Mobile app

Main use case Complete access on a

full-screen in any browser

CRM in your Gmail inbox

Access Prosperworks on your smartphone

Pros

Works in any browser

High level of details on every screen

Use CRM without leaving your Gmail

Complete access to

view or create any entry

Rich experience optimized for smartphones

Cons

Lack of mobility

Have to switch between tabs in

browser

Requires the use of Chrome browser

Requires mobile data connection

Use it if... You are at the office most of the time

You are a hardcore Gmail user You are on the go

Customization

Prosperworks offers customization options to tailor CRM to your exact needs. System-wide customization options are available for administrators under the

option. Some customization, like creating tags, can be done by the end users directly.


Custom fields

Administrators may add custom fields to data pages. These custom fields can be used to capture data that is unique to your company’s data needs. Custom fields can be added to the following pages ● Leads ● Companies ● People ● Opportunities ● Tasks ● Projects


Examples of using custom fields are:

➔ “ Birthday ” field on the Person page (date field) ➔ “ Account ID ” field on the Company page (number) ➔ “ Credit approval status ” drop-down list with “ Cash only ”, “ Net 7 ”, “ Net 30 ” as

values (dropdown) ➔ “ Product ” field in Opportunities that points to a product URL in your web

store (URL)


You can decide if you want to include the custom field in your filters. If you check that box, you can use the value of your custom fields to create custom filters on the list pages. Custom filters are a great way to slice through your data quickly.

When you are adding custom fields to Leads, you will be reminded to create the same fields for People. That way, when you convert a Lead, the data will be preserved and copied to the Person’s page you create from the Lead.

Warning : If you do not create identical fields in Leads and People, the content of those custom fields will be lost when you convert the lead.

For more information read this Knowledge Base article: how to create custom fields .

Tags

Tags are custom “labels” that can be applied to a CRM entry. You may create and apply to an entry as many tags as you wish. Tags are a more loose way of

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204357705-How-to-Create-Custom-Fields-in-ProsperWorks


assigning labels to an entry than data fields. Consider the following points when deciding between using Tags or Custom fields.

Custom fields Tags

Who creates them? Administrator Any user

Data format You have to enter the required data type (e.g. date) Arbitrary text

Can be used for list filtering Yes Yes

Number of entries One field per page As many tags as you need

Applicable to Only the entry type it was created for (e.g. “Person”) Any entry in CRM

Use it if... You need a specific piece of data entered just for that page

You need various loosely defined labels across page

types

Tags are created “on the fly” when creating a new entry in CRM. When you start typing in Tag name, existing tag names matching your type will pop up. If the Tag does not exist yet, you can create it as a new Tag.


Setting up multiple Pipelines

As mentioned earlier, Pipelines are the containers for Opportunities. In Prosperworks you can have multiple pipelines. If your company has multiple sales channels, and the stages of the Opportunities in those channels differ from each other, then you should set up a Pipeline for each sales channel. Let’s consider an example, where a company sells custom websites and consulting services for SEO optimization. A customer may be interested in either one of these services, or both. For the sales team it will take a different workflow to sell a custom website or the consulting, and the stages of the sales workflow will be different. To match the sales workflow, two separate Pipelines can be created in Prosperworks with stages corresponding to the sales workflow.


You may use the multiple pipelines for other purposes as well, such as tracking

➔ Territories ➔ Product lines ➔ Sales teams

For more information read this Knowledge Base article: Customize your multiple pipelines .

Additional customization

Prosperworks offers additional customization to fine tune settings to your exact needs.

Contact types This is a dropdown field that indicates whether the Person or Company is a current customer or other type of business partner. In addition to the default “Potential Customer” and “Current Customer” values, you may add your own contact types to the list, such as “Vendor” or “Competitor.” Sources This dropdown field tells you where an Opportunity came from. Typical values include “Advertising”, “Cold call”, “Referral”, “Conference”, etc. Loss reasons The loss reason is a dropdown field in Opportunities that can capture the reason why an Opportunity was lost. Understanding why a sales deal was lost provides very important feedback to the whole company. Was the price too high? Did the company not meet the client’s requirements? Did the competition come out on top? Capturing these loss reason will help the team adjust their sales efforts and learn from lost deals.

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203669849-Customize-Your-Multiple-Pipelines


Teams You may create Teams and assign system users to them. When it comes to sharing your data with others, you can select a specific team you want to share with. All members of that team will have access to the data. This feature can be helpful if you want to share certain data with “Sales team” or “Managers” only.

Automated Actions

The Automated Actions feature lets you create a Task or assign a Tag, when an entry (e.g. an Opportunity) is created or updated. These actions can be used to automate repeating tasks. A great example of this would be creating a follow up task when a new Opportunity is created. Automated Actions are built from a trigger (“When this happens then…”) and an action (“...that should also happen”)

To set it up, In the Settings > Automated Action menu, create a new item. First name the new entry


then create the trigger

and finally the action


Working with data

Visibility of entries

For each entry in Prosperworks you can set how other users can see your entry. By default, an entry can be seen by all other users. You may change this setting to limit access by others.

Visibility of emails

Your email communication with a Person will show up in CRM on the Person’s page in the Activity stream. By default, emails are only visible to you and system administrators.


Lists

In List view mode, you can see some or all CRM entries of a certain type. For example, going to People from the menu will display all the contacts in the system. With a few simple tricks, you can customize the list of items displayed on the screen. From the drop down at the top you can choose customers by type or only entries that you are following.


You may create a single new entry or import a list by clicking on the ‘ADD NEW’ blue button.

If you are looking for a specific keyword within the list, type it into the search box

by the magnifying glass in the top right corner. As you type, entries matching your keyword will automatically show up in the list on the screen.


To change the columns displayed on the screen and customize the data fields on

the page, click the cogwheel icon.

You may also create a custom filter, using the filter icon. A new sidebar will appear on the left where you can set your filter criteria.


Lists and filtering outside the web app : filtering and search functionality are available in the Gmail extension and the mobile app as well, but optimized for your device’s screen

Search

To find any items in Prosperworks, simply type your search keywords in the unified search bar at the top right corner of the screen.


Reporting

Dashboards

The Dashboard page provides a high level, composite overview of sales and activities. It is the best place to start when you need the big picture view about your company. The includes data from all users, while the

view focuses on your personal data.


Reports

With Prosperworks’ reports you can summarize sales activities and roll up sales results by day, week, month or quarter. The reports not only quantify the results but also help visualize them, providing insight into past trends and expected future results (forecasts).


To access reports in Prosperworks go to

from the menu. Reports are groups into the following categories.

Pipeline reports These reports quantify the value of your pipelines based on Opportunities that are still open in the pipeline. You may choose to see the total or the weighted value of the Opportunities by source, by assignee, or in total. Sales reports Sales reports summarize Opportunities that have already closed. This includes lost opportunities.

For more information read this Knowledge Base article: reports .

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/200925205-Reports


Custom reports builder

Prosperworks offers a Google Sheets add-on that lets you pull CRM data into a Google Sheet and build custom reports. With this add-on you can build complex custom analytics and dashboards around your CRM data using Google’s advanced reporting tools.

The add-on is available from the Google Sheets Add-ons store from this link - it is for free.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/prosperworks-crm-custom-r/bcbdocneacmnhkpdekkjjbeajeblmmhd?utm_source=permalink


Data management

Importing

You may migrate data from other CRMs or spreadsheets by importing them into Prosperworks in a CSV file format. When importing Companies, Contacts and Opportunities, make sure you import that in that order to maintain relationship between the data. Prosperworks provides a CSV file template that you can use to prepare your data for import.

For more information read this Knowledge Base article: Importing data

Exporting

If you need to use your CRM data elsewhere, e.g. for a marketing campaign, you may export your data from Lead, People, Companies, Opportunities, Projects and Tasks.

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/200459047-Importing-Data


If you need a more dynamic way to get your CRM data into another application, consider one of the integration options.

Integrations

There are two ways of integrating with Prosperworks. There is a number of built in integrations in Prosperworks.

This integration connects you with 300+ cloud applications through zapier, one of the most popular cloud integration platforms. Build your own integration (called a “zap”), or choose from a library of hundreds of existing integrations


A very popular email marketing platform, Mailchimp will sync with your Contacts and identify which campaign they belong to.

You can use Google Drive and Dropbox as the source of files to be attached to entries in Prosperworks.

Additionally, Prosperworks has an open RESTful API that can be used to access CRM data from a custom application. You can find the API documentation here.

https://www.prosperworks.com/developer_api


5. Common metrics to measure your sales

The following section is dedicated to common Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you can use to measure your sales efforts. You can use these KPIs to evaluate the performance of employees individually and compared to each other as well as overall sales performance.

Availability of these metrics in Prosperworks: Some of these metrics are readily available from the standard reports in Prosperworks CRM. Others may require the use of the Custom Reports add-on, that can be downloaded from the Google Sheets Add-ons store from this link .

Most KPIs tend to reveal their true nature over time. To get an accurate number, take a longer period of time, and calculate your KPIs for equal intervals for that period. For example, take a 3 month period and calculate your metrics for each week within that range. This will results in a more stable reading. If your business has seasonality, then you have to run the calculation for the busy and quiet periods of the year.

Lead metrics

Number of new leads

The number of leads that come in on a given day or week can be used to measure the overall traffic your sales team gets.

What you can learn from this metric is whether you have sufficient sales staff. If your staff is dealing with more leads than they can realistically qualify, then you

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/prosperworks-crm-custom-r/bcbdocneacmnhkpdekkjjbeajeblmmhd?utm_source=permalink


have to reduce the number of leads (and stop wasting marketing dollars) or hire new sales staff. On the contrary if there are not enough leads to fill all sales team members’ time, then consider upping your lead generation efforts.

Leads by source

Add up the number of new leads received from each source type (e.g. your website, landing pages etc) over a week or month. Over time, you will see trends emerge, and some lead sources will be more active than others. Understanding where your leads come from helps with optimizing your marketing and lead generation efforts.

Lead conversion rate

Divide the number of leads converted with the total number of new leads for a given time period. For example, if last month your received a total of 90 leads and out of those leads 28 were successfully qualified and converted, then your lead conversion rate is 28/90 = 0.31 or 31%. This KPI becomes informative if you calculate it regularly, over a longer period of time. If there are deviations from the long term averages, it can be an indication of changes in lead quality or changes in the efficiency of your team’s lead qualification efforts.

Opportunity metrics

Average deal size

This is a simple KPI, calculated as the average of Opportunity values in the pipeline. It gives you a reading on the average amount of revenue from each deal.


Close ratio

Take the number of won Opportunities and divide it by the total number of Opportunities created for the time period. For example, if you had 7 Opportunities won last month, out of a total of 28, then your close ratio is 7/28 = 0.25 or 25%. The close ratio is a true indicator of sales rep performance, because it shows the amount of won deals from all the qualified leads. If you calculate the close ratio for each sales team member, it will help you pinpoint differences in individual sales staff performance.

Lead to Opportunity close ratio

This metric is calculated by taking the number of won opportunities and divide it by the number of new leads received for the same period. Using the same numbers from the previous examples, if there were 7 won Opportunities last month out of a total of 90 new leads, then your lead to opportunity close ratio is 7/90 = 0.078 or 7.8%. This metric measures the marketing efforts vs. sales efficiency. If you take the cost of generating all your leads and compare it to the revenue from the won deals, it will give you a Return on Investment (ROI) for your marketing expenses.

Opportunity to close cycle

Calculated as the average number of days between when an Opportunity was created and the day it closed, this KPI reveals the average duration of your opportunity management cycle.

If you have multiple pipelines, then you should calculate these Opportunity KPIs for each pipeline separately.


Additional help for Prosperworks Getting help for Prosperworks CRM is easy, and our San Francisco based support team will gladly answer any questions you may have.

You may also submit questions or support requests directly

On our Support Portal https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new Via email [email protected]

https://prosperworks.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

mailto:[email protected]

Documents

CRM Playbook - Amazon S3 · ProsperWorks CRM Playbook This document is divided into three parts. In the first part, you can learn about the CRM concept, it’s building blocks and