About Activities

Activities - this is where it all happens. Whereas most other information in you CRM system describes what the world looks like, then activities describes what you do, what you have done and what you are planning to do. To send a letter is an activity, to meet with a customer is, even to think about something is an activity. All actions related to customers or prospects we think of as activities. So activities are actions with connections to eg a company, a contact person or to a sales project. Often activites are connected as a string of events; you send a proposal, you follow up by a phonoe call, you send a revised proposal, and you meet with the customer for negotiation and signature.

You will find that the more vigorously you use activities to describe what you do and plan to do, the more your day to day activities will be facilitated and the easier you will be able to remember "what we did back then".

It is a typical beginners error in the world of CRM to think that activities are cumbersome and that you should only keep record of important situations as activities, and instead write your actions in a text log like "Called today 14th left message", "Called back on the 17th noone in".

If instead you get used to create activities for each action you will experience:

a) its real easy since the activity can be created automatically based on the previous activity

Imagine if the customer calls you to discuss a situation and refers to something that he agreed with your company a year ago...? Once you have experienced the benefit of having a clear and precise list of all activities, all correspondence (between anyone from the customer's and your organization), all minutes of meetings and all phone conversations sorted in time or sorted by responsible, then you know what we mean.

There is no practical limitations for how many activities the ChannelCRM system can contain. Millions of activities are easily handled by the system.

Oliver Grumple is not keen on registrating activities: "What do you want me to do? Sell or fill out forms in a system?" Well, maybe Oliver is afraid that by entering too much information he is relinquishing information about the customers to his colleagues and diminishing his own indispensability. Maybe he is even worried that someone might notice what his actual activity level is.

Paula Nice is real good with activities. She is well aware of the fact that it becomes visible how hard she is working, and it gives her much satisfaction to know that all of her work is documented, "and then it's just fine that my work can be reused and that others can take over when I am out of the office"

It is more or less obvious that meetings must be in the system, whatever it is meetings between you (your colleagues) and the custome or meetings between you andothers that might influence your sales activity. On a meeting you register time, and place but also participants both from the customer side and from your own company. If you have prepared documents for the meeting you can save this directly under the meeting. Also remembver to let the CannelCM automatically fill out your meeting conformation e-mail or letter.

A Phone Call is also an activity. A special form of telephone activity is telesales in connection with campaigns. This kind of activities are treated in a special way by the Telecenter. Read more about telesales, campaigns and the Telecenter in the Chapter about Campaigns.

ChannelCRM is able to journalize any document that can be handled as a file in the Windows operating system.

When it comes to creating documents, ChannelCRM effectively lets you use templates(Word, Outlook, Excel, PowerPoint, WordPerfect) with merge fields to quickly and easily build standard letters like meeting confirmation, "thank you for your interest in", proposals etc. All data from the ChannelCRM database can be merged into documents.

When you create an activity you will notice that there are 7 types of activities to choose from:

Information is used if you want to create a quick note on say a company (you might have hard that the company was mentioned in the news and want to write a few words about it.

Presentation is used to describe the kind of customer meetings that resembles one way presentations. Very often presentation of a solution has a specific meaning in many sales models.

Phone message is used when you take a message for another user or when you leave a message with a contact.