Sage ACT 2013 Opportunity Management

What can we do with Opportunities in ACT!? Following up on our summary last week, Do One Thing (click to view the post), we now focus on taking action.  Let's embrace opportunities in our Sage ACT! database to improve business performance in 2013.

Design and Embed Business Processes in Sage ACT! Opportunities.

Here we walk through the process required to re-engineer our business in the ACT opportunity entity. We have a few moving parts here, but stick with the steps and realize a permanent benefit if we seek to gain more traction with every prospect in our pipeline:

1. Identify our Processes and the Stages within them.
2. Modify our Product List to reflect method for recognizing revenue.
3. Special circumstances? Customize Fields and the Opportunity Layout to reflect our specialized market.
4. Tracking ROI.

Tracking this information against the contact record currently? You're not alone. Here we hope to make the case that the one-contact-has-many opportunities case. What can be tracked solely against the ACT! contact record turns out to be very limiting. Take a look at moving to opportunities. Do this and change everything. Now to roll up our sleeves and get started:

1. Business Processes and Stages: 

We all know how we approach any opportunity we identify. Whether we sell a product, a service, membership, subscriptions, brokerage, loans, space, time, events, or ideas, we need to focus on where our relationship-driven revenue is generated, and how it is generated.  

Simplicity is key. Let's say we sell widgets and have a service to install those widgets, in this example we want to track all the opportunities for:

1. New sales
2. New service
3. Cross-sales and up-sales
4. Maintenance and support

Because our interactions with new prospects are likely to be different than the interactions we have with existing customers, and in this example we may have a different approach to selling a product than we do with service and maintenance, we then want to identify the unique stages associated with each process.

Do this now:

Open a notepad and write down what you sell.  This is NOT a product list (we will get to that in a moment).  Look at the big picture: we sell left-handed widgets and we sell right-handed widgets, sure, but the process is the same for both.  If we sell widget accessories and parts, in this example, those lines of revenue may be more transactional (closing on one phone call), rather than more relationship driven (requiring full engagement), and may not need to be tracked in your ACT! database.

Identify your market segmentation.  It may be as simple as a single vertical, or it may be more complicated.  Remember, keep it simple so updates, tracking, and reporting are more meaningful. Getting this right is important.

Now, for each process identified, create a series of Stages, or steps, required to complete the process. These are NOT activities, though they are always the outcome of those activities. In our example of New Sales of widgets we may have the following Stages:

Customize Processes and Stages from the Tools | Define Fields
and select Manage process list

1. Identify (We recognize a potential opportunity)
2. Qualify  (We engaged the prospect and determined the fit is good)
3. Quote (We provide a quote or proposal)
4. Done... We get the business or we don't and update the opportunity Status (Closed - Won, or Closed - Lost), appropriately.

View these stages as your prospect might, aligning your process stages to the prospect's motivation to engage. While your methodology may dictate whether you proceed, the stages you define in your ACT! database remain true to the process.

Probability.
Before we commit our processes to the database let's establish our probability percentages to our stages. The Probability of Close becomes important when we view all our opportunities, all our users' opportunities, in an aggregated list view.

When we create our Stages the Probability is an optional point of data feeding our Weighted Total. For instance, we may have empirical data (or even just a feeling) that for every ten of our opportunities that come in at the Identify stage, only one advances to the Qualify stage. Therefore, the Probability for the Identify stage would be 10%.  This number may be adjusted to reflect your actual close percentages as reporting improves with real-world data.

For every stage, in each process, associate a percentage.

2. Product List
What do we sell? Homes, memberships, medical supplies, design services, mortgages, architectural components, landscaping, booth space, executives, software, expertise, rooms, banks, balloons, airplane timeshares, yachts, widgets... you name it. What do our customers buy? Millions of pages are printed every day answering this very question.

When we structure our opportunities we build on the components making up those opportunities. What our own product list looks like may define our niche. How we sell the items on this list may be what defines us as a company, hence the reams of reports.

To keep the conversation of how we present this in our Product List simple let's look at two ways to view out list: Brief and Comprehensive.

Comprehensive.  If we are looking for an accurate list of products, down to the last wing nut, it is likely we would be a great candidate for integrating our ACT! database with our accounting application where this sort of detail is essential. This way, quotes may be generated by ACT! users with up-to-the-minute accuracy.  The Product List in ACT! is synchronized with, say, Quickbooks, nightly. Accountability is guaranteed. Take a look at the very affordable and comprehensive ACT!<->Quickbooks link, QSalesData, for this sort of integration. When our own reams are generated they will be rich with really groovy data well suited for our widget business.

ACT! Manage Product List accessible from Tools | Define Fields menu.

Brief. Our line may be more amorphous. Realtors come to mind. Our clients are either buying, leasing, or selling, a home. (Three processes, by the way). Our Product List may have as few as two items on it: Home and Rental. We could add things like Land, etc., depending on the specialty, but that's the point.  Just a few items and the costs and prices of these items would be different for each opportunity. The reporting doesn't suffer from applied brevity.

Commissions.  Recognizing revenue based on the margin between the Price of an item and the "Cost"? We can find ACT! manages this very well. Should our commission be based on the Margin, ACT! will track this number with a system field, doing the math for us on stock reports.  No more spreadsheets. Complicated commissions? Let's manage those in custom tables associated with our opportunities. Call me if this is of interest.

3. Custom Opportunity Fields.
Tracking the particulars of a deal often requires we track special data. Work with suppliers to whom you would like to present a WHYDFML (what have you done for me lately) report? Add a field with a dropdown of suppliers. Done. Is there a checklist of tasks that need to be completed for each type of opportunity? Add those fields, appropriate dropdowns, and automate the completion of those checklist tasks. Done. (See our recent post on how to do this, with step-by-step instructions here).

Corporate inside sales reps? Marketing referral codes? Product or service categories of interest? Portfolio requirements? Split commissions? Effective dates? Regions or territories? Done. Done. Done. Done. ...and Done.

During our notepad moment, detailing Processes and Stages, we think deeply of all aspects of our potential deals. What we commit to the database will likely be permanent and unchanging. More transitory information will likely be captured as an Opportunity History item: a call completed, a meeting held. Elements of our process, hard-boiled elements, will be tracked. To track that information we will create fields in the opportunity entity. The example above works inside the zip city operating database and shows many custom fields in a custom layout. Do this one thing well and change everything.

4. The case for ROI.
The holy grail of opportunities, perfected: Return on Investment. If you are still reading you have arrived to the payoff. We have taken all the data we used to collect against the contact records in our database and made room for it in the revamped opportunity entity, using our sales strategy to craft a selling machine. Now we leverage this new business intelligence and make it work for us. The reporting potential is astonishing, but here we will look at ROI.

Need to know if an initiative is paying off? Of many initiatives, which is our most productive? Periodic sales and marketing meetings will benefit from hard numbers. Collect opportunities tagged with either a referral source or marketing codes and see how many, and what weighted value, those resources have brought to bear by running some ROI analysis in our new ACT! database.

Fortunately, we have a step-by-step approach to create this in a previous blog post using an event as an example. Take the investment associated with an event and measure the results. Understand the investment made in many events and enjoy solid numbers on performance for planning purposes in 2013. Make the jump and see how you can do this, too.

Do One Thing. We have seen how to build out opportunities in ACT! and make one significant change to our database.  Do One Thing. Continuing on this theme, our next item on the list intended to change everything is Email Marketing, specifically the integrated marketing available with Sage Email Marketing for ACT! (SEMA, a.k.a. Swiftpage Email). Do this one thing well and your prospective customer base will thank you. Do One Thing, baby.