Although Kalexo Teamwork is designed for project-based industries such as design and construction, we have many users that use it in other ways. One quite popular use is in Business Development and Sales, where tracking a large number of customer engagement is of critical importance. A common setup is vice president and all his reports sharing the burden of interacting with clients and prospects.
How is this done in Kalexo? [Demo]
Typically a dedicated workspace is created for the business unit, and all project members are invited into it. Next at least one thread is created for each prospect, and the core folks that interact with the prospect are added to the thread. A thread description is created giving an overview of the prospect and contact information. Goals that need to be accomplished are entered as checklist items.
Day-to-day operations becomes then pretty straight-forward.
Every time an interaction or some significant event happens with a prospect, add the relevant data / record to the thread. This could be done by anyone in the group. It could be as simple as adding a one line comment, or dropping in a file that the prospect received. When there are email conversations with a prospect, simply file the email into the thread.
This creates in indelible record that makes progress tracking very easy. The history of a business development thread typically reaches back to when the prospect enters into the conversation – and could last months or years.
Also make sure the participant who is taking the next step with a prospect has the ball. If no progress can be made for a period of time, set a due date the next time an action should be taken. Typically due dates advance continually to remind participants that attention is needed – this is easy to see since the thread will turn red when the due date is reached.
If some business activity needs to be put on ice, simply lower the priority of the thread, or set it to none.
Handing off a prospect to another person is as simple as passing the ball (pick it up with the mouse and drop it on another participant). The complete prospect is really convenient for the person who gets the ball – there is no looking for information since it is all right there in the thread.
What happens when you work like this? First, everyone in the group has an up to date view of what needs to be done – nicely prioritized. The VP can easily see what is happening across all deals – without having to be informed by e-mail or in a status meeting. It is also easy to run reports to see what is going on. It also becomes possible to efficiently track a much larger of engagements without driving everyone crazy. Everything is easily organized and searchable.
At Kalexo, we actually have a workspace called “Kalexo Bizdev” which contains all client interactions from the formation of the company onwards. One of our other users have all sales leads in a workspace.
Once you have something like this at your fingertips, there is now way you can go back – it is just so much more convenient.
Learn more about Kalexo Teamwork at the Kalexo web site.
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