Aarav Diwan

The one best thing about salespeople? They are independent and do not require micromanagement.

During the COVID-19 pandemic when they are not able to step out, it is important as a sales manager, to keep your team motivated and productive even when working from home.

And here are seven ways to keep your field team motivated as they work from home:

Maintain a relationship

So many people must be experiencing anxiety or may get paranoid with the current situation. So even if they do not need a manager to tell them how to do their job, they need someone to talk to and keep them engaged.

See what you do currently to stay positive and motivated. Schedule occasional meetings via Zoom or another video conferencing platform. And that should be like an open platform where everyone can share their thoughts, stories. And most people derive energy from interacting with their peers so have one-on-one calls with each of your employees.

Sometimes little of letting go is important

Productivity is important within the team. Rather than assuming that a staffer is slacking off or making excuses when a quota is missed, try to find out the real reason behind what’s going on.

Rather than focusing on their failures, offer an empathetic ear and a flexible schedule. Overall there will be a lot of stress they will have to deal with. You have to trust that they will do their best work.

This will help your employees feel like they have room to grow and that you trust them even when things get back to normal. Because it is important to let your employees know that you have their backs and you are aware of their contributions.

The Best Sales Advice to Survive COVID-19: To Sell or Not to Sell?

Direct them 

Unless your company has essentials to offer, whatever you are pushing might be tough to sell right now. And making sales when most businesses are shut, all they would hear will be “Not now”. And after a point, they would not see any point in making any more phone calls.

However, it is the time when you need to step in and change the narrative. Even if nobody is buying today, it usually takes six to eight touch points from initial contact to final pitch, before a new client would buy anything. So remind them of these small things and encourage them to reach out. Because persistence can still pay off.

Work on skills

This time is the best one to take up to get your team into as many online training sessions as possible. While they are sitting at home without any clients, it is time to utilize and sharpen their current skills.

They could learn new software and practice their video conferencing or presentation skills. It will also help you as an individual. This way, your entire company can step up their game by utilizing the free time.

Keep it light and fun

The pandemic is a really grave business. However, it is important to remain positive and keep your team engaged. You can pump a little bit of excitement and new creative ways in your sales meetings.

For example, you could arrange a small virtual party. Have TGIF meets, have fun competitions or if someone is good at cracking jokes, share that stage, etc. To bring some more excitement you could also offer them small prizes such as sending lunch to someone’s home, giving a shopping voucher, etc.

Also, co-workers enjoy joking around and catching up with each other. Have a couple of such minutes at the beginning or end of every virtual staff meeting. Because a staff that plays together works well together.

Celebrate wins (Even the smaller ones)

Whether it is a big win like the first sale in two weeks or a small win when a team member was able to present a decent speech, you need to celebrate both. Take a moment to appreciate and celebrate your team's wins.

Congratulate every achievement. Because at a time like this, celebrations are necessary and appreciated more than ever.

The times are tough. However, as a manager, you need to exercise skills like appreciation, encouragement, empathy. Even if your sales team is stuck, it is time to act as their leader and motivator to deal with the current state of their job, and look forward to the coming days. Develop their skills, increase their self-confidence, and watch them grow.

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Dynamics 365 Mapping Tool: Learn how you can maximize your sales routes & sell more!

Territory management saves every organization time, resources, and most importantly, enables them to cover more ground with fewer resources. The only way territory management becomes effective and garners the results you want is with proper organization and effective communication of all the developments within the sales team as well as other involved functional teams.

Apart from these two points, there are other things to take care of as well and hence this blog.

First, we’ll start with understanding what is sales territory management Software .

What is Sales Territory Management?

Theoretically, Sales territories are geographical areas assigned to a particular team/sales reps to work on and the management of that particular territory or territories can be defined as sales territory management. The territories are divided based on the product you want to sell, the potential of the territory, target audience, industry, etc. It sounds as simple as drawing a circle on a blank canvas but the effectiveness lies in perfecting the shape of that circle.

The most important aspect of creating territories is to be able to define and bifurcate sales targets as well as customers properly among the sales reps/team. The idea of creating and assigning territories might seem like a cakewalk but there’s a lot more going on in the background that needs to be properly taken care of.

Rather than creating territories on a whim, create territories based on certain criteria. Ideally that criteria should be a Venn diagram of what has previously worked in the territory and what are the possibilities of improvement. Other things you can consider are performance, the number of clients, bifurcation of resources for territories based on the number of clients in those territories, the potential of the territory, and more.

Once you create those, comes the next step of matching the right team member to the territories. Some of the things to keep in mind for that are:

- Geographical proximity: This is a primary requirement. Your head of the territory should be able to access their region as easily as possible. It is cheaper for your company because it saves you a lot of money in transport and hotel costs. And the more local a sales head is, the more they are able to leverage that to their advantage. Local connections with the city or state help get venues, data, and even trust of the local community. To customers, it is a local person representing them in a company. That goes a long way in getting people to use that product.

- Matching potential: A particular region may be promising, but a salesperson, in spite of being local and everything personally handled smaller sections before might not be up for it. And by smaller, I mean financially, and target based.

For example, if a customer wants to open a chain of restaurants in west coast states, someone who has work experience in Texas might not be able to pitch them designs for it. However, someone with experience of restaurant design in California or Oregon will be able to handle the sales pitch much more effectively. They are more tuned into the younger crowd’s approach and lifestyle.

- Language fluency: Following in the footsteps of the previous example, each region boasts of different languages that are not English. Not only the literal language, but there is also a cultural aspect of language that changes based on places. If you are handling New York or California, you are likely to have clients from everywhere in the world. If the sales manager is able to step into their shoes language wise and see where they come from, they will be able to build a strategy that works to win more clients.

- Past track record: As the above points point out, a track record of getting through to the right customers and maintaining a growing relationship with them is a winning factor in matching the territory manager and team to the territory.

After creating and assigning these territories, it’s time to get the most out of them. For that, follow these best practices:

Sales Territory Management Best Practices

Proper planning will win you the most elaborate and tough battles. The same goes for sales territory management. Always have a quarterly plan as well as targets and then divide it into monthly or weekly plans to suit your and your team’s working methods. When we say organized system, we mean being organized in regards to territory creation, team creation, call rotations, follow up processes, sales pitches, along with the offers and discounts system.

Having an organized system for every stage of your customer cycle defined according to the territories and customers will not only help you cover more clients but also close more deals.

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Products are in varied forms. Each product is made by too many people, and thankfully, the competition is fierce. However, you can still get your customer if you give a little more to them. Right now, the experience is everything. A weekly visit from your sales team will go a long way to maintain that experience. You can use these visits to plan long term experience strategies as well. This gives you more room to show off your product and assure the clients that they will be looked after.

Each week something new might crop up in how your target market responds. Take those changes into account. And respond to it. When working from home began, the tech industry’s most popular product became the webcam. Similarly, there are often changes in what the audience demands and responds to, and this change has regional factors in place. Tune your sales strategies periodically to stay on top of that demand and even go so far as to predict it.

The victory lies in understanding when it’s the right time to contact a particular prospect and knowing seasonal trends of your industry can help you with it. You can understand the trends by studying past data. If you don’t have any past data to rely on then you can create multiple strategies and implement them on a trial and error basis and learn what actually works for you.

For example:

If you are selling computers and laptops, then you can run ‘Back to School’ offers from July - September or June - August based on a particular territory’s school reopening dates. And then your on-field team for installation and maintenance can schedule their visitations accordingly.

A lot of efforts go into finalizing a particular territory and then assigning the right resources for the same. So it is better to give the teams at least 3-6 months to adjust to the territories for you to make any decisions regarding reassigning or rearranging territories. Moreover, it is plausible that your conversion cycles might be more than 60 days. So you would want to consider that while analyzing the performance of territories.

Taking this into consideration will help you make informed decisions that you can rely on.

These were some of the points to help you get started with understanding sales territory management and its best practices. What might work for us might not work for you. The main thing is to be innovative and keep on analyzing and evolving your strategies.

Have an organized systemPlan weekly visitsMonthly analysis of sales targets and territory performanceTake advantage of seasonal trendsConsider your conversion cycles

Dynamics CRM has Bing Maps integrated by default. But there are certain limitations when it comes to navigating using Bing Maps inside of Dynamics CRM. To overcome these limitations and achieve more from your Dynamics CRM, you can invest in a Dynamics Mapping tool that allows you to plot records on a map, visualize data with heatmaps, and manage your territories more effectively.

Not only that, but you can also find the shortest paths to cover more clients and meetings in a shorter period of time. And with the right app for navigation, your on-field sales reps can work more effectively.

In this blog, we are going to show you how to set a navigation app like Google Maps, Apple Maps, or Waze on a user level using the Dynamics Mapping tool. Further, we’ve also demonstrated how one can generate navigation links to go about their day.

For the demonstration purpose, we’ve taken Quick Maps but you can browse around on MS App Source and find a suitable Dynamics 365 map integration.

Step 1: Navigate to Map

If you are using old UI (Classic view):

Find the “AppJetty” tab from the header menu, navigate to Quick Maps and then click on Map.

If you are using Unified view:

You can find the ‘Quick Maps’ App by clicking on the Dynamics 365 option.

Step 2: Select any one(Google/Waze/Apple) from the configuration

- Click on the “Map Configuration Details ” option and select the user (a record) for whom you want to set the Navigation Map.

- You can set navigation maps at an individual level i.e. for one user you can set Google Maps while for another user, you can set Waze Map and so on.

- You can also set the Navigation Map based on the devices i.e. Google Map for Android and Apple Maps iPhones/iPads.

Based on the selection in the user configuration detail for ‘Navigation Via’, the navigation link will be generated from the Quick Maps, and by clicking on it, the user will be redirected to the respective App.

Step 3: Navigate to the Maps page and select the Entity.

- By clicking on the Maps, you will be navigated to the Quick Maps page.

- Select the Entity & its view. You can also select the multiple entities if you want.

The data will be plotted on the Map as per the selection of the Entity(s).

Step 4: Insert the Origin and Destination

After plotting the data on the maps, you can add the locations in two ways:

- Manually: Click on the “Direction” tab. From here, you can insert the starting & ending locations by inserting the address manually in “From” and “To” edit boxes.

- Via pushpins: By clicking on any Pushpin, the details of that records will popup. You can set the directions by selecting the “Add to Origin” option and the final destination by selecting “Add to Destination” respectively.

After selecting origin and destination, both locations automatically gets inserted in the “Directions” tab.

- Now click on the Go button for directions on the map. You will get turn-by-turn directions of inserted locations.

The multiple locations selection option is also provided if you want to cover 2-3 clients in a single day.

Step 5: Generating Navigation Links

- After the route is plotted on the map, click on the navigation icon to get the link of the plotted route.

- If you have selected multiple locations, you will get more than one link.

- This will open “Navigation Links” popup with direction links generated from waypoint A-B, B-C, so on.

- By clicking on the links from the Dynamics Mobile/Tablet App, you will be redirected to the relevant Maps app as per the selection of Navigation Map in Map configuration details.

Therefore, the admin user can select any Navigation Map option from Google Maps, Waze, or Apple Maps. This makes it easier for the reps to access the links and make it on time for appointments and meetings.

With modernized approaches to purchase and support, certain businesses never actually see their customers. If your business is hardware, technical products like home appliances, there is still one way to meet your customers. Your installation and on field support teams interact with your customers in person.

 Maintaining that relationship appropriately is crucial.

What if your dryer broke down during the monsoon and the company sends their staff late and without the right equipment? That would definitely cause you extra struggle and you’d have to wait a couple of days more for your dryer to get fixed.

Now imagine you are this business that has this unsatisfied customer. What is one of the ways that could make it easier for you to serve your customers?

Just like a CRM helps you keep track of your customers, support requests, and other data, a mobile CRM with mobile centric features provides you with unique ways of serving your customers.

TapCRM, which is a mobile app for SuiteCRM, has an exclusive feature that is especially for your field force. You can track your team members on the map, and they can access and edit CRM data right from the field.

Let’s take a look at how TapCRM helps with field force management:

- Once a purchase order or repair request comes in the CRM, the team lead can assign the clients to the field force. This can be based on location, tasks, skills, etc.

- Each team member will get their assigned tasks in their TapCRM app. They can see these assignments on the map as well.

- The CRM also enables them to see the details of a service or installation request, which in turn helps them plan the tools they require for it. This way they don’t have to carry every tool, but they will also not miss the required tools.

- Once they are on the field, they can check in and check out of each service or installation request right from within the app. This makes it easy for them to have minimal interaction with their devices. It ensures that their manager knows their task is done.

- Since TapCRM has all the CRM data, the field force can use it to check if a customer has previously made any requests for repairs to their appliance. This can give them a better understanding of what component may be faulty.

Once the service is done, they can generate an invoice, add it to the customer’s record, and provide customers with a copy of the same right then.

- At the office, the team manager does not need to be in constant touch with the team via phone calls and messages to know their whereabouts.

- In case a customer contacts them asking for when their promised service will be taking place, the manager will be able to answer confidently and deliver on that promise because they can see the team’s progress in real time using field force tracking.

- The manager will be able to generate reports of each team member’s accomplished tasks, as well as their miles traveled. This enables them to compensate the team for fuel or other such expenses of the job.

- Once the tasks are completed, the field force doesn’t necessarily need to come into the office to do any paperwork because all the necessary paperwork is digitally available in the CRM and happens in run time during the day.

TapCRM’s field force management feature creates a transparency between the manager and their team members, which in turn helps them serve their customers better as well.

With the logistics of whether they have the equipment, or whether they can find the meeting spot, out of the way, the task becomes easier to focus on. It enables productivity because no one has to spend time doing paperwork.

AppJetty recognizes the logistics that go behind businesses and how it wastes resources. So we make software products to lessen the burden of logistics, enabling you to focus on serving your customers and business partners better.

If you are a business that is looking to make it better for your field force, we can customize TapCRM for you. You can contact us here.

Unlike brick-and-mortar store owners, online retailers don’t have the ‘luxury’ to meet customers in person and collect their feedback. Generally, they have customer support, emails, online chats, etc. to collect their customers’ feedback.

 Even if they use several remarketing strategies like a promotional discount to engage shoppers who have already purchased with them, they can’t get the full picture of customers’ post-shopping experience.

But if you are an online store owner, collecting post-purchase experience matters a lot! This is because it builds trust in customers towards your brand. As they realize that you are concerned not just about selling your products but also about how they are finding your products and their experience, your bond with your customers strengthens.

In general, sending a customer feedback survey in the first week of purchase is a good idea and a good-quality CRM survey module can help you create, monitor, and analyze the results too. However, unless you don’t have engaging and on-point questions, your post-purchase survey may fall flat.

Therefore, picking the right set of questions is of utmost importance. Let’s go through a few questions that you can include in your survey.

How did you find our store?

Here, your objective is to identify the primary referral source. You can either keep this question open-ended or use checkboxes against all options for customers to choose multiple option that apply all that apply.

Here are several possible options:

- 

What made you consider our brand?

This question can help you gauge the reason why a customer chose to buy a product from your store. It also helps you find out the strong points and USPs that make your brand stand out. With these USPs in your knowledge, you can enhance them further and leverage them to create content and marketing strategies.

Here are a few suggested options that you can include for customers to choose from in response.

- I am a loyal customer

- Price

- Product Specifications

- Free Shipping

- Exclusive promotional coupons

- Same-Day Delivery

- Your brand came on top in search results

- Referral from friend

- Appealing Product Information and Good Product Reviews

- 30-Day No Question Asked Return Policy, etc.

Based on responses, you can get the full picture of the powerful reasons that drive sales on your store.

What did you like the most about our product(s)?

You can keep this question in two parts. The first part where you can let your customers choose one or more possible variables as responses. A few suggested ones are:

- Quality

- Products meeting expectations and matching descriptions

- Value for money

In the second part, keep a line blank for open-ended feedback where customers can write down what they felt about the shopping experience. Further, they can also write about something specific they didn’t ‘like’.

Based on the responses, you can determine the factors that are ‘actually’ making your products popular and sales-worthy. Besides, you can also work out to fix the things that customers didn’t like.

Did the overall shopping experience meet your expectations?

Though it is a relatively tough question, it could be one of the most crucial ones.

A few key questions could be:

- Did you easily find your product(s) once at our store?

- Did you find our store easily navigable?

- Could you find all the items you were looking for?

- How did you find the checkout process?

- Did you receive the product on time?

- Could you easily track your order and receive timely updates on it from our end?

Such questions will help you to analyze the end-to-end customers’ experience right from when they found your store to using the product.

Would you consider returning to our store in the future? If yes, what other items would you prefer to buy from our store?

This question onwards, things start getting personal. This is because you are asking your customers straight away whether they liked your store enough to return or not.

So, it is important to keep the tone light and not ‘over-imposing’. Customers shouldn’t feel like you are forcing them to consider your brand worthy. Rather, they should feel that their repeat purchases really matter to you and that you would like to improve your product(s) according to their responses.

You can also suggest a few items for them to buy:

- Similar items to those ones they bought.

- Complimentary items

- More variants of the same product (in size, color, etc.)

- More brands to select from

Others

Which method would you prefer to stay connected with us?

You can include a number of options like:

- Email

- Twitter

- Facebook

- Instagram

- Pinterest, etc.

to choose from.

Make sure that you include links in your survey for respondents to change their email preferences and follow your brand on various social media platforms.

Would you refer our brand to your friend(s)/relative(s)?

If they answer ‘Yes’, you can offer a promotional code for both the respondent and their friends. And leverage their satisfaction to expand your customer base.

However, if their answer is ‘No’, you can immediately accompany a question like - ‘What went wrong?’ or ‘Is there anything you would like to mention that we can improve upon?’ This question will engage your customers more and they’ll understand that they matter for you.

 Are You Ready to Make Your Post-Purchase Survey Engaging?

Collecting post-purchase experience is the key to determining your customer satisfaction level. With well-thought questions as mentioned above, you can easily prepare a post-purchase survey using a CRM survey module and stay on top of your customers’ shopping experience.

Want to create a post-purchase survey right away?

Check out our Survey Rocket

COVID-19 is a storm that has hit every possible industry there is. Be it manufacturing, automobile, agriculture, service, IT, and more. Some it has hit hard, and some a little less. The industry that is working the hardest and has the most difficult job is the medical industry.

 Hospitals are understaffed and have less equipment in comparison to the number of patients that they are dealing with. While the doctors and nurses are less in number, the administrative staff is also less and at risk. The more people that come into contact with the virus, the more people are likely to get infected. And the more people are likely to get infected, the more the chances are for the virus to spread.

This is when one of the solutions is to let technology do the heavy lifting. While there are contact tracing apps that are working to figure out if one has been exposed, tech also needs to be implemented inside hospitals. And it needs to go beyond the administrative desks.

Large hospitals have entire wings, and buildings dedicated to COVID-19 patients but only two or three administrative offices managing this abundance of patients. So what is the solution?

A mobile CRM!

TapCRM is a SuiteCRM mobile app that can be set and the entire staff can have the CRM in their pocket. Let’s see how this would benefit:

On boarding:

When new patients get admitted to the hospital and added to the CRM, the data is immediately available to the whole staff. So everyone with the right to access that information, can access their files, know the severity of their symptoms, and take care of them accordingly.

Ongoing care:

Once a patient is diagnosed positive for COVID-19, the treatment begins. They are not declared cured until they test negative for it. Since a number of nurses and volunteers are taking care of them, all of them can have updated information for each patient in their pocket. They don’t have to check on patient specific allergies, or the last dosage of medicine before treating them. One glance at the mobile CRM app and they will get all they need in order to take care of the patient correctly. It limits the pressure on them to remember details while also reducing the chance of mistakes.

Dashboard view:

An intuitive dashboard can dynamically update the live, new, cured, and deceased cases. It can also give everyone a quick glance of which doctors are available at a moment of emergency. This makes the logistical part of things easier so everyone can give more attention to attending the patients.

At home care:

If there are patients who are quarantined at home, the CRM can have a portal integrated with it, through which they can update the changes in their health, medicine doses they have consumed, and even keep track of the number of days they have been sick and apply to get hospitalized if their condition worsens, or if they need to test their changes.

Appointment management:

Administration can put in a schedule for the whole staff, and in case there are changes or leave applications to be made, the staff can do so from their own CRM access. For the nursing staff, being able to see the doctors that are on call when their patient needs them can be helpful. They don’t have to wonder which doctor is available for a particular patient.

Path Lab integration:

The inhouse path lab should also have access to the CRM so they can upload results of patients directly into the CRM without delay. The faster the results get to everyone, the faster an action can take place.

The most significant benefit of having the whole staff have access to the CRM on the go around the hospital is, it frees up more people to actually attend to the patients rather than being tied to a desk or running between desks to help coordinate the paperwork.

TapCRM is a featured mobile CRM app for SuiteCRM and we will customize it for your hospital, maintaining proper access filters, adding unique modules that you may need, in record time. With TapCRM, we want to help you, as a hospital, get the upper hand in the battle against COVID-19.

Please reach out to us here for more information. You can also go through the product page to get a deeper look at the features of the app.

Server actions like creating a record, executing several actions, etc. can enable customers to meet their requirements in Odoo 13. So, let’s understand this functionality in detail and how to use various parameters in server actions accordingly.

Before we proceed to discuss all server actions in detail, it is important to understand what server actions actually are.

Server Actions: Definitions and Types

Server actions are actions that can be executed automatically. As an Odoo admin, under the ‘Technical’ menu comes the Actions -> Server Actions option. However, for the ‘Technical’ menu to be visible, you need to activate the ‘Developer’ mode first.

To activate the ‘Developer’ mode, refer to this screenshot.

If you use any Odoo 13 theme or app, you can define a server action for a complex and long task like “Product Website Published.”

There are two ways to create a server action.

- Using code

- Using user interface (GUI)

Below are some available server actions:

- Update the record

- Create a new record

- Execute Python code

- Execute several actions

- Send Email

- Add Followers

- Create the next activity

- Send SMS

Though all of these server actions are quite important, one of the server actions that you often need to create is ‘Update the Record’. Let’s understand this server action in detail and how to use it.

Following that, we will explain the rest of the server actions in brief as well.

Update the Record

Let’s take a real-life scenario to understand the use of this server action.

If you handle a website that has lots of products and wish to publish all the products in one go, you can simply define a server action with “Update the Record”.

Now, create a record for ‘Server Actions’.

Add the following details:

- Model - Model linked to the action

- Action to do - Select the action ‘Update the Record’

- Feld - Specify the field you need to update.

- Evaluation Type - This is the type to be updated and is of three types - value, reference and python expression

- Value - It specifies the ‘Value’ field as a literal value.

- Reference - Allows you to select the existing values in the ‘Record’ field.

- Python - The ‘Value’ field is interpreted as a ‘Python’ expression.

Now add your server action to the related object via the ‘Create Contextual Action’ button. After you add this button, you will see that the menu appears under the ‘Action’ button of the related objects. In this case, the related object will be “Products”.

Below are the several other types of server actions that you can create similarly:

Send Email: Using this server action, you can send emails to your partners.

Add Followers: Using this server action, you can add followers and channels.

Execute Python: Using this server action, you can execute a block of python code.

Send SMS/Text Message: Using this server action, you can send text messages in bulk to your business partners and customers.

Create Next Activity: Using this server action, you can create the next activity. For instance, if you have a meeting with a client, you can create an activity ‘Meeting’ and specify its due date.

Execute Several Actions: Using this server action, you can perform several server actions at a time.

Create a New Record: Using this server action, you can create a new record. But for that, you need to specify the model you want to create the record in.

In a Nutshell

Defining server actions in an Odoo 13 theme or app helps users create or update a  record, create an activity, etc. enabling them to meet their requirements.