TARGET Sales Management System - Application Notes
Follow-up procedures
One of the most important functions of the TARGET system is to
provide a way to follow up on previous sales activity. We suggest
the methods below as a minimum effort to follow up on sales efforts.
Outstanding quotes
The Outstanding Quote report (Back Office, Sales Reports) gives a list
of all quotes issued prior to a chosen date (we suggest using about
10 days prior to the date the report is run) that have not yet been
resolved. Many users elect to limit this report to showing only quotes
to end users. This report should be distributed to the appropriate
salespeople and used to drive their follow-up effort on the quotes.
As each prospect is called, either the quote should be resolved or
a tracking line should be added to Prospect Tracking (F4) showing
that the follow-up was done and the result.
The goal is to have a relatively clean outstanding quote list that
contains only quotes that have a chance of leading to a sale. Effort
can then be spent on these potential sales.
Quotes should be resolved in the Quote Resolution (F7) function as
either NS (no sale) or S (sale). Note that resolving
a quote as a Sale does not remove the machine from inventory
or make it unavailable for quoting; it does reserve the machine in
the sense that an attempt to quote it to another prospect will lead
to a warning message. Note that if the agreed-upon sale price is not
the price originally quoted, it is important to modify the quote to
correct the price before resolving it as a sale.
Pending Sales
When a quote is resolved in F7 as a sale, it will show on the List
of Pending Sales report (Back Office, Sales Reports). We suggest
running this report once a week to make sure that everything
that must be done to keep the sale on track is being done. If
any special requirements (paint, change electrics, send pro-forma
invoice...) are noted in the comments area at the time the quote is
resolved in F7, those requirements will show on the pending sale
list.
Nag list
The Nag List (either sales functions F12 or Back Office, Sales
Reports) can be run for any chosen period of time. We suggest
running it each day for a three-day range (yesterday-tomorrow).
Items on the nag list may be added manually (F4) or as a result
of other sales activity (quoting, letters). Items are not removed
from the nag list as they are completed so that the system may
reproduce a nag list from any prior date.
Forgotten prospects
The Forgotten Prospect List (Back Office, Sales Reports) is used
to produce a list of prospects that might have been forgotten.
The idea is to isolate prospects who have had some sales activity
in the past but not "recently", where you define recently based on
the entered dates. It is generally much easier to reestablish
a relationship with an existing customer than to find a new one
so we suggest using this report to help make sure that you have
some contact with every prospect in your database at least every
six months.
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