Whatever your surface level reason for investing in a product like Daylite was, ultimately the real reason you decided to get out your credit card was that you thought you’d make a return on this investment. Either by being more productive and thereby having more billable hours available in your day, or by increasing your revenues directly by selling more, due to it’s CRM and sales tracking features. If you are only doing the former so far by using Daylite’s calendaring and task management features, you are really only taking advantage of half of your potential for a return on your investment. Let’s talk opportunities.
What is an opportunity?
I have spoken with many, many Daylite users over the years. It always surprised me when I heard something like “Yea, not really sure about what Opportunities are; I don’t really use them.” from even longstanding Daylite fans. I’m hoping that the much less subtle icon used for Opportunities in Daylite 4 makes the idea behind them clearer on first glance.
The way I think of opportunities is that one should be created anytime it is reasonable to think you’ve just met, spoke or emailed with someone who might be interested in giving you money for your products or services. I’ll expand this to include people who work at companies who fit your profile for good clients, but don’t work in a dept that is directly related to your business. In other words, if I’m in the business of selling office furniture and I just had a chat with a guy named Jim who works at a company that are expanding their offices to the next floor, even though Jim is in the tech support department and would have nothing to with purchasing new furniture, it’s still a pretty good lead and deserves to be an opportunity.
When creating a new opportunity, you can create a new person record at the same time by clicking on the “+ Add Person” button and typing their name in the search field. When Daylite can’t find a match, it offers you a “+ New Person” option to create a new record. You can even quickly enter their email by double clicking the blue person token open a slideover of their record so that Daylite Mail Assistant can ingest messages from them, automatically linking those emails to this new Opportunity. Click Save All and both records are created. At this point, to keep notes on the stuff you talked about, you can either use the details field in the opportunity record, or create a new linked note to jot down any relevant details to your conversation.
But what about a company you’d like to target to sell to, but you don’t yet have any direct contact with them? Sometimes when I’m browsing through Linkedin, I see ideal potential clients for what I do, several levels removed from my direct network, but still want to make a note of it somehow. You could create opportunities for each, but from my mind, that dilutes what opportunities really are and can quickly make your list of active opps long and unwieldy. Also, it’s extra data entry with a much smaller potential for a return on your efforts. I’ve created an Opportunity called “Potential Clients” that I link multiple company records to as a place to track all the ideal clients I’d love to work with somehow. To make adding these as fast as possible, I’ve added this Opp to my favourites (did you know you can add any individual item to the favourites bar now, not just lists?) so it’s one click away. I’ll then create a new linked company by clicking on the plus icon and paste in the URL I’ve copied into both the company name field and it’s default URL so the resulting token has a name and I can get to their website quickly by selecting “Open in Browser” when clicking on the URL label.
Opportunity Analysis Report
Often when first explaining Daylite to new users and performing an initial configuration of their database, it helps to think backwards about what kind of outputs or high level overviews of their sales data they’d like to have available. It makes deciding on which fields you want to use more pragmatic and avoids having you and your employees fill out additional metadata with no specific use in mind.
For example, the Opportunity Analysis report is included in Daylite 4 to calculate and show you data on:
- the success of different types of opps, including their value and number of days to close the sale.
- statistics on each sales person, including total value, their closing ratio, average number days to close
- table of reasons for winning and losing sales.
From this one report, which you can run on specific date ranges as well, there’s a ton of high level info that all business owners or sales managers would love to have.
Knowing this, you can then go back and define Opportunity Types in the preferences as the classification that you are most interested in seeing a giant pie chart for at the end of the year. Some examples of how you might use the type field:
- the source of the lead, i.e.: web contact form, inbound call, referral, yellow pages
- company division, i.e.: retail, service, consulting
Basically, any sort of system where the type of sale is easy to define as being one thing and never another. If you’re looking for high level information about product interest, it’s likely that customers will have interest in multiple things so using Keywords for your opportunities would be advisable.
Likewise, the table of reasons for winning and losing sales may help get your brain thinking about the kind of data you’d like to have aggregated about why your customers decide to buy, or why they didn’t. At the end of the year, seeing that 40% of your sales were lost because of price is a pretty obvious indicator that you need to revamp your pricing model. Or seeing data that tells you missed out on 300 new customers because they thought your product was too hard to use can help focus your product development into simplifying things. The trick is to come up with reasons that can actually help you improve how your company operates. Putting a reason in the lost column of “competition” doesn’t really reveal anything and may give your sales people an easy way of avoiding thinking about why a sale was really lost.
Hopefully this gives you some ideas about how the data collected by an intelligently designed opportunity system in Daylite can give you insight into ways of improving your business. Even just having a simple list of all of your potential revenue sources in one place can help you focus on what you need to do to bring home the bacon, and avoid a reactive daily email triage approach to doing sales.
To learn more about using opportunities, join our Webinar on August 23rd @ 2 PM EDT and have your questions answered by our charming and knowledgable product specialists.
