New sales leads and opportunities are the life blood of any company.  Leads come from many different sources - marketing campaigns, current customers, trade shows, word of mouth, cold calling, telemarketing, and social media, to name a few - and are of varying quality.  Following up on these leads and keeping track of their status is crucial.

Manufacturers' representatives, as multi-line sales agents, face a unique challenge in regards to new leads and opportunities.  Not only do they have to follow up on and keep track of what's happening with each lead or opportunity, but they also have to report to multiple manufacturers about the status of their leads.  

It's not unusual for a rep agency to have dozens of leads, per manufacturer, after a national trade show.  Most of these leads have to be qualified and then the good leads are given to reps in different territories.  Once these leads have been passed on, each individual rep has the responsibility to report on his/her sales efforts - activities and results - for each lead.

MRSWARE offers Opportunity Tracking to help reps and management follow up and keep track of sales efforts.  
      

As business grows, it's harder to keep track of sales activities.  Managers often ask - Is there any way to search by sales rep to see a summary of journal activity and non-activity for that sales rep's customers?

For example: Let's say Sales Rep George has 25 customers.  I would like to get a "snapshot" of his customers with his call frequency. I.e., he went to ABC Supply twice but went to XYZ Industries no times.


In MRSWARE there are 4 ways to find reports on sales rep/user activity: 

1) Search Journals by User
To see a list of activities entered by a particular user, select "Search" → "Journals" from the menu and select the user from the "Opened By" selector.  You will probably also want to use the date range selectors to narrow down the results to a range you are interested in.  The search results are all journals matching your criteria.  You can look through the list, open any journals to read the details, sort, filter, and save the list out to a spreadsheet ("File" → "Save As"). 

It is extremely handy to be able to print things directly to a PDF file, then you can e-mail that file, add it to File Share, or archive it away on your computer.  PDF's are standardized format files that view the same on all computers, so you can be sure that what you send is being seen as you intended it to look, regardless of what computer or software the recipient might use.

There are a number of printer drivers that allow you to print directly to a PDF file that you save on your computer.  This one, PDFCreator, is free and easy to install:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

When you install this program, an additional printer appears in the printers installed on your computer.  When you print to this PDF printer, you are presented with a prompt to name and save the print file as a PDF document.

Sometimes you find that you would like to fill in a PDF form, or just make a simple edit to a PDF file for which you don't have the original document.  A new online web site offers just that ability:

http://www.pdfescape.com/

I used this the other day to fill in a PDF form, so that I could e-mail it back to the sender.  The other option would have been to print, fill in by hand, scan and e-mail/fax.  The ability to skip the printer and the scanner makes things a lot easier for me, and for anyone that is on the road.

One of the popular subjects at rep conferences is sales management.  Discussions are often focused on what managers are tracking - activities or results?  

Many of the sales consultants/speakers say that tracking activities is more important than tracking results.  Results are in the past and there is nothing you can do about them now, but current activities will lead to results and this is where the focus should be.

We feel tracking both activities and results can be useful for companies.

Tracking and analyzing results allows you to learn from past efforts and tweak the sales process or procedures.  Tracking and analyzing activities and communicating this information to key partners - manufacturers represented, sales managers, other members of a sales team - helps everyone stay on track and focus on the ultimate goals - satisfied, loyal customers and increased sales. 


MRSWARE allows you to track both results and current activities.

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