Client Classification
Hi,
Having used Insightly for some time now, I'm still looking for a way to classify my clients/contacts.
I currently use: Lead, Prospect, Client, Dead.
Would anyone have some smart ideas how they do it?
Hi,
Having used Insightly for some time now, I'm still looking for a way to classify my clients/contacts.
I currently use: Lead, Prospect, Client, Dead.
Would anyone have some smart ideas how they do it?
Comments
I use tags for that. But not only the words: if you find a "grammar" you're able to sort and handle Tags quite smart
(de) and (fr) and so on for languages and there are plenty of other rules and chars and brackets to structure your tag information.
What's your best practice and minimum set of tags?
Hi Holger,
Why would you use tags and not custom fields? How are they more manageable than custom fields?
I suppose HA, AK & MH have meaning in your language? Care to share what they are?
thx
Chris
I prefer tags because of multi tagging and selection and... what do you do if some one is a "dead" "client"?
HA is just a shortcut for Holger Ahrens ;)
I got what the HA was ;-)
I actually have the word "Dead" as an option to label a client...
Here's my two cents on managing contacts. I think a lot of how you manage these depends on the nature of your business, your lead flow and your sales process. It also depends on how you use Insightly. In my opinion, tags are the best way to sort through masses of contacts easily. Most of our leads come from referrals or networking and everyone gets added to the system. Because of our sales cycle, we manage prospects through pipelines and then through tags after that.
Also, there is more than one way to do this. Ultimately I think the trick is to find what works best for you and do it consistently.
I use Cold, Warm, Prospect, Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Customer, and Dead
We also use a number of different labels to indicate certain qualities of our customers. The biggest issue we have is the inability to sort Contacts based on these labels. When we look at an Organization we would like to see the Contacts we already got leads from on top, then the people people with whom we started a dialog. At the bottom of the list we would like to show previous employees of the Organization.
The only sort mechanism is on First name and Last name. To fix this we use !, * and + signs in front of the First name for the key people. We get a simple sort order, but it is rather clumsy since First name can no longer be used for merge tag automation in e.g. emails.
It would be great if Contacts could be sorted based on an arbitrary field of the contacts. More realistic would probably to get sorting based on the Role or Details field for the Contact. With such functionality, anyone could introduce the sort mechanism/classification they want. Key decision makers can show up first in the list and ex employees last.
It would also be great if Contacts could be sorted based on Role or Details also for Opportunities and Projects. A simple classification coding could then help to sort the key people in Opportunities and Projects on top of the list. Our add-something-to-first-name workaround works badly for Opportunities and Projects, the sort order is the same for all regardless of the actual Role in the Opportunity.
Please sign in to leave a comment.