After the contact

After any contact event or meeting, it’s really important to keep things moving by updating your lead to capture progress made and by ensuring that there’s a next activity set up. That’s all Martin needs to manage this lead, to prompt you when your next action is due and free you up to move onto your next lead. The following helps explain how the process works.

Martin requires you always have at least one live action, so that the lead is followed up.

The event model also helps you to:

1. Manage Actions in Lead View

  • All pending actions are shown
  • Can select calls and change call time
  • Can select meeting and
    • Resend current invite
    • Change time / location / other detail
  • Past actions cannot be “managed”

2. Capture Outcomes in Lead View

  • If a non calling action is complete
    • Select outcome button next to action
    • Follow the usual prompts to record
  • Calls cannot be updated this way
    • Must follow the usual process post dialling
    • Or use Inbound if client calls in
  • If a call is pending & you select “Call” icon
    • The pending call is closed

Once contact has been made with the client, Martin will direct you to the outcomes stage. This ensures that a record is kept of every interaction.

Each time you complete an event say closing a call or meeting or receiving a reply to your email or sms, you will be prompted to do the following:

1. Capture the Outcome

  • What happened in your call or meeting?
  • You are trying to get to a sale – the outcome is mostly about whether you were able to progress the discussion or not
  • A drop-down menu will present some options to help you quickly capture the outcome.

2. Capture context

  • Beyond the drop-downs, it’s helpful to take a sales-note so that you can recall the conversation when you next look at the lead
  • Martin provides voice-to-text to make it easy and quick to capture rich, accurate notes

3. Set up the next action

  • To keep the discussion bubbling along, it’s important to set up your next contact
  • Select an action from the drop-down menu. Generally a call or meeting.

4. Review other actions

  • If you have any other actions open for this lead, you’ll be prompted to review them
  • If they’re no longer relevant, then you can go ahead and close them here.
  • If you still need them, then select hold.

5. Select “Update” to save your changes

  • This will save your changes to the lead record and update the lead status and your company’s reporting

NB: if you don’t record the outcomes immediately for a call or meeting, you will be prompted to capture those outcomes next time you try to action the lead. This helps ensure you capture outcomes while they are still top of mind.

Close after no contact

Martin is programmed to close leads after consecutive unsuccessful attempts to contact the customer. This is done to ensure that sales time is not wasted pursuing clients who appear to have decided they no longer want to talk.

You will always get an alert before the lead is closed. This applies to all types of contact events phone, email, SMS, and meeting and happens in two steps:

Soft Close: after say 3 consecutive calls or emails without an answer, Martin will ask you if you want to close the lead or continue.

Hard close: after say 5 consecutive calls with no answer, Martin will notify you and then close the lead.

Across contact events: Martin looks across the event history and will zero out the count any time contact of any type is made. So for example:

  • You’ve made 4 consecutive calls without an answer. At say 5, the lead will be closed
  • In desperation, you also email the prospect
  • You get a reply to your email suggesting a time to call
  • You call but there’s no answer
  • Even though you’ve now made 5 consecutive no answer calls, the lead stays open because of the email reply
  • The unanswered call count is now 1

On closure, an SMS message is sent to alert the customer that you have made several attempts at contact and that the ball is now in their court.