Martin release 1.6: your end to end sales valet

A significant new upgrade has been made to Martin.  With release 1.6, the capabilities of the application have now been expanded – taking it from a tool to manage leads, to one that will help you manage a prospect all the way from enquiry to sale. 

We encourage you to familiarise yourself with the changes by following the links in this note and then applying the functions.

User Guide

To make it easy for you to check on and understand Martin’s features, Martin now has this detailed online User Guide. The guide covers all the functions of the app in a simple and easy to navigate website. You’ll find each of the functions explained and illustrated with screen shots or short user videos. You’ll need to login to the User Guide to use this introduction to release 1.6.

New Functions

Good selling is about building rapport with the customer and engaging them in the sales journey. The new Particle status model tracks the buyer’s engagement through critical milestones. The journey is broken down into three phases:

• Lead – an early stage enquiry – before you have built rapport and engaged the customer – unclear if there is an opportunity to do business
• Opportunity – you have engaged the customer and know that there is an opportunity here
• Client – they’ve purchased and are potential prospects for future cross sell.

2. Outcome Buttons

With many new types of action coming online (meeting, SMS and soon Zoom), we’ve taken this opportunity to update and standardise the outcome buttons. They will help you answer the three key questions about an event, which regardless of the event type are:

• Did you successfully contact the client?
• How has this effected the deal?
• What is the next action in the process?

3. Managing Actions

Martin users are now starting to overlay actions – maybe having a meeting booked, and a reply due for an email. To help initiate, track and manage these actions, we’ve created a new “event model”.  It helps you to do three things:

• Pending actions
  • Lead view – all your pending actions are now shown in the lead view.  Next to each you have buttons to “Manage” the action (change dates/ other details) or if the action is complete, to capture Outcomes
  • Outcome workflow – after capturing an outcome and before setting up a new action, this shows you what actions are still pending – you can keep or close
• Next action – you now have the ability to choose from several types of action – including Sending an SMS (below) and shortly setting up a Zoom meeting. The Next Action function makes this easy

4. SMS From App

Without doubt, the most requested new function in Martin history is the ability to send SMSs from within the app.  This new feature enables you to send, track and view historic messages in two ways. From either:

• The lead view – simply open the lead and hit the SMS button, or
• Outcome workflow – select New action / Send SMS

5. Meeting Enhancements

Double booking and “no shows” are a hassle we can all do without. These two new features help with that:

• Meeting reminder (scroll down) – this feature sends an automated SMS reminder to the client to reduce the risk of no shows. You can configure it to go the morning of the meeting or the night before.
• Send meeting invite to Self – if you manage life through your phone calendar then you are set with Martin’s existing mobile calendar insert. But if you also use a desktop calendar then this feature provides a way to get a meeting into your formal business calendar

6. View System SMSs

At last there’s a way to see what SMSs are being sent out automatically on your behalf to alert clients to missed calls etc. We’ve added to the History page so you can see:

• When an SMS is sent
• View the content of that SMS