I get support and training questions regularly about the best strategy for managing follow up. There are a couple important factors in making a good decision. Do you need:
- ‘heads up’ display of notes? Comments are good at this. Activity notes are buried and take about 10 clicks to see 5 notes inside activities.
- disciplined follow up? Activities are good at this, but comments are not. With activities you can schedule your first call with a couple clicks on the activity widget and it’s easy to complete your calls, take notes and schedule the next call.
- display/manage your activities on a calendar or dashboard? Activities are good at this, but comments are not.
The problem is, everyone wants both. Here are a couple options you can use to have your cake and eat it too.
- If you manage a commercial sales force you probably want the standard follow up system of activities linked to contacts/orgs. It has worked forever and good sales people are comfortable with this system. The problem is that the notes are buried and hard to get to when viewing the contact/org record. You can’t ask the sales people to make notes in both activities and comments — they won’t do it. So Boru created a module the creates a comment for every activity that has notes. This way you get the best of both worlds.
- If you manage a retail sales force, the sales reps are less sophisticated and simplicity is important. We have helped our clients successfully implement filters that pull up leads/contacts for follow up based on a ‘Next Follow Up’ date field. So the sales agent simply loads a filter, opens the first one, updates the comments, updates a status fields and/or the Next Follow Up’ date field and go to the next record. It’s simple and effective.
I hope this helps. I will have more to say on this topic next week.
