Every salesperson’s day includes following up on quotes. Call the customer, find out where things stand, keep the deal moving. It is about as basic as sales gets. At a manufacturer we work with, it wasn’t happening.
The quotes themselves were fine. Every one went out through the CRM, using a process we had built, so the data was accurate and management could see what had been sent. What management could not see was what happened next – because for most quotes, nothing did.
Their first instinct was the obvious one: the reps weren’t following up. That turned out to be true and beside the point.
Seven steps per call
We sat with a rep and watched what it actually took to follow up on one quote.
- Open the follow-up task.
- Make the call.
- Log a note on the task.
- Log a second note on the quote itself, so management could see it.
- Close the task.
- Create the next follow-up task.
- Go hunting for any other open quotes belonging to the same person – because there was no way to see them together.
Seven steps. Per call. Forty calls in a good day. And along the way, two more things weren’t happening: nobody was updating the sales probability, and nobody was pushing out the estimated close date. So every quote in the pipeline still read twenty percent, closing on a date that had already passed. The forecast was a list of defaults.
The problem wasn’t the sales team… it was the CRM
An out-of-the-box process does not hold up against a real sales day. When following up costs seven steps and not following up costs nothing, the system has made its choice for you, and no amount of reminding the team changes the math.
One screen, sorted by who needs attention
So we built a My Day dashboard for sales. It shows every contact with an open quote, sorted so the most neglected contact comes up first. It changes how the day starts: instead of asking where to click next, the rep is told that Delia has eight open quotes and hasn’t heard from us in weeks. She’s first. Her phone number, her email, and her first quote are right there.
The two data gaps close in the same motion. Probability is sitting at the default; a few clicks and it’s right. The close date needs pushing out; one click, pick the month, done. Add the note management needs to see, add a longer one for yourself, log the call, and move on to the next quote – without ever leaving the screen. And if today isn’t the day for that call, skip it and it comes back next week.
What changed
No more piecing a follow-up process together across tasks, quotes and memory. One screen, sorted by who needs attention most, fixed all three problems at once: quotes get followed up on, probability gets updated, close dates get entered. Management has a forecast it can stand behind for the first time.
This is one of several My Day dashboards we’ve built, each one designed for a specific role and the process that role actually runs. If your sales team looks anything like this, we should talk.
Tell me the process your team hates most. In twenty minutes I’ll tell you whether a My Day view would fix it – and if it wouldn’t. Schedule a Strategy Session.
