CRM
Socius contains a simple CRM, which tracks people, companies and opportunities (leads). These are the basic entities within the system. In addition, it contains a system for tracking recurring revenue. The CRM is an optional addon to Socius, and if you have access to it, you will find it located under Business Tools, CRM in the top navigation menu.
Setup
Use the Settings tab to set up the meta data in the application. Use this to customize the system to match your sales process and evolve with it. These settings are:
- Sales Staff: Assign users on your workspace to the CRM, which allows them to create and edit data in the system. A user will also need to
- Company: Create categories on this tab. Examples are: Current Customer, Potential Customer, Lead, etc.
- Opportunities: Opportunities contain settings for Stage, Status, Source and Reason. Each of these are described below.
Stage
Each opportunity moves through a lifecycle, which is captured in this setting. You may have a different person handle each stage or not. An explanation of a lead lifecycle is described here.
Status
Example statuses are Open, Won, Lost and Abandoned. The status field is used to track opportunities at a higher level than stage.
Source
This setting contains all your potential lead sources. Examples are Advertising, Chamber of Commerce, Inbound or Referral.
Reason
The reason field contains information on lost or abandoned leads. Perhaps a lead went with a competitor, or you lost on price.
Basic Usage
Once you have set up the CRM for your sales process, the CRM has five tabs for Dashboard, People, Companies, Opportunities and Settings. Use the Add New button (highlighted above) and its corresponding View, Update, Delete to work with data within each of these tabs. When the people tab is selected, this menu will operate on people objects, when companies are selected, it will operate on company objects, etc.
You can browse each tab for data you need, or use the keyword Search box on each tab to quickly find items you need. For example, select Opportunities and search “Open” to see all your open leads.
Each row in the database has a blue plus sign (+) that you can use to expand it and see all the data points for that particular item.
Dashboard
The dashboard tracks total sales and opportunities. Opportunities are tracked by stage, both by number of opportunities and by value. The dashboard also gives a simple count of entities within the CRM.
People
The people tab contains contacts associated with your leads. Each contact is assigned a company, so it makes sense to start adding companies prior to people; but if your business deals with individuals, you can start here. People are comprised of the following fields:
- Name: The contact’s name
- Company: The company associated with this person
- Email: The contact’s email address
- Title: The title of the contact at their company (if applicable)
- Description: A description of this person. This can be either a physical description or perhaps a description of how or when you met them. It could also contain useful information about them, such as their birthday, restaurants they like, etc.
Companies
Each opportunity and person in the system gets assigned a company, so it may make sense to start your sales process by entering a company on this tab. Companies are comprised of the following fields:
- Name: The name of the company
- Contact Type: The category for each company, as defined in your settings (described above).
- Work Phone: The main phone number for the business.
- Email Domain: E.g., @example.com
- Work Website: The main URL for this company.
- Address: The company’s street address.
- City: The city for the address.
- State: The state for the address.
- Zip: The zip code for the address.
- Country: The country for the address.
- LinkedIn: The URL to the company’s profile on LinkedIn.
- Assignee: The person assigned to this company as defined in settings (described above).
- Tag: An optional list of tags which helps to describe or find companies.
Opportunities
Opportunities (leads) are the crux of the CRM. Opportunities are tracked to companies. As such, a company or contact may have multiple opportunities within the system. Opportunities are comprised of the following fields:
- Name: Give the opportunity a name that makes sense to your business, such as the name of a product or service you are selling.
- Company: Leads can be assigned companies, described above.
- Stage: The lead stage is configured in settings, and the concept of lead lifecycle is described here.
- Value: The dollar value or estimated dollar value of this lead. Enter this information as a whole number (no dollar sign).
- Close Date: When you make a sale, record the date of this event in this field.
- Win %: Enter this as a whole number. For open leads, adjust the win percentage to indicate your estimation of the close probability.
- Status: Status is configured under settings and should described the lead at a higher level than stage.
- Loss Reason: If lost, enter the reason in this field to track the cause of lost leads over time.
- Priority: Prioritize leads for your sales team with this field.
- Source: Sources are configured under settings and should contain a list of every possible lead source for your company.
- Tags: Optional meta data for leads to help describe or find leads.
Recurring Revenue
If your business has monthly recurring revenue, you know how hard this can be to track, especially in QuickBooks, which doesn’t offer an easy way to see it at a glance. On the CRM page, click the Recurring Revenue button to create profiles for each of your clients, which you can categorize. The Graphs page shows a simple dashboard with graphs for monthly revenue and categories.