Sales Activity Planning:

If your product/service is sold to a specific set of prospects whom you know by name/location or if you sell largely dealers, activity planning becomes critical for your success. In companies selling industrial equipment or raw materials, pharmaceutical companies, FMCG companies with well-defined dealer networks, etc., such activity planning is typical. For example, in a company that sells high-value industrial equipment, the set of prospects you target is well-known - your sales people have visited them many times and will visit them again regularly. What you need is a mechanism where you can plan their visits, get salespeople to report their visits against that plan and then analyze the effectiveness of your sales process from a plan perspective, not just from an activity perspective. Meeting 5 companies a day is one thing; meeting some for new business, some for closing open proposals and some for keeping in touch is what a planned sales model is all about.

With Impel, you can do all this and more.

• Plan activities for yourself and/or people in your sales team for a full month
• Tie each activity with objectives from the planned visit (things like "Lead generation", "Complaint tracking", etc.)
• Find accounts/contacts by location or city, so you can plan activities around your travel schedule
• Target a specific account or contact in each visit, drawn from the items in your territories
• Review your/your team's objectives in terms of number of activities planned for each objective
• Report each activity as it occurs, against the planned items for a given day
• Reschedule planned activities in response to people not being available, changes in your schedule, etc.
• Analyze the overall effectiveness of your plan every month, so you can figure out exactly where your planning needs improvement or where certain types of activities need focus.

Most importantly, all this dovetails directly into the overall CRM process that you use in Impel, so you can see planned and unplanned activities together for every prospect and customer. That's how you can make sure that action actually translates to achievement month after month.