Overview

Since Method Field Services is built on the Method platform, it gets to take advantage of the built-in functionality, such as the CRM features. “CRM” broadly stands for “Customer Relationship Management”, but in the context of Method Field Services it should be thought of as a way get more customers and keep the ones you have.

Note: this guide only touches on CRM. To learn more about Method CRM, please see our Webinars.

Why use Method for CRM?

You should be using some kind of software to help you track conversations with customers, follow up reminders, and how customers heard about you. This will not only make sure customer requests and sales opportunities don’t fall through the cracks, but also ensure that you can assign some success rate to the marketing dollars you spend. This is just a small taste of what CRM software can do.

The problem with CRM software today for small businesses, however, is that there is little or no integration between all your pieces. You use QuickBooks for your accounting, a 3rd party program for your industry-specific operations, and usually a separate 3rd party program for your CRM. CRM apps are typically more company specific as they tend to offer lots of flexibility in terms of custom fields and tracking requirements, since most companies feel that the tactics they use to get and retain customers are unique and are what separates them from their local competition.

All these separate programs, however, each only tell you a portion of the full story.

Because Method Field Services is built on the Method platform, all three functions become very interconnected. Since Method is a web-based mirror of your QuickBooks data, contains built-in CRM, and is the same platform used to create Method Field Services, everything either already talks to each other, or can be customized to talk to each other in a manner specific to your company’s needs.

To view the CRM features of Method, choose the CRM tab group in the top right corner of your screen.

Campaigns

Campaigns are marketing initiatives you setup and track. This could be a paid advertising campaign, such as “Door Hangers March 2012” or an in-house sales campaign such as “Revisit lost 2011 opportunities”, or even an ongoing lead type campaign such as “Word of mouth”.

Opportunities

Sales Opportunities should be entered whenever a customer or potential customer (lead) has expressed interest in doing some business with you. By entering a Sales Opportunity, you can assign a dollar value and a likelihood that the sale will close, as well as track all conversations, emails and follow-up reminders related to making sure you close the sale.

Your Sales Opportunity Pipeline is the total value of all your un-closed opportunities multiplied by the probability percentage they will close.

For an example of an opportunity, consider that a neighbor of a customer of yours expresses interest in your services, or an existing customer asks for details about an optional service you offer. In both scenarios there will be a sales cycle that may last a few days, a few weeks or a few months. Either way, you will not want to let the opportunity fall through the cracks or go undocumented, and you will want to know whether you succeeded in closing the sale (won) or whether you did not (lost).

Leads

Leads are simply customers that have not yet been sent to QuickBooks. You can therefore have thousands of potential customers as “leads” in Method Field Services and only have a few hundred actual customers in QuickBooks.

Customers have an “Is Lead Status Only” field. When this is checked for new customers, the syncing engine knows not to sync it to QuickBooks, and therefore it remains a “Lead” in Method Field Services. If you later manually uncheck the checkbox and save the customer, it will instantly sync to QuickBooks.

Also, if you create any transaction (such as an Invoice, Payment, Estimate, etc.) that involves this customer, the Is Lead Status Only field will automatically be unchecked for you behind the scenes and the customer will be sent to QuickBooks along with the transaction. The only exception to this is when the transaction also has Waiting For Sync Approval checked – meaning the customer doesn’t have to be sent to QuickBooks until the transaction is approved and sent to QuickBooks.

Activities

Activities are every conversation, event, task, and follow up reminder you have with your customers. In fact, the work orders used in Method Field Services are actually stored as Activities with the Activity Type of “Work Order”.

Activities can relate to opportunities so that you can track each conversation you have had related to closing a sale, as well as regular customer contact, service and history tracking.

Tip: for advanced customer service tracking, use the Call Center which allows you to create a customer service “Case” for a complaint or problem, and track all activities related to that case until the problem is resolved.