Introduction
Lead Management System is a SharePoint site template that allows you to enter, track, manage and evaluate potential sales leads. The site template uses a combination of built-in SharePoint capabilities, extended through the use of a set of Infowise components.
The template allows you:
- Create, nurture and track sales leads.
- Manage events
- Create and manage sales campaigns.
- Create and distribute newsletters.
- Manage press releases, testimonials and other marketing materials
Using the Site
The site uses regular SharePoint lists to store and manage data. No external data storage or custom interface is implemented. This allows you to easily modify the way the site functions, using just your browser.
Managing Companies and Leads
Leads are individuals associated with a company, there can be multiple leads in each company or just one.
The Companies list manages company data. It contains the following columns:
- Title – name of the company
- Industry – lookup to list of industries, you can add new values when needed
- Leads – references to company’s leads. Use this column to assign new leads to the company
- Events – reference to events involving the company. Any event, created for the company and/or one of its leads, will appear here
- Annual Revenue – estimated (or actual) annual revenue of the company
- # of Empl – number of employees in the company
- Account Mgr – account manager assigned to the company
Leads list is based on SharePoint’s Contacts list and contains the following additional columns:
- Company – lookup to companies
- Industry – lookup to industries
- Source – choice of channels through which the leads has been obtained
- Source Event – if Source was an event, lookup to the event
- Product Line – lookup to product line the lead is interested in
- Account Mgr – account manager assigned to the lead
- OK Email – can be emailed marketing materials
- OK Call – can be phoned
- Campaign – automatic email campaign the lead is assigned to
- Newsletter – can receive newsletters
- Level – lead interest level
- Value – estimated sales value
- Probability – percentage of sale materialization probability
- Status – current state of sales process
- Events – reference to events involving the lead
- Closed – date the lead is closed
Managing Documents
The template contains 3 document libraries to store and manage marketing materials:
- Press Releases – store press releases
- Testimonials – store customer testimonials
- Marketing Materials – store general marketing materials
Managing Campaigns
Campaigns are sets of predefined email messages sent out automatically according to preconfigured intervals. The messages are configured as timer-based notifications managed and sent by Smart Alert Pro. The notification are sent according to the value of one of the date columns (e.g. Created) after a specific interval (Created + 1 week, Created + 1 month). Each email can have different subject and body.
Each lead can belong to one of the campaigns and receive a series of promotional emails. You can design this email through Smart Alert Pro or using the simplified interface, implemented as a web part on the homepage of the site.
You can create an unlimited number of campaigns, each containing an unlimited number of messages.
Both Subject and Body fields can contain list column placeholders that will be replaced with the actual values. These are values of the actual lead receiving the message. Copy the columns from the right-hand side box.
Refer to Smart Alert Pro user guide for more details on how to set up alerts and notifications.
Managing Newsletters
You can set up a newsletter to be delivered to your customers. You can even set up several different newsletters and send each to a different group of customers.
Newsletters are automatically generated based on HTML template (you can design your own using any web authoring tool) and a set of articles, which are basically SharePoint list items. Each time a newsletter is sent, it will locate the articles not previously included in any newsletters, generate the message by combining the template with the article data and then sent it to each individual recipient. You can then track who and when viewed the newsletter and how many times (you need to extend your SharePoint farm to Internet/Extranet zone and allow access through your firewall first).
Refer to Infowise Newsletter user guide for more details on how to set up your newsletters.
