Dealing with prospects + feedback on the CRM

[delphos]

I use the CRM module, but to be honest I’m struggling with it. Number one is differentiating between prospects and contacts.

I view a prospect as someone that you would add to the system that needs contacting and qualifying, after which you would create a deal. There are some difficulties here primarily that the contact and tasks do not seem to exist they are linked to a deal.

I’m about get a database of 2000+ contacts and at the moment AC is not going to be the CRM of choice, meaning I’ll have to look elsewhere.

Perhaps users on here could tell me how they manage this? To save me the pain of migrating???

[Brian]

Hi Jonathan!

There’s a big problem between platforms, and within marketing & sales itself, with terminology. Pipelines, funnels, leads, prospects, deals, opportunities, campaigns, autoresponders, etc. all mean different things to different companies. Unfortunately, it’s ultimately the end user that suffers with the confusion and providers expect users to conform with their vocabulary rather than seeking consensus with each other.

I’m not sure yet, but I think your situation may be a classic case of this. Hopefully we can resolve things so that you feel comfortable using our CRM because there are so many advantages to having your CRM tied together with your marketing processes under the same roof. Most of all, the ability to automate many sales tasks and processes using automation tools, share 100% of all data with between marketing & sales, and pass leads back and forth between marketing & sales seamlessly. I think the biggest problem here is how we define contacts and deals versus how you’re used to defining contacts, prospects, and deals…

In our parlance, you market to contacts and sell to deals. Once you’ve qualified a contact with marketing processes, you create a deal record for them and reach out to them. So I think what we call “contacts” you are used to calling “prospects.” There isn’t really any differentiation between contacts and prospects built into our system. If you want an additional status in between “contact” and “deal” such as “prospect” you could create a pipeline for qualifying prospects, create deals for prospects for initial outreach, and then move prospect deal records into your sales pipeline when they’re sales-qualified.

It’s a pretty flexible system and I’d be surprised if you can’t make it work for your needs. It might be a bit of an adjustment to adopt our way of viewing things. Just let me know what doesn’t make sense to you and I’ll do my best to clarify.

[ezdirectmail245]

I’m in the same boat. I really want to utilize the CRM within AC but it just seems to miss the mark when it comes to tasks/contacts/lead management (basic functions found in any CRM). AC added a pretty deals/pipeline structure but it lacks that authentic and intuitive nature of how leads pass through the pipeline in terms of leads, tasks (activity sets), projects, etc. It’s just not there. There are a number of $15 a month CRM services that do this and more (the list is extensive and you’ll find the app section lists many of them). A 10 minutes review of any inexpensive CRM product will quickly reveal the CRM shortcomings within AC. I use insightly and it’s great and covers all the basics.

I recently signed up with AC (the new CRM was the draw) but I feel like I’m trying to push a round peg through a square hole when it comes to using the AC CRM; the basics are missing. I love the AC automation engine but I think it’s a bit misleading to say AC offers a fully integrated marketing automation/CRM product. It’s flirting with being a decent CRM but it still requires significant improvement and expansion. I am going to continue my quest to see if I can make the AC CRM work.

[delphos]

Same here.

I use the automation engine to do more than just send emails. I use webhooks in conjunction with Zapier to add and retire users on my app platform, add them to my accounts system. This is a very strong feature for me and I will stick with it.

But for Prospects/Suspects (contacts you may not have even contacted yet, or you haven’t qualified as having pain/budget) the system needs basic functions for tasks, notes, and emails using tags or a status field (new, contacted, sales meetings, qualified) to filter the list. Imagine a list of 2000 contacts added to the Deal CRM and having to have a deal for all of them. Hideous.

Once they’re qualified or ask for a quote then the AC CRM is great and much of my automation is done by just moving deals from stage to stage.

Another thing I note is that when I contact is added via Zapier they have to the put into a list. Is this to do with the system being about email marketing?

[Brian]

Great feedback, Steve.

It would be really helpful to me (us) if we got very specific around this point:

it lacks that authentic and intuitive nature of how leads pass through the pipeline in terms of leads, tasks (activity sets), projects, etc. It’s just not there.

What are you trying to do that you aren’t able to? Or where do you find it unintuitive? I really want to get to the bottom of this and I appreciate you taking the time to have this discussion.

[Brian]

Hi Jonathan,

I think in your case I’d recommend using tags to indicate the status of the prospect. Something like:

Status - First touch
Status - Follow-up
Status - SQL

With that in place, you can easily filter from the contacts view:

… and the CRM:

Another missing piece of the puzzle might be the Task Management feature:

From there you can filter to view only tasks associated with contacts:

Let me know why this won’t work for you or what you’d prefer to have. Definitely want to help you work it out. The more specific we can be, the better. I have a feeling that all the pieces are there for what you need, it’s just connecting the dots to find the features important to your preferred workflow.

[delphos]

For me an amazingly simple system is Freshsales. They treat a Lead as a whole separate entity. A lead record contains a lot of information but you can start with basic information such as name, company, phone, and email. The relationship develops you can add information on potential deals without adding a separate deal; it’s all one record. These leads also have a status to represent the qualification process, but I guess this would be done with tags, but a dropdown with a clear unambiguous status is easier to manage.

The point is that at this stage its a single record that can be quickly accessed and modified. Nice simple and clean.

Its only when a lead is qualified is the record “converted” into a contact records, and account record and a deal record. This is the point at which AC CRM would excel because the automation is such as time saver.

[delphos]

OK, I can see how the Manage Tasks function can help there… I’m going to try make this work BTW…

[Brian]

Come create a thread here when you run into friction or something seems unintuitive. Here to help.

[delphos]

I’ll have a look through. Thanks…

[ezdirectmail245]

You asked for specific detail on where the AC CRM fails. Here’s a couple…

TASK CREATION
Most tasks are to-do’s. GTD. Yes, there are meetings and calls but most are actionable things to do (send proposal, send letter, prepare report, run analysis, run reports, etc.). I cannot for the life of me figure out why I have to allocate a 15-minute time frame to every task considering it doesn’t show up anywhere else in the system.

In a typical CRM system (I use insightly), I can give the task a name, assign it to people, select a category, and a due date. I can set a reminder, progress and priority if I want. I can link the task to a person (lead, contact or deal). There is nothing special about this - these functions are at the core of any basic CRM.

TASK MANAGEMENT
Honestly, there is nothing nice to say about the TASK widget on the home screen. There’s no point in even having it on the screen.

TASK OVERVIEW
Not sure if this is a bug or on purpose, but when you navigate to the task management screen, the oldest task is on top. You have to click the arrow to show the more urgent task. This screen desperately needs help. The columns are meaningless. When, Relation, Status? Completely not necessary. The when “in 7 days” doesn’t reflect common English communication. If I ask you when the meeting is, I’m not going to say “we are meeting in 5 days”. I’m going to say “we’re meeting on the 24th at 2pm”. The relation and status columns do not provide any meaningful information.

IN a REAL CRM, tasks are displayed in order, based on common sense and use common terminology. Here’s a screen shot of my insightly task page.

I can see what needs to be done today, tomorrow and next week. I can also see overdue tasks. I can also immediately click the contact associated with the task and make edits on the fly.

DEALS PAGE
You mentioned before to try and use the deals page to handle tasks but this is cumbersome. Remember, if you attach a TASK to a contact that is NOT a deal, it won’t show up here. Odd. The next action is strange. If it’s overdue, it’s listed under next action as “2 days ago”. Again, shouldn’t it be all date based?

I hope this has provided enough information. This is just a look at tasks. Others have mentioned notes, leads, etc. Again, basic CRM core elements which are missing. I know we can use tags, deals, etc., but it feels like you’re trying to force basic CRM operations into a system that is not really designed for it. Given that AC is a marketing automation solution, this makes perfect sense! But since you’re now claiming AC includes a CRM, you’re going to have to demonstrate authentic CRM capabilities.

[Brian]

Incredible feedback, Steven. Invaluable. Thank you so much for taking the time to do that.

I’d think of our current task management more like a blank canvas than a finished painting. We’ve only recently released the new CRM and we haven’t fleshed out the task management solution. It’s there, but it’s not a fully mature feature. From here, with feedback from you and other users, we’ll iterate on our task management till it’s, not just on par with, but better than existing solutions. You’ll find that over time our CRM slowly transforms into a best of breed solution just like our email marketing and marketing automation. It’s one of our three core solutions and we’ll work on it till it’s as close to perfect as possible.

I’ve sent your post to our product team (they too appreciated your feedback) so it’s in the hands of the people who can make the decision to shift our focus onto iterating on our task management.

[ezdirectmail245]

Thanks for the reply Brian and thanks for being so prompt and engaged with users here. I appreciate your indication that the CRM is still in it’s infancy. As much as best of breed sounds appealing, I’m keen for you guys to get to quickly get to a point where the CRM is at least on par with typical CRM products on the marketing. Let’s get the basics done. Cheers.

[John_Morrison]

Thank you very much for this Steven. There is a lot here to consider as we evaluate the future of tasks in ActiveCampaign. There’s a number of great items in here that I noted specifically and a few we’ve already got on our radar. Thanks again.

[migraineagain]

@Brian I’m glad to see you getting involved in this thread. I, along with others, have been commenting on some of the shortfalls of the CRM in other threads so I hope you’re looking at those as well. One of the biggest weaknesses I saw was in the task functionality, causing me to go with another CRM (Salesforce). I’m still using AC for my email marketing but I’m ‘forced’ to use another CRM.

The biggest weakness (Unless you’re a solo shop) is the inability for your CRM to schedule tasks to other users. I have other people in my organization that need to be involved in the process.

[ezdirectmail245]

Agree, I’m going to continue my involvement with insightly as my main CRM/task management engine. I’ve spent considerable time trying to get AC to at least “pretend” to act like a half-way decent CRM but it’s full of shortfalls and terribly frustrating - there really is a long way to go. There is light at the end of the tunnel as Brian has indicated that AC is going to focus on this but there doesn’t seem to be a timeline (“slowly transforms”). It’s also encouraging that he active in this community and concerns are being addressed. Looking forward to those concerns being put into action.

[mham]

@Brian: If you need more, take a look in the beta forum for the Deals. I have some feedback there. (that’s currently all crickety lol).

My concerns are especially about user privileges on what can be seen and cannot be seen. CRMs that others have mentioned in here are all good when it comes to access rights. Some users (sales guys) simply do not need to see it. Seeing as AC is primarily email related work, I would prefer the sales people to not have to see (and/or confuse) email related stuff like automations, etc.

I have about 16 sales people I’m currently pushing to an external platform and it’s extra work whereas if they were on AC it would have been so much more fluid. However, with the ability to see/tinker/question unrelated parts of their jobs, they are not part of AC.

[Brian]

@mham You should definitely be able to configure user access privileges so that your salespeople do not see Campaigns, Automations, etc.

This done though “My Settings” then “Users.” Then you create a Group and define what they can and can’t see:

Then you assign users to those groups.

Let me know if this solves your concern.

[mham]

Thanks @Brian! Yeah except that part is buggy sadly - all shown here

[Brian]

Ah, okay, I’ll talk to our product team and see where we’re at on resolving those concerns.