Sales & Scheduling Tips with POMUpdated 2 years ago

Every company is different, but heres an example of using the POM software through your entire sales process

1. New potential customer contacts you for a quote or to schedule service
2. Create a client in POM as a lead with a Quote tag applied
3. Send the client a quote with your terms/contract they accept, a Sales Followup tag gets applied automatically and the Quote tag removed     The client is now a lead with a sales followup tag.  Sales staff then actively reviews the sales followup tag on the customer list and all quotes page to either get the customers to signup, or mark the quote as complete and the customer as inactive (<21 days to keep our work queues clear)
4. The client signs and accepts our quote, we get an email and the Schedule tag is automatically applied
5. The office calls that client, gets the credit card to keep on file, confirms the appointment details, provides an estimated date range of when service will be and then physically creates the appointment for their service at that time, this is an unassigned appointment x days in the future, the office verifies all the necessary tags are removed, sets them to Active
6. The service manager sees the unassigned appointment on the Schedule page and assigns to a route and sends the appointment notification email to notify the client of the day of service.

Every business is different, this process keeps it fairly streamlined but it does spend a little extra time on quality/tags to ensure we don't lose customers in the process or actively followup/mark as inactive. This keeps our work queues very visible and gives us a good history/reporting of clients.

Tags

Quote tag - Need to send a quote

Sales Followup - Quote has been sent, solicit an answer yes or no

Schedule - Quote signed, customer needs to be scheduled by creating an appointment

Customer Status:

Active - Current active customer

Lead - Current potential customer in the sales process

InActive - Not a current paying customer

How to accurately communicate projected service dates:

We got better when we started using the workqueues via tags: seeing how much is in the pipeline/active quotes are out gives us insight into whats coming on top of what we already have scheduled. As a result we keep a changing 'days out' number between the service manager and the office. In step 5 when the office makes the appointment we have at that point in time, for example: 3 days out rule.  So all customers get their appointments scheduled 3 days out from the day the person is creating the appointment.  This changes to 5 days, sometimes on a Tuesday we say we're into next week, but its a constant number we communicate and adjust all season and sometimes multiple times in a single week.

We live on the schedule page and try to keep it as clean and true as possible so we can recognize our work loads and its easy for managers, and the office to see appointment counts, seeing how many appointments are getting rolled over can help make that adjustment to telling clients 2 weeks out versus 1.  To improve, we have the office make a private note on each appointment of what they tell clients when creating the appointments. "Told on 1/3 around 1/10-/12 range'   

When we get to that service and the service manager or office see the dates inaccurate, we can make that adjustment quickly to be more accurate when we communicate. It made a big difference but is still something that's challenging for us, we typically add a healthy buffer time, like an extra day or so, to pleasantly surprise clients being early versus the other way.