Tips and Tricks: Assigning Tasks From Data

Wouldn’t it be great if within a few mouse clicks you could analyze a particular issue you were facing and then immediately assign follow-up activities to your team? This is incredibly easy to do with SMP and it a very popular feature for our users. In fact, in our recent focus group, almost all of the users surveyed (89%) felt it was critical to be able to act on your data instead of just reporting on it and 67% felt that SMP’s feature was valuable to them.

If you haven’t been creating activities based on your data, here’s an example of how easy the process can be inside of SMP.

Step 1: Identify an issue with the SMP Market Analysis tool

The SMP Market Analysis tool allows you to perform analysis around performance and goals in a matter of seconds. For example, let’s say you wanted to identify all accounts that are off by 50% or more from the previous year and establish a call program for your sales reps. In one click, SMP can provide you with a complete list that you can save as a separate customer list. When you save this list ins SMP, it allows you to track and create activities against each company in the list. You can easily check back in with this list to better understand the progress of the call program you want to establish.

Step 2: Create follow-up activities

Creating follow-up activities for your reps is extremely simple in SMP. Pull up the list you just saved and add an activity. You can manage a lot of different information for that activity such as due date, set an Outlook reminder and add notes for your sales reps. In this case we might add a note like, “This customer is 50% down from last year. Please call and prepare to update the team at our next meeting.” You can then have the system automatically choose who to assign it to – in this case we’ll assign it to the account manager of record. Then save and close the activity and your reps will automatically have activities assigned to them for each record on the list.

Step 3: Track and measure progress

You can now easily track the progress on all of those activities in SMP. In this case, you might want to simply select the subject line you entered for the activity, run the report and get a list of all of the assigned activities. You can then group by rep to examine each activity in more detail. You now have all the information you need at your fingertips to discuss these accounts with your sales reps and coach them to greater success.