Tips and Tricks: Assigning Tasks From Data

Wouldn’t it be great if within a couple of 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, let’s show you just how easy it is inside of SMP. 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. Here is how you would set this up in a matter of minutes.

First, you perform your analysis with the SMP Market Analysis tool. This tool allows you to perform analysis around performance and goals very quickly. In this case, we’re going to identify all of the companies who are down by 50%. In one click, I am provided with a complete list that I can save as a separate customer list.

When I save this list, it allows me to track and create activities against each company in the list. I know my team will follow up, but I can easily check back in with this list to better understand the progress of the call program.

Next, I want to create follow-up activities for this select group of customers. I can do this using SMP’s Activity Review. I can add an activity for the group of customers I just profiled by selecting the customer list I just created. Select Add Activity and choose your customer group.

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.

You can now easily track the progress on all of those activities in the Activity Review tool. In this case, you can select the subject line you made for those activities, 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.