Sales Management

The SolarNexus platform provides multiple tools to assist salespersons and sales managers in successfully managing their day to day sales activities.

This article contains two main sections:

1. Recommended Activities - describes key activities for both sales people and sales managers
2. Tools - describes specific tools that SolarNexus provides for managing your activities

Recommended Activities for Salespeople

A sales person's primary job is to close sales. To most effectively do that, you should focus on the best current opportunities. You may handle a high volume of leads and opportunities. As such, the only way to effectively focus on the best opportunities is to diligently track and update the status of leads and opportunities within the SolarNexus platform.

Daily / Ongoing

• Respond to new leads ASAP.
• Qualify new leads using your company's defined criteria. Archive unqualified leads. Be sure to enter a reason (define reasons in Administration > Lead and Project Data). Defer qualified leads who are not ready to act.  See Qualifying and Archiving Leads.
• Look at Sales screen - filter for late tasks (prioritize these tasks).
• Generate sales proposals. Complete "Proposed" milestone for any solution that you've delivered a proposal to the customer, and be accurate with the time completed.
• Followup on existing proposals. (View currently proposed opportunities on Sales screen). Archive lost opportunities.
• Complete sales, and efficiently transfer to the implementation team by completing the "Sold" milestone.
• Diligently update the Milestone Status field on completion of milestones, or other status changes so that you know at a glance what you are currently waiting on.
• Use Reports to see a variety of special views that give you clear understanding for all your leads/opportunities.

Recommended Activities for Sales Managers

Sales Managers must have reliable information to effectively manage your sales team. Therefore the number one priority as a Sales Manager is to ensure that sales people are properly using the tools provided to them for managing sales opportunities.

Recommendation: Clearly define sales job responsibility to manage the current status of all leads/opportunities. Do not provide new leads to sales persons who are not managing their current active opportunities in SolarNexus.

Setup

Ensure that you've got a clearly defined set of qualification criteria, and that this criteria is listed in the Completion Criteria for the Lead Qualified milestone. Give your team a reminder cheat sheet.

Ensure that suitable values are pre-defined for the Milestone Status

Make sure you have milestones defined and configured properly to manage your desired sales process. At a minimum it will be lead created > lead qualified > proposed > sold. 

Reports - Review current reports, add new ones if required.

Some recommended reports to review when beginning. Its important to establish good habits quickly when using SolarNexus to track your work. The following reports are good for monitoring proper employee use during the Sales process:

• Project summary report: "Sales Funnel Results by Sales Owner" - First focus on new lead processing. This report shows you who is qualifying and archiving leads. The numbers of leads qualified/archived should pretty much equal leads created.
• Project summary report: "Sales Process Step Completion Times" - Time from created to qualified/archived needs to be evaluated. Although you'll have some outliers, avg time to qualified / archived should be minimized. Ideally less than a day, never more than 2 days.
• Project detail report: "Qualified Lead Status" - See that user is capturing key data (scope, Milestone Status). Has the scope been populated? Does the Milestone Status field make sense?

Daily / Ongoing

• Assign new leads to sales persons (use summary report to assess current load on each)
• Run project sales detail report for individual sales owners. Look for instances where progress is not happening. For each salesperson, note instances of inconsistent or incomplete data.
• Immediately followup with individual sales persons on lack of progression, or inconsistent data.
• Are there unqualified leads or lost opportunities that need to be archived?
• Are there opportunities that should be deferred?
• Run Late milestones report - followup with responsible sales owners. (Qualification of new leads is a good use of the milestone completion deadline feature. 

WEEKLY

Run report on each sales person. Look at all active opportunities. Should be a manageable number. When was last update?

Meet with sales team. Update on pipeline, past week's successes. Note failures and "teaching moments." Display report results to team and call out both good and not so good results. Reinforce proper use of platform.

MONTHLY / QUARTERLY

• Referral report
• Commission report
• Pipeline report
• Review individual sales person performance

Tools

Project Status

Each project's status is defined by the following elements, and are managed on the right side of the Project's Workspace:

• Project Milestones - Current and past completed milestones. Your goal is to complete project milestones in a timely manner.
• Milestone Status - Provides clarifying information about what you're waiting on in order to complete the next milestone(s). Also can be used to indicate any potential issues/delays with the project completion. 
• Scheduled Events - These are created as a result of a milestone, such as "Set Sales Appointment", or "Schedule Installation."
• Project Log - Contains any supporting notes taken during milestone updates, or any other time.
• Subtasks - Tasks that are added to the Milestone level which are added on an ad-hoc basis. Used to indicate individual activities that need to be completed for the Milestone to be considered complete. 

Sales Screen

The Sales screen (accessed via the Operations menu), is a great way to see a quick summary of status for a selected set of leads/opportunities. By default, this screen shows Active project leads/opportunities. But you can also switch the view to showing archived (Lost Opportunities) or deferred projects (temporarily inactivated). From this screen you can You can see last last completed milestone and what's currently pending. You can click the book icon to open the Project Log to view/take notes.

Detailed filters are available to choose which set of project leads/opportunities are displayed. When the "Sold" milestone is completed, the project is moved from this screen The columns displayed cannot be customized. However you can (and should) use the Reports screen to define and use custom views of projects.

Use the Qualification of new leads is a good use of the milestone completion deadline feature.

Reports

Available from the Operations menu. All users can access and are encouraged to run reports. Basic sales people only see results about the project leads/opportunities that they are specifically associated with. Sales Managers see results for any/all users. There are two types of reports:

Project Detail - Returns one record per project lead/opportunity. Used to show specifically selected data fields for specific sets of leads/opportunities. Examples may include:  with

Project Summary - Presents summary counts of projects in a large variety of ways.

Workgroups

See Managing with Workgroups.