About Best Practices:

This is a series about using Heap CRM in a way that is most productive for your business. No new features are introduced, but new concepts, and introductions to 3rd party applications are par for the course.

E-Mail integration is one of Heap’s great strengths. However, most people don’t use it to it’s full potential. This blog entry is focused on two scenarios.

Scenario One:

You’re trying to schedule a meeting with a person. Maybe you’ve passed the e-mail back and forth a bit, but at this point you have an agreed upon time and date.

Scenario Two:

You’ve just been e-mailed by a new prospect and you want to forward their info into your Heap account. Maybe you’ve also given the prospect a call and you have a bit more info than is contained in the e-mail alone.

Scheduling the Meeting:

Here is an e-mail from someone I’m trying to meet:

Ok, so I could just forward this into Heap and go in and make an event at later time; but that isn’t that efficient. Ideally I would like to schedule it as part of the forwarding process. So I add:

[event:04/26/2008:Lunch with James at 12:10pm->My Calendar]

Truth is, I didn’t type all that. I use a program called TextExpander with the Heap bundle that allows you to produce large amounts of text by typing something shorter. So I actually typed “[e". Which gave me:

[event:04/23/2008:->My Calendar]

Then I typed in the event and modified the date (by default TextExpander places the current date when this snippet is expanded).

Some interesting things to note:

1. If this person is a lead, opportunity, customer or archive, both the message and the event will automatically be associated.
2. This event is tied to this message. So when viewing the calendar you can quickly click on the message icon and see the message that relates to it.
3. You could have many of the “event operators” in a single message (setting up many events). This is more common when you are setting up a list of tasks that you need to complete.

The new Prospect:

Here is an e-mail from someone who is interested in a product of ours:

I have some additional info (because I talked to them on the phone), specifically their phone and website. So I’m going to add the following operators to the top of the forwarded e-mail:

[phone:000-000-0000]
[website:www.acme.com]
[category: Real Estate]
[template:Real Estate Lead]

First, just like the event in the previous scenario, every one of these has a snippet in the Heap bundle for TextExpander. So, this is what happens when Heap receives this e-mail. First, it creates a person named “John Doe” that works at “ACME” (subject line), then it fills in the phone and website. Then it creates a lead from this new person, places that lead in the category “Real Estate” and runs the event template “Real Estate Lead” (in this case creating a half dozen or so follow-up events that automatically send out e-mail).

I hope these two scenarios gave you some ideas on where you might make your input process more efficient; next in best practices, “categories, find and reports.” Hope you stay tuned.

Questions? Contact support@wbpsystems.com

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Heap, Heap Best Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.