Overview

With the prospects area you can enter details of prospective customers onto the system, and view/manage them away from the account/cash customers.  You can also configure your own set of prospect statuses, which can be used to track which stage of the sales cycle that each prospect is currently at.  Prospects can be converted into an account or cash customer in the same way that a cash customer can be converted into an account customer. 

Configuration – Menu Options.

Prospects are entered and managed via two screens accessed via the ‘CRM’ tab – these are ‘Enter New Prospect’ which is opened via the ‘Prospect’ icon in the ‘New’ area of the tab and ‘Prospective Customers’ which is opened via the ‘Prospects’ icon in the ‘Amend’ area of the tab.  These options are not available by default, so to use this feature you must first set a user defined role with access to these menu options, and then grant access to the role for your users that are to be responsible for entering and managing the prospects.  

Configuration – Company Types.

You have the ability to record the Type of company via a drop down list when creating/viewing your prospects.

The example above shows company types as Company, Individual, Charity, etc. 

This list of company types can be amended/extended using the ‘Reference Lists’ screen within the Syrinx Configuration\General\Reference Lists:

Configuration – Prospect Statuses.

You should consider how the prospects are to be organised, and the different statuses that a prospect can be at any one time.  The system comes with a sample set of statuses, but these should be considered as just a sample, and thought should be given on what makes sense for your particular company.  The statuses are set up using the ‘Prospect Status List’ option within the Syrinx Configuration\General\Prospect Status:

The Dflt? flag is used to indicate the default status for any prospects added to the system via the ‘Enter New Prospect’ screen.  The Imported? flag is used to indicate the status to be assigned to prospects that are imported from file.  The ‘Tab Name’ field should be set for those statuses that are considered as being actively managed, and the name entered is used to name the corresponding tab in the ‘Prospective Customers’ screen in the Syrinx system.  Hence the set of statuses that have a Tab Name supplied essentially defines the active set of prospects currently being managed.  The Seq column allows you to set the sequence in which they will appear. In the sample setup above, you will see that any prospects that have been flagged as no longer interested are not part of the active prospects currently being managed as they do not have a ‘Tab Name’ value and therefore will not be displayed in the ‘Prospective Customers’ screen.

Configuration – Customer Calls feature.

Part of managing prospective customers may be to note the details of any calls/visits made to the prospect, and to record the date when another call needs to be made.  You must therefore also enable the ‘customer calls’ feature that allows these calls to be recorded on the ‘Customers(3)’ tab of Syrinx Configuration\System Options\Customer:

Entering a new Prospect.

To enter a new prospect, use the ‘Enter New Prospect´ screen on the ‘Customers / Suppliers’ menu:

This screen works in the same way as the ‘Enter Account Customer’ screen, except that instead of entering an account number, you can change the default status to another, if appropriate.

Reviewing Prospects / Changing Status.

The set of active prospects can be reviewed, amended and managed using the ‘Prospects’ menu option on the ‘CRM’ tab:

The screen is organised as a set of tabs – one for each prospect status.  The tab names are as defined earlier in the configuration, and note the ordering of the tabs is defined by the ‘Seq’ setting in the configuration.  The Show Detail button will take you into the Amend Prospect Details screen. The ‘Add Call’ button can be used to enter details of a new call/visit/etc, and the ‘Edit Call’ button can be used to view/amend details of the latest call.

To change the status, and hence to move the prospect to a different tab, you press the button:

To get a printed list of prospects, chose File/Print List. You can print a report of either all the prospects, or just those for the select tab:

The report shows the same information as on the screen, and if All Prospects was selected the report will be organised by status:

Find Prospect.

To find a prospect if you do not know their current status, you can use the button at the bottom of the Prospective Customers screen. This will bring up the Find Prospects Search Criteria box:

You can search on Name, Salesperson or various other criteria.  This will search across all prospects under any status, so that it will find, for example, any prospects that have been marked as ‘no longer interested’.  

After pressing the Query button, the prospects that match the criteria are displayed on a new Find tab:

Prospect Details.

From the ‘Prospective Customers’ screen you can either double-click on a customer name, or press the button to view and amend details of a particular prospect:

This screen has a similar set of tabs/fields as the ‘Amend Customers’ screen, so that you can add contacts, sites, notes, and set up a pricing agreement, etc.  There is a Prospect tab that can be used to change the status, and note any credit checking details:

The Quotes section allows you to add and store quotations raised from unconfirmed hire contracts or unconfirmed advice notes, in order to raise a quote for a specific hire or sale. You can Add/Amend or Cancel any quote from here and any such notes are not displayed in the Unconfirmed Hire Contracts or Unconfirmed Advice Note screen until the prospect is converted into a customer.

Converting a prospect to a customer.

To convert a prospect into a customer, you use the button next to the Type field:

Note that the system uses the ‘Account Requested?’ tick-box on the prospect tab to determine whether an account or cash customer is to be created.  You are then prompted for an account number, and the prospect is converted into a customer, retaining all the details, calls, pricing agreement, etc, that may have been entered.

Removing a prospect from the list.

To remove a prospect from the active set currently being managed, you use the Prospect tab within the Prospect details to change the status to a status that does not have a tab in the Prospective Customers screen, such as ‘No Longer Interested’.  The prospect details will be retained, and you will be able to find the prospect in the future via the Find button.  If required the status can be switched back to an active one to place it back in the managed set of prospects.

Importing prospects.

It is possible to import prospective customers into the system, you prepare an import spreadsheet using our format for customers, with an additional column which must be set to ‘P’ to indicate the companies are prospective customers:

You then import the file using the Customers tab of the standard Import program within the Syrinx Configuration program. 

Amend Customers screen.

If your users have access to the Prospective Customers screen, then the Amend Customers screen may be used to query prospects as well as regular customers.  By default, the screen will only query regular customers, but the Type drop-down can be used to widen the query to either just prospects, or all customers and prospects:

If Prospects is selected, then an additional tab allows query on the prospect status, or Credit Check Required’ flag:

There are a couple of situations where this may prove useful.  Firstly, a user responsible for credit checking can use the screen to find those that require credit checking, and then once the check has been done they can un-set the flag and enter the credit check reference.  Secondly, if a set of prospects have been imported from file, then it may be useful to query all of the imported prospects and browse through them changing the prospect status.