Manager or Owner using SME

Manager or Owner using SME

Managers use SME to monitor and track activities, business results, and customer service levels. This section goes through various functions that are useful for managers.

Here are specific functions the manager would likely do within SME:

• Monitor and contact active customers
• Track Open Work Order Volume
• Track customer payments through aging reports
• Monitor profit/loss for jobs
• Check activities and lead tracking of salespeople
• Check sales pipeline through proposals
• Notifications: Get notified for activities being performed by special customers either those critical customers or those behind in balances or who need to pay prior to new service.

Monitor and contact active customers

According to leading business gurus, managers and owners should spend 60% of their time nurturing, working, and selling to existing customers. SME enables close monitoring and follow-up for customers. Below are various activities to utilize to Monitor and contact active customers:

SME tracks active and inactive customers. How your business handles inactive customers will be unique to your type of business. For example, a software, HVAC, or IT business may track active customers as any customer with an active support or maintenance contract. Customers without active support contracts would be set as inactive.

Business Process Tips: The business must establish a consistent process for making a customer active or inactive. All SME users that will be converting a customer from active to inactive must follow this business process.

Here are some common tasks for tracking active and inactive customers:

• To get a search list of active customers select F2. Remember to nurture your active customers!
• To get a search list of inactive customers, select ctrl-F2. Try to move inactive customers back to active with new service offerings, new products, and maintenance contracts.

Track Open Work Order Volume

You can quickly see the number of open orders, either open service orders, open install orders or open invoices. This will give you an indication if work is piling up and not getting done or taking too long to complete, which could lead to customer dissatisfaction.

Here are some common tasks for tracking open work order volume:

• To get a list of open service orders, select F6
• To get a list of open install orders select F8
• To get a list of open invoices that have not been paid, select F5.

Track customer payments through aging reports

Delays in customer payments will affect cash flow. It's important that someone is monitoring customer aging information to see if management intervention is required to discuss with customers who are behind in payments.

To get an aging report for all customers, go to Doc Center>Reports and select Invoice section. There are a number of reports for tracking aging:

• Standard Accrued Balance Report, Billing or Site. Usually you would set the cut off date to today, however you could set the cutoff to another day such as end of month. This report is used for companies reporting on an accrual basis. Usually you would track by billing location, but you can also track by site location. These reports will should all the outstanding invoices and total amount due per customer. At the end will show the total amount due from all customers.
• Standard Aging Report by Date Range. This report provides a date range for aging information.
• Standard Customer Statement. This report allows you to create customer statements for each customer with an open balance.

Monitor profit/loss for jobs

It's important to track profits for each job or for proposals to make sure the business is healthy and customer pricing is at the correct level. SME allows tracking of profits through proposals, projects, orders, and reports.

The following are various ways to track profits:

• Proposals: You can quickly see the profits of a proposal by just going to the proposal and looking at the Totals tab. There is also a report to show profits on proposals that can be run on individual proposals or all proposals called "Standard Proposal Profit/Loss Report".

Business Process Tips: You may want to establish an approval process for proposals where it must first be approved before sending to a customer. SME provides ability to accept proposals.

• Work Orders: Track the profits of service and install orders. Run the report "Standard Order Profit/Loss Report" from the service or install order.
• Invoices: Track invoice profits with "Standard Invoice Profit/Loss Report".
• Projects: When orders and proposals are added to projects, you can track the profits of the entire project in the Totals tab.
• Reports: Run the Profit/Loss reports for orders, proposals, or invoices from the Doc Center>Reports section. Then select the appropriate module to run profit reports for proposals, service, install or invoices.

Check activities and lead tracking of salespeople

Sales are critical for any business. It's important to track incoming leads and proposal opportunities. Managers of SME have a number of ways to track sales leads and proposal opportunities:

• Sales Leads: The first step is to make sure your salespeople are entering ALL leads as soon as they come in. Secondly they should continue to update leads with additional information and notes. When the salespeople enter notes it also triggers the last edit information so management can track the last contact of leads and also track if leads are "stale" and have not been contacted in a long time. Track sales leads by doing a search list of sales leads. By selecting the appropriate fields in the search grid, you can track sales lead activities and pipeline. Create various views to track by sales person or by forecasted amount. See the Views sections for details on how to create custom views.

Business Process Tips: Make sure salespeople track all information in SME and enter every lead, take notes, and enter proposals as opportunities.

• Customers: Salespeople should also be looking to past or existing customers for sales opportunities. Managers should provide lists of past leads to sales people to work on. Once again, use Views to find past active or inactive customers.

Check sales pipeline through proposals

Track pipeline by monitoring proprosals.

• Proposals: Proposals are your pipeline of opportunities. Tracking proposals gives managers an idea of what pipeline of future sales are being worked on. Utilities Views to track proposals.

Business Process Tips: Salespeople should be entering proposals for every opportunity with sales leads AND customers. Proposal opportunities should be entered as soon as the opportunity is qualified and the salesperson knows what products or services the customer or sales leads will need. These proposals should be continuously updated until either closed due to conversion to an order or closed because they no longer want the solution.

Notifications

Notifications can be set for an special customers. Special can either be good or bad. For example, set a notification on customers that are behind on their balance so that no additional service is performed until the pay past balances. Or set notifications on important customers that notify managers or other key personnel that new service is being performed for these VIP customers. See the Notifications section for more information.