Tracking a contract from the initial contact through project completion often involves several software applications, notes, and records.
Keeping this information organized is critical to using your time and efforts efficiently, all the way to making sure this effort produces a profit. The process you go through to solicit and secure work deserves its fair share of streamlined tracking.
In BQE CORE, we do just that. We make sure that the process of soliciting, negotiating, and securing your jobs is tracked and documented, all in one place from start to finish. This ensures you are attracting work that returns a profit for you.
To better understand how CORE Pursuit helps you through this process, we will start from the beginning with four simple steps: setting up some default information, building our sales tools, tracking the details, closing the deal, and making money.
Step 2: Build Sales Tools for Your Sales and Marketing Managers
Step 3: You Are Now Ready for Your Pursuits
Step 4: Close the Contract and Start Making Money
Step 1: Set Up Your Lists
Lead Sources: These are the common avenues your company collects the leads from. The source could be advertisements, trade shows, the internet or search engines such as Google, word-of-mouth, emails, conferences, resellers, etc. You can create a custom list of lead sources to represent how the leads and prospects are identified by your company.
Opportunity Types: When an opportunity arises, it is helpful for sales representatives or business development team members to classify or categorize the opportunity.
The opportunities can be classified or tagged as new business, existing business or migration from another business, cross-sell or up-sell, and so on. This allows the sales agents to quickly understand what the opportunity is about and also helps in reporting by displaying a breakdown of all your open opportunities.
Opportunity Stages: You can create a list of stages for your opportunities to indicate the current status of an opportunity or to track the progress of an opportunity, e.g., whether an opportunity is ongoing, lost, won, or closed.
When an opportunity arises, a sales representative or business development agent can be at various stages in the sales process. Whether it be understanding the needs of a client, negotiating a quote, or closing the sale, it is important to be able to quickly understand where you are.
It also helps your company to track and forecast potential revenue and allow managers to do performance reviews of their sales agents based on the opportunities lost or won.
You can also set a Workflow Action on a stage. When an opportunity reaches that stage, CORE prompts you to create a Pursuit Project or an Execution Project.
To-Do Actions: To-Do Actions represent different categories that help to organize your to-dos in CORE Pursuit. You can list your company’s common sales or business development tasks that are used to categorize your to-dos. A to-do action can be a call, meeting, email, etc.
Campaign Types: CORE Pursuit allows you to create a list of campaign types to describe the different types of campaigns run by your company. The most common types of campaigns are email, newsletter, referral program, social media, etc. You can create any number of campaign types and then use them in your campaigns. You can manage a global list of campaign types in Settings > Pursuit.
Campaign Status: CORE Pursuit allows you to create a custom list of status for your campaigns that indicate the different stages of a campaign’s activity or progress. The commonly-used status can be Budgeted, Planned, Approved, Cancelled, Completed, etc. You can create any number of campaign statuses and then use them in your campaigns. You can manage a global list of campaign statuses in the Settings > Pursuit > Campaign Status screen.
Step 2: Build Sales Tools for Your Sales and Marketing Managers
Email Templates: Build an email template or series of templates to ensure consistent content to be shared via email with your clients. This also streamlines your emails, which is a common way we communicate with our clients.
Promotions: These are essential for an organization that uses Pursuit. The Promotions screen in CORE Pursuit allows you to define promo codes that offer special discounts on your products and offerings for a limited period. It allows you to define promotions and tie them with marketing campaigns. Create an association between sales and promotions so as to run on-demand or interval-based reports.
Campaigns: The Campaigns screen in CORE Pursuit lets you set up marketing events and activities to reach out to existing leads and prospects, track response and conversion rates, calculate ROI, and so on. You can also use a list of campaign types to describe the type of campaigns you are running, say email, newsletter, referral program, etc.
CORE Pursuit also allows you to create a custom list of status for your campaigns, such as Budgeted, Planned, Approved, Cancelled, Completed, etc.
Resource Library: As a part of the sales process, Pursuit users provide prospects with information that can help close the sales. In the professional services industry, these resources can include PDF portfolios, white papers, e-books, request for qualifications (RFQs), etc.
These resources can be in the form of documents, hyperlinks to files, or links to websites that feature the project you want the prospects to see. Based on the interests of the prospects, you can send them some materials from the Resource Library in CORE via email.
Sales Goals: The Sales Goals screen in CORE Pursuit allows you to set a target for your sales and then track what percentage of the sales target your sales or business development team actually achieved in a given period.
Step 3: You Are Now Ready for Your Pursuits
Leads: CORE Pursuit provides a centralized system to track your leads and their progress through the sales pipeline. In CORE Pursuit, leads can be created from scratch or can be imported from Comma Separated Values (.csv) files.
You can also create a custom list of lead sources to represent how the leads and prospects were identified by your company. CORE allows you to manage leads with details that can be used to evaluate their chances of becoming prospects.
Prospects: When leads are converted or qualified as prospects, this can lead to various sales opportunities. As these opportunities are won, they lead to various projects where the earlier leads and prospects now become your clients.
In CORE Pursuit, you can create prospects from your existing contacts or from scratch. If you have both CORE and CORE Pursuit subscriptions, then those prospects for whom sales are won become part of your standard client list.
Opportunities (Quotes & Proposals): In CORE Pursuit, if you have determined there are potential sales to be made for prospects, you can go ahead and create opportunities for them detailing what you are expecting them to purchase, when they might purchase and how big the purchase is going to be.
You can review your pipeline in the list view or the card view, where each stage is a column. Drag a card to another column to change its stage. Open an opportunity to work it from its Overview tab, where you see the client and primary contact, the team, pursuit costs, to-dos, notes, and recent activity together.
To record the time and expenses your team spends pursuing the work, link a Pursuit Project to the opportunity. A Pursuit Project is a CORE project linked to an opportunity before it is won. You can create one from the Overview tab.
You can then create proposals from the opportunity’s Proposal tab to email the prospects and negotiate the sales. After the life cycle of opportunity is completed, you generally indicate a closed-won or closed-lost opportunity stage. As these opportunities are won, they lead to various projects wherein the earlier leads and prospects now become your clients.
Notes, To-Dos, Documents and Emails: Pursuit To-Dos are the tasks that can be created for leads, prospects, opportunities, quotes, etc. and assigned to salespersons. You can create a to-do and specify the record it is linked to. The to-dos can be created by you and assigned to yourself or another person. Although you can create to-dos in various screens like Quotes, Sales Goals, etc., the main Pursuit To-Dos screen allows you to manage all of them from one place.
When you log into CORE, you can view these to-dos from the screens or the Pursuit To-Dos widget. To-dos can have a remind date set on them along with a priority and action. CORE reminds you about each to-do on its remind date.
Step 4: Close the Contract and Start Making Money
If your proposal is accepted and it now moves on to contract, you are ready to begin tracking your client, project, time and expenses, invoices and payments.
Mark the opportunity as won and create the Execution Project, which is the active billable project for the work. If your Won stage’s Workflow Action is set to Execution Project under Settings > Pursuit > Opportunity Stages, CORE prompts you to create it. You can fold the Pursuit Project into the Execution Project as a phase, so the cost of winning the work counts toward the project’s profitability. Both projects stay linked to the opportunity, so you can open either one from Shortcuts or the Settings > Related tab.
Using CORE Pursuit, from initial pursuit through contract completion allows you to track the details of a pursuit from the first contact to the completed contract. You will have this information for your proposals and contracts as well as the history, leading to an efficient, organized and streamlined process for tracking your important project information. Check CORE Help Center for details.