Installation and Configuration Using the e-mail gateway

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10.8 Profiling

10.8.1 Using Call Center Features

You can manually encode calls that happen or you can pass them into OpenERP. But for mass campaigns, you can import a list of phone calls to make. To do this, click the import link at the bottom of the list of phone calls. On the GTK client use the toolbar button Form → Import data... at the top. The different operators can be assigned calls and handle them one by one using the menu Sales → Phone Calls → Outbound . The operator can open the calls one by one. For each call, after having contacted the customer, the operator can click on one of the following buttons: • Cancel: you cancel the call. For example you could cancel the call if you have tried to call them more than three times. • Held: you have spoken to the customer by phone. In this case the operator can change the case section and send it to sales opportunities, for example. You could alternatively leave it in this state if you do not need to carry out any more actions with this customer. • Not Held: the customer has not been called, you will try to call him again later.

10.8.2 Establishing the profiles of prospects

During presales activities it is useful to qualify your prospects quickly. You can pose a series of questions to find out what product to offer to the customer, or how quickly you should handle the request. Tip: Profiling This method of rapidly qualifying prospects is often used by companies who carry out presales by phone. A prospect list is imported into the Open ERP system as a set of partners and the operators then pose a series of questions to each prospect by phone. Responses to these questions enable each prospect to be qualified automatically which leads to a specific service being offered based on their responses. As an illustration, take the case of the OpenERP company which offers a service based on the OpenERP software. The company goes to several exhibitions and encounters dozens of prospects over a few days. It is important to handle each request quickly and efficiently. The products offered by OpenERP at these exhibitions are: • training on OpenERP – for independent people or small companies, • partner contract – for IT companies that intend to offer an OpenERP service, • OpenERP as SaaS – for small companies, • a meeting in conjunction with a partner to provide a demonstration aimed at providing a software integration – for companies that are slightly larger. The OpenERP company has therefore put a decision tree in place based on the answers to several questions posed to prospects. These are given in the following figure Example of profiling customer prospects by the OpenERP company : 120 Figure 10.10: Example of profiling customer prospects by the OpenERP company The sales person starts by asking the questions mentioned above and then with a couple of minutes of work can decide what to propose to the prospective customer. At the end of the exhibition prospects’ details and their responses to the questionnaire are entered into OpenERP. The profiling system automatically classifies the prospects into appropriate partner categories. This enables your sales people to follow prospects up efficiently and adapt their approach based on each prospect’s profile. For example, they can send a letter based on a template developed for a specific partner category. They would use Open ERP’s report editor and generator for their sales proposition, such as an invitation to a training session a week after the show.

10.8.3 Using profiles effectively

To use the profiling system you will need to install OpenERP’s crm_profiling module. It is part of the core OpenERP system in version 6.0.0 so you do not have to download it separately from addons-extra. You can also use the Reconfiguration Wizard and add Profiling. Once the module is installed you can create a list of questions and the possible responses through the menu Sales → Configuration → Leads Opportunities → Questions. To obtain the scheme presented earlier you can create the following questions and responses: Table 10.1: Questionnaire for defining profiles Questions Possible Responses Journalist ? Yes No Industry Sector ? IT ERP Consultant Services Industry Others Number of Staff ? 1 2-20 21-50 51-100 101-500 500+ Contact’s job function ? Decision-maker Not decision-maker Already created a specification for the work ? Yes Soon No Implementation budget ? Unknown 100k 101-300k 300k For instance, a sales person specializing in large accounts for the service sector could have a profile defined like this: • Budget for integration: Unknown , 100k-300k or 300k , • Already created a specification for the work? Yes , • Industry Sector? Services . When entering the details of a specific prospect, the prospect’s answers to various questions can be entered in the Profiling tab of the partner form. OpenERP will automatically assign prospects to the appropriate partner category based on these answers. Customers corresponding to a specific search profile can be treated as a priority. The sales person can access the profile of the large active accounts easily.