Schedule management and maintenance is no laughing matter, I’ll have you know! When it comes to keeping track of 5 consultants’ schedules on a daily basis and you are solely responsible, things can potentially turn pretty sour if you mess up. The billable appointments, the non- billable ones, the personal commitments, internal meetings, external meetings, phone calls in, phone calls out, ongoing support with clients, vacation requests, technical support coverage, kick off meetings, follow ups, yes friends, the lists goes on.
Sure, you go right ahead, visit your nearest calendar store and take your pick ( Cute puppies, nature, Brad Pitt- whatever floats your boat) and prop that calendar up beside your desk and I wish you all the luck in the world keeping tabs on everyone’s schedules by hand. Of course, you have the benefit of your images of choice and that may bring a smile to your face from day to day but does it have the following? The following being what I would consider the icing on the cake of the CRM calendar:
- I can set reminders. I love this ability. Just as much as I love the snooze button on my alarm clock in the morning – this in affect is the same. Consultants have no excuses and either do I!! So as soon as I log in to have a look at my calendar, I can see all of my 593 reminders of the things that I have to do. Okay, hopefully it doesn’t get to this stage for most of you but it is reassuring to know that you will not be allowed to forget to do those little niggles and if you keep seeing them blasted into your face each day, you are bound to get fed up of looking at them and so this is motivation to get it done.
- I can set a recurrence communication – so this saves me manually entering a new appointment for something that I know is going to be taking place each week, bi – weekly, monthly, and yearly. Can you say time saver? Think back to and imagine the days when we had to make the same appointment over and over and over. Sends shivers down my spine!
- It also helps to manage the comings and goings of our hardware – if our training laptops and projectors are being taken onsite somewhere and I am panicking as they are all missing from the office, I can add the laptop / projector to the appointment and then easily find out where they are at any given time.
- I have an appreciation for the “created by” and the “updated by” because it lets me know if some little fairy has been messing with my appointments and thinking that they will get away with it!J
- When I am done or when the consultants are finished with whatever the task on hand was or the appointment, they can then set it to complete. Simple, clean, efficient. Oh organization – it’s a wonderful thing!!
Are you using the options and fields in Sage CRM to their full potential?? If you are – you can easily delve a little further in and pull up a report in seconds if you want an analysis of what is done, what isn’t complete, or just to get a simple grasp of where things stand. For example, say its Friday morning and its time to do the weekly invoicing and you need to know what work has been completed this week so that you can invoice it in an efficient manner. Providing that staff change their billable appointments to complete once completed, you have yourself a neat little report here that aptly provides you with the details you need to go ahead and bill. Go to your Find button and click on the Communication option. Fill in the specifics according to what you require and voila!
If you want to talk to us about getting a personal assistant in the form of a CRM system in place, contact us!
