Connecting related pieces of information makes all of that information much more powerful. From a contact’s name, you can jump to the company that contact works for. From the company, you can jump to deals with that company. From the deal, you can jump to a meeting note about that deal…
Mastering connections is key to harnessing the power of TeamGram. Make sure you connect everything you put into TeamGram to other relevant records.
TeamGram doesn’t just capture and store vital information about your sales process and customers. It also helps you capture the links between them to make relevant information more accessible.
Throughout the sales process, different members of your team may interact with different people working for your customer, each one interested in a specific part of that process. It is in your advantage to understand all of these connections, and navigate the best way to success.
The Power of Connections
When selling to businesses, you may have to work with multiple people to close a sale.
Imagine a company that sells floor coverings to construction projects.
- Their sales rep may have multiple meetings with the project’s architect, the contractor’s project manager, and the building’s owner.
- Meanwhile the head of their installers may have visited the job site to take measurements and chatted with the building’s superintendent.
- The production manager may have had an internal meeting with his team regarding the production schedule, and also asked for a delivery estimate from a materials supplier.
- A request for proposal may have been received from the purchasing department, and a quote submitted to them, with a copy to the project manager’s assistant.
Typically, this information will be scattered all over the company: spreadsheets, personal to-do-lists, calendars, mailboxes…
TeamGram connects these pieces of information in an easy to navigate interface, so you can instantly access everything you need to know.
Making connections between different records is easy, and usually there are multiple ways to do the same thing. You can use whichever method is more convenient for you.
Typing and Selecting from Auto-suggest Lists
Almost every TeamGram record has at least one field that lets you connect it to other items.
As an example, take the deal record, one of the most important records in managing sales. A deal record contains the most important information about a specific sale you are trying to close: Who is the customer? What are you trying to sell? Who are your contacts? What is the value of the deal?
You will definitely want to link this deal to the customer’s company record, so it will become part of your relationship with that company. One way to do this is to click on the deals tab on the sidebar and then click on the new deal button.
The customer field here is a linking field. Type the first few letters of the customer’s name here and TeamGram will automatically suggest matching company and contact names. If you see the company name you are looking for, select it by clicking on it.
When the form is saved, the name of the customer will be displayed as a link. Clicking on it will take you to the company’s page, where you can access other information about that company, including other deals with them, more contacts, notes, etc. Conversely, when you visit this company’s page and click on the deals tab under it, you will be able to see this new deal alongside others, and click on it to view its details.
Creating Connected Records On-the-fly
Sometimes you will want to create a record, but find out that the record you want to link it to does not exist. When that happens, yo don’t have to stop what you started and go back to creating the other record. You can do both in one step. Here is how:
Imagine you came back from a meeting with a client and are now writing a note about that meeting. Typically, you will want to link that note to the deal, company and contact records of everyone who was present. While typing in the name of the third contact, you discover that her name is not among the known contacts, and is not presented in the auto-suggest list. In that case, you can just click on the New Contact option under that field, and enter that person’s information in the popup. When you save this form, both the note and the new person’s contact will be saved, and the two will be automatically linked.
Selecting from Pop-up Lists
It is easy to type in company and contact names, but deal names can be tricky. There can be multiple ways to name the same deal. You may not remember whether the deal where you are trying to sell carpets to a hotel project in New York was named “The New York Project Carpets”, “The Manhattan hotel floor coverings project”, “The Excelsior Deal” or something else.
That’s why TeamGram offers the option to select items form a popup list when you need to select from records with hard to remember names.
Inheriting Connections from an Existing Record
The simplest way to connect a new record to an existing one is to first go to the existing item’s page in TeamGram, select the relevant tab under it, and click on the New button. This not only creates an item with a link to the existing item, it also adds other links to related items too.
For example, if you are writing a new quote for a specific deal, going to that deal’s page and creating a new quote from its quotes tab will automatically fill in both the related deal name, and the customer’s name (from the deal’s customer field) in one step.