As a manager or administrator, one of the more frequent tasks that you'll face in PlayMaker is reviewing ownership change requests. Marketers on your team can request ownership of Accounts, Contacts and Referrals. Approving these ownership changes will ensure that they have access to the data that is important to them, and can also help ensure that reporting is accurately reflecting assigned ownership. This may already be process you are familiar with, and this article walks through automating part of the Approval process. We suggest saving the Approve Owner Change Report and scheduling it to be sent to you whenever there are pending requests.
Saving the Report
The Approve Owner Change Report is found on the Reporting page in the Owner Change category. Clicking on the name of the report will load a generic copy of the report. At the top of the page are options that can be tailored to filter for your team, and for a specific record type.
For an administrator or manager at a smaller organization, no Territory filtering may be necessary. However, for a larger organization, a manager will likely want to run a report for a specific area, as those are likely the only requests that they can manage. To filter down to a specific territory, click on the Select Territory dropdown and choose the appropriate territory to view.
Secondly, it's important to select the appropriate Object. The Object dropdown will allow you to select Accounts, Contacts or Referrals. Only one Object-type can be reported on at once, so you'll need to end up saving three reports, one for each kind of ownership request.
Once the correct filtering has been added, click Run Report to see any pending requests. Once the report has run, and you are satisfied with filters, click the Save as... button at the top of the report.
A window will display, allowing you to enter a name for the saved report. Since a report covers only one Object, we suggest naming the report Approve Owner Change - Object, where "Object" is Accounts, Contacts or Referrals, making it easy to know what the report will show. If you want to break out territories, you could name the report Approve Owner - Territory - Object, where "Territory" is replaced by the name of the sales territory.
Once saved, the name will update at the top of the report, confirming that the report has been saved. Saved reports display in a new section at the top of the Reporting page called My Saved Reports.
Scheduling the Report
Now that the report has been saved, the report can be scheduled. Scheduling a report will send an email to you, with a copy of the report, alerting to the pending requests. This removes the need to remember to return to the reporting page and check for pending requests. To get started, click the Schedule button below the filters.
A window will display with scheduling options:
In this window, you can set:
• The start date of the report.
• The frequency that the report is sent. For this report we suggest daily or at least weekly to ensure requests are addressed promptly.
• The file format that you'd like to receive. You can choose either PDF or CSV (which can be opened in Excel).
• The distribution list. You can send any scheduled report to a distribution of your choice. It may not make sense to have this report sent to other users as they may not be able to approve the owner changes.
• Add a personalized message to the email that delivers the report.
• Enable a feature that will only send an email when there are results (meaning that there are pending requests). We recommend that you set this to Enabled, which will prevent you from receiving emails when there are not any pending requests.
• The Status of the schedule determines whether the schedule is Active or Inactive. Changing the status to Inactive will turn off the schedule.
Click Save, and the schedule will be active. On the Reporting page, you can see when a report is scheduled, as the schedule is displayed in the Schedule Report column. If a report is not scheduled, you can click the Not Scheduled link to create a schedule for that report.
Now that the first Approve Owner Change Report is saved and scheduled, repeat the steps to create reports for the other two objects from the original report. Once all three objects reports are saved and scheduled, you should receive an email whenever there are pending ownership change requests.
To learn more about approving ownership change requests, please read this article that walks through that process.