New Prospects: Placeholders and Cold Call Documentation

Today we’re going to talk about ways for you to manage your prospects until that first referral comes in.

If you’re working primarily in the Marketscape CRM Mobile app, it’s likely that you’re creating one-time, stand-alone events for your cold calls.  You’ve also likely found it unwieldy and time consuming to create every single event from scratch, especially if you must also create accounts and contacts that, perhaps, will only exist for a brief time.  But how will you know if your Cold Call event was worth it? What’s the ROI? 

Unfortunately, with that practice there isn’t any ROI.  Creating stand-alone Cold Calls means that you also lose the call history and insight into the value of your work.  Instead, let’s fix that!  Here are some suggestions for managing cold calls within Marketscape CRM.

First, think about where your cold call leads are coming from.  Are you discovering and qualifying leads yourself, or are you provided with a list of qualified leads?  For example: you have 20 opportunities that you call on via phone, and then weed those out to 2-3 that you actually do visit in person.  Can your intake representative enter those 2-3 accounts into Marketscape CRM as part of your company’s workflow?  If not, it would benefit you to go ahead and create Accounts in Marketscape CRM Web for those 2-3 accounts only and then proceed with the ACE Process from there.

You can use the functionality within Marketscape CRM to create Placeholder Accounts to collect groups of Contacts that do not yet have a permanent Account "home." Some examples of Placeholder Accounts include:

• Archived Contacts
• House Accounts
• Cold Calls and Outreaches

In the following steps we will create a "Cold Call" placeholder to house our Contacts temporarily.

1. In the Marketscape CRM Web app, create an Account called Cold Calls and Outreach.
   
   
   
2. Add contacts to Cold Calls and Outreach as needed for all your qualified leads / cold calls that do not have their own account.
   
   
   
3. Following the ACE Process, create your recurring events within Cold Calls and Outreach for each of the calls you make – via phone, in person, etc. All your historical notes will filter into the events you create, so that you can successfully track your cold call and prospecting activity within Marketscape CRM.
   
   
   
   

Cold Call Best Practices

•  When a referral comes over from one of your cold call events, a new account will be created in Marketscape CRM that contains all the information provided through the integration with your EMR. At that time, simply go back in to your event, click Edit Series, and then update the account name from Cold Calls and Outreach to the new account (Hill Valley Medical Associates in this example). Click Save.
  
  
  
• Now your call history and future recurring events are all tied to the new, permanent account!
  
  
  
• As a final housekeeping step, click on the Contacts tab and edit the appropriate contacts so that they are associated to the new account as well.
  
  
  

With your cold calls all in one place, you now have a structure that easily identifies those accounts which don’t eventually yield referrals.  Moving forward, we recommend that you work with your manager and marketing team to develop a process for maintaining and scrubbing through these events periodically, which will further optimize your book of business.