[JoshU]

Hi all,

Brand new to OF and hope to make a very good and much-needed use of the app. I'm putting together a little work flow and such right now. Here's one of my questions: A good part of my job involves sales. Basically following up with customers after X amount of days after I quote them, remembering to get answers to their questions from my vendors, etc.

I really do not want to have to go to a full scale CRM for this sort of stuff. I just want to keep it simple and do it in OF. Anyone doing anything like this? Any tips?

Thanks!

[Brian]

My workflow doesn't really resemble yours, but from interactions with other customers, it may be handy to take a look at Curt Clifton's Populate Template Placeholders script.

(We've got a feature request open for "Template" projects. In the meantime, folks use that script to set up their "I have a new client I need to do the following X steps for" projects in a more automated fashion.)

[Danny B.]

Josh,
I have something that's been working for me, but it's not an automatic solution. With regards to Following Up - there are phone calls and emails.

First for phone calls I actually use Apple Address Book and "smart folders". Also go to preferences->template and open all the hidden fields. What I did, is added a custom date field, called it "Call Back", and created two smart folders inside address book titled "Call Back Today" and "Call Back Tomorrow". See apple help or google "Smart Folders" if you've never used them - they're a life saver. So, as I use my address book to make phone calls, I put in the date of when I want to call that contact back, and my smart folders pull up all contacts with "date is within the next 1 day" or "date is within the next 2 days". And no matter what you set the "Call Back" date field, only the contacts you need to call today and tomorrow will show up in their respective folders. (Also you can use the notes section for each contact if necessary)

I haven't gotten email to work exactly the same - but without learning to become a programmer I found the following tip within a feedback in an article at 43folders. Using Apple Mail with the "Mailtags" and "Mail Act-on" plug-ins, select emails I send out, I stamp with a "Waiting For" tag and I initial "wf" under my signature. I also have a "smart folder" in mail that automatically pulls these emails based on the tag. Now, I added another smart folder called "Waiting for - Reply" (I couldn't get this rule to work with the first folder correctly) that pulls any incoming messages based on the rule "for every message in the inbox", and contains "wf". This way I can follow up on which messages were sent and replied to.

As for linking a question from a client, and an answer from vendor, into the same flow - that's probably best left up to the individual.

Hope this helped somehow.
D

[ria_amp]

I've been struggling with how to use OF for tracking sales/marketing leads. The address book hint is great. We'll see if it does it for me.
Thanks!