When Ontraport was first created, and before it evolved to encompass marketing automation and a variety of other features, its core functionality was focused around sales force automation (SFA). Today, with the ever-growing list of new features focusing on other business areas, many Ontraport users aren’t fully taking advantage of all the unique tools created around sales automation.
Because of the positive impact they can have on your marketing and sales process, such as bringing in more sales and making better use of your team’s time, we want to introduce you to some of Ontraport’s key SFA features. Here are some definitions you’ll want to know before getting started:
- Lead Scoring assigns point values to contacts based on their actions within your campaigns or other attributes they’ve provided to you about themselves, such as their geographic location or job title. The more a contact engages with your business or fits your target demographic, the higher the point value they’ll have.
- Lead Routing allows you to automatically assign contacts to people on your team for follow-up. Once you’ve created your lead router, you can add contacts to it when they enter the database or take a qualifying action.
- Notes and Tasks Notes are important pieces of information about your leads that salespeople add to their contact record, and tasks are set up in your Ontraport account to notify your team to call or email a lead immediately.
- Custom Objects In cases where your business needs to manage more than just contacts in Ontraport, custom objects allow you to create and store different kinds of data sets to match the way your business really works. For example, if your business does B2B sales, you might need to keep track of which contacts work for which companies so you can manage opportunities for each company and contact.
We asked our experts — Ontraport Certified Consultants — which SFA features within the software they find most valuable and how they use them for their clients’ systems. Here are their insider tips that you can apply to your business.
1. Notes and Tasks
“One of my favorite sales force automation [features] within Ontraport is the Notes and Tasks section. To me, this is a very underutilized feature. This section allows you to marry automation with manual tasks and keep everyone in the loop.
For example, let’s say you offer a product or course that includes a payment plan. You have a customer on the payment plan whose payments have begun to decline. If we have everything set up in the re-charge settings, this would initially be the way in which we could automate contacting the customer via email to let them know about the declined payment.
But, what if they never respond? What if the recharge attempts expire, resulting in the transaction being listed as a ‘Write-Off’?
This is the point where a manual task comes into play. By adding a task for a team member to manually contact the customer via phone, Facebook private message, etc., it raises the likelihood of you recouping the declined payment and getting the contact back on track.
And not only can you create a task for a team member to follow up, but you can:
- Use the notes section to keep everyone on the team up-to-date on the correspondence.
- Incorporate the proper task outcomes that could trigger a NEW automation that could result in something like canceling their open order and revoking access to the membership site until all past due balances are settled.
Using the Notes and Tasks section will help you and your team to be more efficient when it comes to follow-up and connecting the manual to automation in a seamless fashion.” ‒ Akilah Pitts, Ontraport Certified Consultant and Systems Strategist
2. Custom Objects and Tasks
“I’ve done a couple of setups lately that use custom objects to track and automate leads. Custom objects is a complete game-changer for anyone who receives more than one lead per customer.
Also, I always say that tasks are one of the most underutilized tools in Ontraport, so my clients use plenty of those as well. One of my clients even had an automated task that would send a text and a voicemail if a prospect missed a scheduled sales call.” – Neil Kristianson, Marketing Automation Specialist, Email Splat
3. Tasks, Lead Scoring and Lead Routing
“One of my clients uses an embedded web form and the answers are reviewed at salesperson assignment. Another uses a task for a follow-up sales call as new leads receive a tripwire to drive research from inside sales for qualification. Others have used a form and routed the follow-up based on certain field values; higher values signify a qualified lead, and lower values trigger follow-up or sending a different offer.
Additionally, some clients run a regular fulfillment list of high lead scores for weekly review and reach out directly where appropriate.” ‒ Kevin Switala, Chief Propeller Head, Wild Fig Marketing
4. Lead Scoring and Sales Reports
“We add to the contact’s lead score based on email opens, clicks and site revisits. We send a ‘Friday at 5’ report to sales teams so they know who to focus on.” ‒ Chad Root, President, Spearhead Sales & Marketing Services
5. Lead Qualification
“If you’ve ever spent time qualifying a lead, you know how mindless and time-consuming it can be. Because of this, you want to make sure that you’re prioritizing outreach to each lead based on his or her likelihood of purchasing.
By comparing page visit data, email activity, phone calls and incoming communication like emails or chats, you can effectively prioritize your list based on interest.
In Ontraport, you can pull up the opportunity, view all of the communication that’s been sent (including inbound emails from the lead to the sales rep), notes from your sales people, page visits, marketing UTM sources, phone calls, and sales data. Rather than logging into four different places that don’t really talk to each other (meaning a few of them are always out of date or don’t have the whole picture), you can look in one spot for all of the necessary info.
Even better, since all of your data is in one place, you can view the overall health of your business in one reporting dashboard. Good businesses make decisions on data via the big picture, not just the tunnel vision version of their stats that their tool has decided to report on.”
‒ Brendan Dubbels, Business Development Director, Ontraport
