One of the main reasons a business chooses to use a CRM product is because they want to make sure they don’t lose touch with any of their leads or customers. After all, customers are the lifeblood of any company. If you find yourself still putting reminders in Outlook or using sticky notes, alarm bells should be going off because your CRM isn’t doing its job.As a business manager, some of the common questions I ask myself are:
- Does every Opportunity in our pipeline currently have a follow-up? If the Opportunity isn’t closed, it should always have a future activity date.
- Has every Lead been qualified by us contacting them? I want to quickly see which leads have never been contacted and make sure that I always have a follow-up scheduled for myself or for a member of my team. If they are a dead lead, we should make them unqualified or inactive. Focus on leads that are most likely to become customers.
- Do our current customers have follow-ups scheduled? We want to see how they are doing to keep customer retention high. However we can also identify if there is any opportunity to upsell so there should always be a future activity scheduled.
- Does every open customer service Case have a scheduled follow-up? I want my team checking with the customer to see if their issue has been resolved and eliminate the chance for something to fall through the cracks. If the case is still open, it should always have a future activity scheduled.
Last Activity and Next Activity
I’m pretty stoked about this new feature we’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks. It solves for all of the questions I mentioned above and applies to 4 key screens in Method CRM.
- Leads and Contacts List
- Customers and Contacts List
- Opportunities List
- Cases List
Each of these screens now benefits from 2 new columns called “Last Activity” and “Next Activity”. If a lead or customer was never contacted, the Last Activity date will appear blank. When an activity is completed, the current date will get filled in automatically for the Last Activity date and if a follow-up is scheduled, that would automatically fill in the Next Activity date. If no follow-up was scheduled and no other activities are pending in the future, the Next Activity date will appear blank.
By filling in these dates automatically, we are able to quickly filter grids on these screens using some newly added filter views and see:
- Leads that have no activities, no last activity or no next activity date scheduled.
- Customers that have no activities, no last activity or no next activity date scheduled.
- Opportunities in the pipeline that have no activities, no last activity or no next activity date scheduled.
- Cases that are open that have no activities, no last activity or no next activity date scheduled.
You can also click on the Last Activity and Next Activity dates directly from the grid to quickly launch that specific activity. 
Having this information available at your fingertips can really empower a business owner to quickly take action in areas that need it. I can’t wait for my team to use this internally.Have any feedback or suggestions on this feature? Let me know.Danny