Action

***** Software On Sailboats Desktop Sales Manager v6
***** Contact management software, sales automation software, CRM software

Action

The Action tab houses choices that take action upon many items at once. Inherent in that idea is the concept of selecting exactly WHICH items are to be acted upon from among the many items in your sales pipeline.

Repetitive actions

While the discussion below talks about powerful techniques for selecting the items for an action, it is worthwhile to keep in mind that many of these actions can easily be repeated on a different group of items. For example, if you wish to send an email to all the items that have "25% - Long Shot" or "50% - Competitive" in a field labeled Probability, it MAY be simplest to send the same email twice - once to each group.

Selecting Items

Desktop Sales Manager allows you to select a more than one item at a time in the List Area. The List Area is on the right hand side of any sales pipeline window and has rows and columns of information from the items in the sales pipeline. The Category area (on the left side of any pipeline window) does not allow selection of multiple items but can be absolutely invaluable in the process.

Techniques for selecting multiple items

There is no one 'right' way of selecting items in the list area. What follows is a discussion of techniques that can be combined or applied to select items in the List Area. And while these techniques are useful for the Action choices - Mail Merge, Email, Update, etc - they are also useful for selecting items for the Copy, Delete, and Archive commands.

Filtering hides irrelevant items

Filtering uses criterion to hide irrelevant items from view. Examples of filtering criterion are 'all items modified within the last 30 days' or 'all items with "Texas" in the address'. Any items that do not match the criterion are not displayed. It is a great tool for weeding out clutter and is most useful for sales pipelines where there are LOTS of items. Filters are different than any of the techniques below in that they are global - they act upon all open pipelines. The rest of the techniques below are local - they act upon the pipeline window in which they are used.

Category and category groups show items in the List Area

As mentioned, the Category area can be incredibly helpful in selecting items. It can be used to show the 'right' items in the list area. For example, suppose you want to select from among the items that have "25% - Long Shot" in a field called Probability. An easy way to see these items is to select the category button Probability in the Category Area and then select the category group "25% - Long Shot". This causes all of the "25% - Long Shot" opportunities to be displayed in the List Area.

Note that any data field or property (80+ of them) can be used as a Category button. Category buttons are managed through Tools --> Categories.

Selecting items in the List area

Filtering and Categories are two techniques that can be used to show items of interest in the List Area - i.e. they show a subset of all of the items in your sales pipeline. What follows is a discussion about selecting items from the List Area. Note that these techniques can be used together to quickly build a collection of selected items in the List Area.

Select All

On of the simplest techniques is to right click in the List Area and choose Select All. In this case you are selecting all of the items displayed in the list area - not all of the items in the sales pipeline.

Using Ctrl to select individual items

While a simple mouse click can be used to select the first item in the List Area, items can be individually added as selections by holing down the Ctrl key and selecting items. Also note that selected items can be individually unselected - removed from the group of selected items - by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking a the selected item.

Using Shift to select blocks of items

You can select a whole block of next-to-each-other items by selecting the first item with the mouse and then holding down the shift key and selecting the intended end-of-block item. All of the items between the first and last item will be selected. This process works in both directions - up the list or down the list. For example in a list of ten items, choosing the third item and then holding the shift key and choosing the seventh item selects items three through seven. Choosing the seventh item and then holding the shift key and choosing the third item selects the same block of items.

You get some interesting results if you have selected items and hold the shift key and select an item. Experiment to understand how this works.

Using Ctrl and Shift together to select additional blocks of items

You can use the Ctrl and Shift key to add a second (or third or fourth...etc) block of next-to-each-other items. To add additional blocks hold the Ctrl key while using the mouse to select the first item of the additional block. Continue holding the Ctrl key, and depress the Shift key and then select the item that will be at the end of the block you want to select.

Sorting in the List Area to arrange items in blocks

Using the shift key to select groups of next-to-each-other items is very powerful, but sometimes the difficulty is getting items-of-interest to line up together so that a block of them is easy to select. Clicking the column headers in the list area sorts the list by the selected column.

This technique is VERY powerful when combined with selecting blocks and adding additional blocks. For example, clicking on a column named 'State' would make it easy to select a block of items in Texas because they are all sorted together by state. Then clicking on a column named 'Region' and using the Ctrl/Shift technique described would allow you to add the block of items with Southeast as their region - and thus selecting items in Texas or the Southeast region.

Software On Sailboats

Software On Sailboats