One of the original needs for Focus was to help with the sales process. Focus does this unobtrusively and allows you to adapt it to your sales process instead of the other way around. Therefore these instructions can be seen more as best practices instead of rigid rules to follow.

As usual you should focus on each activity while doing them. Not only will this make you feel more focused and allow you to sell more efficiently but it will also let you track how much time is spent during each phase of the sales process. You should also import all relevant e-mails, pictures etc. so they can easily be found later attached to the correct activity by you and your team members.

Some relevant activities and other record types are shown next to the sales process phase descriptions. Use the Focus main view or the feed to create them.

Whenever an opportunity rises, create a Sales Lead. You can do this in the Focus main view.

You can use the lead to gather background information about the prospect and when searching for the right person to contact.

Attach any e-mails you've sent and received and log calls you've made as Contact Notes and tag participants (Contact Persons). These are valuable to team members and to yourself as details are eventually forgotten.

When you are ready to create an offer, create a Sales Proposal in the Sales Lead's feed.

A Sales Proposal is a special activity for tracking offers and orders. Set the sent date when you have sent your offer. The sum fields should correspond to the estimated value of the sale at this point.

When you've created the offer, the related Sales Lead is handled for now and you can mark it as finished. The Sales Proposal is not finished after sending it, though. Move it to whenever you plan to follow up on your offer. This can be the next day or week depending what you are selling.

Revise the offer and send it again, repeat if necessary.

If you are turned down completely, just mark the Sales Proposal as finished and move on to others.

Congratulations, you've made the sale.

You can use the Sales Proposal's Sold-action to easily convert the offer to an Order. This will also find the parent Sales Lead and convert it to an unfinished Client Relationship.

You should now update the sum fields to the actual ordered value. Move the parent Client Relationship to a suitable after sales or satisfaction query date, eg. a month from now.

Create separate tasks for the fulfillment of the order, for example to pack and deliver the product or to activate the service.

Move the Order to whenever you want to check that fulfillment was done, anywhere from a day to months depending on what you are selling. The person fulfilling the order should upon fulfillment move the Order to the current day and mark it as delivered so you can bill it.

When the Order has been fulfilled, it's time to send the bill or setup monthly billing. When it has been sent, fill in the billed date and mark the Order as finished.

Remember, the Client Relationship is still open and should remain so as long as there is a contract with the customer. You can use it to check every now and then how the customer is doing and to verify that billing is running smoothly.

You can see proposals and orders at different stages of the process in the Sales Process feed view. Go to your Reports from the Menu and change the feed view to Sales Process. This will show all proposals and orders from your clouds with you as an actor. You can also activate the view for an individual cloud showing the process for that cloud only.

The Sales Proposal type shows an info graphic of offers versus orders.

You can change the feed view to Report Export to open the data in Excel for more detailed analysis. You can calculate average times from offer to order or from order to billing, for example. These can help you find bottlenecks in the process.

To list sales leads or client relationships, go to the respective record types. If you wish see these on a cloud by cloud basis, navigate to a cloud first and limit the feed to these types behind the feed settings cogwheel.

These tools are free for you to use, but to get the most of them, sign up for Premium Support (39€/months) or for a Focus Power Day (1990€) where together with our experts in sales, business processes and Focus usage find the best workflows for your company. Contact sales@timespace.co