Prospects are different to leads because you’ll have had at least one conversation with them already, you believe they are a good fit for your firm, and you feel confident that they will engage your services.
Prospect Management
Within Karbon, prospects are managed with Contacts, Work, and Tasks.
Contacts: the person or organization who is your prospect
Work: the job to keep track of all the communication and documentation
Tasks: the steps in the process you’ll follow to convert your prospect to a paying client.
#1 Set up the Contact
The first thing to do is set up your prospect contact. On the contact profile, if you have additional information you want to note, you can record it on the Details tab or add a note to the timeline.
#2 Set up Work
You should now create a piece of work to manage the prospect project. You can do this from the contact.
We recommend using a consistent naming structure for all the lead-management Work as this will allow you to search across all your firm’s Work in progress, and display a list of all prospective work. For example call it “Prospect”, or “Proposal” or “Pre-sales”. There is no need to add the prospect's name to the Work title, because at a glance you’ll easily be able to see which contact each piece of work is assigned to.
#3 Set up your Tasks
Tasks are a powerful way to manage your Work as they outline each of the steps that you need to undertake to complete it.
For your prospect management, an example Task list may be
Set up a phone call with prospect to gather their requirements (if you haven’t done this already as part of converting them from lead to prospect)
Write up prospect’s requirements
Prepare engagement letter, including terms of service
Send engagement letter
Organize a phone call to discuss engagement letter
Get prospect to sign off on work
Create a new piece of Work in Karbon
A couple of tips:
If you like this example Task list you can copy it into Karbon by copying the bullet list (Control + C on PC/ Command + C on Mac) then pasting into the first Task. (Control + V on PC Command + V on Mac).
It’s useful to set up reusable Tasks as a Template in Karbon.
Managing the Prospect
Now that your Contact, Work and Tasks are created, it’s time to transition the prospect into a paying client through the process you’ve defined.
There are some actions you can do in Karbon that will help:
Make sure all your emails are attached to the Work timeline
Upload all documents to the Work to keep them in a centralized location
Utilize the work status. If you’re waiting for the prospect to get back to, change the Work status to “Waiting”
After any phone calls or meetings, add your notes to the Work timeline
Once your prospect converts into a paying client, add their work into Karbon.