[30] – Autotask Implementation Series: CRM, Sales, Opportunities & Quoting

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts Rayanne Buccianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. Hey, Rayanne, how are you doing?

I'm doing great today. Chris, how are you doing? I'm doing very well, thank you, Rayanne. So today, Rayanne, we're continuing with our implementation series on the PSA Impact podcast. So what did we want to talk about today, Rayanne?

Well, so I think last week, we wrapped up the back office set up and all of the basics that you have to get set up before you can really start to use your autotask. So the next place that I wanted to go is in the CRM package, and I want to focus because the CRM package is kind of like the beginning piece of the whole sales process, the entire customer experience. So we may as well start at the beginning with the CRM and the opportunities. With my favorite part of the PSA, right? Of course.

Well, I'm sure that it is, right? Absolutely. I mean, I think everyone knows that by now, right? So let's talk a little bit about the opportunities. Now when you're working with a new account or somebody comes in and they've been using autotask for a long time, perhaps, but they've never really used the CRM package or the piece of it, and they want to know more about it, what's the first thing that you tell them?

Where do they want to dive in first? That's a good question. And I mean, following on from, like you say, in the last episode, we talked about customers and contacts and getting all of that stuff in. So obviously that's the very first part that you're going to do as far as getting stuff into the CRM, so it's your customer and contact type bits. And then when it comes to running opportunities for customers, so if a customer calls you up about a new PC or server install or something to that effect, then you'd want to have an opportunity.

So you're probably going to start at that point by creating an opportunity on the system and you're then going to run that opportunity through different stages. So your new lead stage, and then as you talk to the customer and you send them a quote, you're then going to change that to the quote stage, all of that kind of stuff. And I normally do that when the customer, or I wouldn't actually say a customer at this point, but when the company is still a lead. So at this point, they're a lead, I might've just heard from them at a trade show, somebody who wants to work with me, I'll put them into the CRM, I'll call them a lead, and then I'll generate an opportunity because there's potentially some work that we could do together. So you're generating the opportunity while it's still a lead.

See, I would have changed them over into a prospect before I would create the opportunity. This is my line of thought, right? A lead is like a warm lead, maybe somebody to reach out to, somebody to make sure that you leave on your mailing list. But the prospect is when there's actually an opportunity to present something or continue a conversation with them. That's how my brain differentiates the two.

Good point. So where are you doing all your kind of lead management and all that kind of stuff? Have you got a third party tool that you're using, like a HubSpot or ActiveCampaign or one of those? I do not. I do it all in Autotask.

So I would put the lead... So you leave them as a lead? Mm-hmm, right. Right. Okay, so you leave...

Okay. So I... Yeah, I mean, and a lead is exactly that, you put them in as a lead. But I... It depends on the lead, right?

I mean, because Autotask has a lead and it has a prospect. So to me, if it's a warm lead, if it's somebody that has actually engaged with me at a trade show and said potentially, you know, they might... Or anywhere that said potentially we might want to actually do some business together or they've made an inquiry, to me, that's still in the lead stage. It's still actually a lead because I only make them as a prospect when I've actually started things like sending them a proposal or sending them a quote or that kind of stuff. But I'm still calling them a lead when I'm having initial conversations with them.

So at that point, they're a lead, but I'm creating an opportunity because I'm saying that potentially there could be an opportunity to actually do some business with this person. So can we talk about stages for a minute? Because I get an awful lot of questions about stages. And the standard stages that come along with QuickBooks is that it's a new lead, got a first contact, a qualification, proposal was sent, contract sent, you know, and then closed. Can we change the wording of these stages?

And can we add stages or, you know, remove ones that we'll never use? Yep. The answer is yes, we can. So you can change all of those stages to be whatever you want them to be. And in fact, I have multiple different stages that are completely different from the standard stuff that comes out of the box.

Now, one thing that I think a lot of people get very confused at is in an opportunity, there are two things. There's a status and there's a stage. And I think people get very confused between the two. So the status of the opportunity is, for example, it's an open opportunity or it's a closed opportunity. And that's typically going to be your status.

So is it, you know, is it an active open opportunity or is it a closed opportunity? And if it's closed, is it closed one or closed last? So that's a status of the opportunity. But a stage is, you know, working through all of those different processes of kind of the customer engagement with you. So, you know, that initial conversation you have, you might have a stage in there called initial conversation.

But the status is still going to be active because that opportunity is active. But the stage is initial conversation. Then the stage changes to quote sent or proposal sent. So you're going to change the stage. And it's only right at the very, very end that you're going to change the status of the opportunity to a closed or a last or implemented or something.

Well, so there's a couple of other statuses or statuses that, like, for instance, there's the not ready to buy. So, you know, it might be that the customer is interested in the proposal or the opportunity, but, you know, has decided for whatever reason that they're going to hold off actually spending that kind of money rather than place that into a lost, you know, or closed status. You know, you can simply put it into the not ready to buy so that you can follow up with that customer, you know, in another month or two, you know, to see, you know, what their new timeline looks like. Absolutely. Yeah.

So, I mean, so the statuses you get, as you say, exactly are that, right? So you've got the active status. So the opportunity is active and then you've got the not ready to buy. And what that does is kind of turns the opportunity into a, if you like, a kind of a not a non-active status. So it doesn't show up on any of your dashboards and any of those kind of things.

Unless you specifically tell it to show opportunities in that status. And then you have a lost and a closed in Autotask. And the people, I think, get very confused by the lost and closed as well, because closed actually means closed one and lost means closed last. So, you know, when you've actually lost the opportunity, that's when you would mark it as lost. And when you've won the opportunity or you've run that one opportunity wizard, that's when you would put it into the closed status.

I find that another area that people get confused is the opportunity versus the quote. And so can we move over on into the quoting section piece of the opportunity, right? So, you know, the way I always try to explain it is you've got the opportunity, you're outlining what the opportunity is. You know, you can create a checklist, you know, for the salesperson or whomever is managing this opportunity. But then it comes time to make a presentation to your customer on a quote with costs and with prices and maybe even a signature line.

So I have a whole process that I use, you know, from the opportunity to quote. But I'm interested in how you are managing the quote piece. Are you publishing the quotes? Are you having the customers, you know, review the quotes online, sign the quotes, you know, for approval or decline, you know, and how are you managing that? Great question.

And so, yeah, just talking about opportunities, I think where most CRMs and certainly some of the marketing tools out there refer to an opportunity as a deal. So, you know, for those people out there that are using something like ActiveCampaign, you know, ActiveCampaign will refer to it as a deal. So that means, you know, there's a price against that, a value against it that says, hey, I've got an opportunity here or a deal to work with a customer. So that's what it is. It's that, you know, something where you're going to put a value against it and you're going to say, this is what I'm actually going to be, you know, potentially this is what's going to go into my sales pipeline.

And that's what Autotask is calling an opportunity versus a quote, which the quote is essentially going to lead in or link into that opportunity so that you can then say, OK, well, now I have this opportunity to do business with you, but now I need to generate a quote that I'm actually going to send over to you so you can sign something so the customer can actually see what they're buying. Now, the way I do it, and I know the way that a lot of people do it, is there is a quoting tool built into Autotask and built into most PSA tools. Personally, I don't use the built-in quoting tool. I use a third party tool purely because I think the third party tools have a lot more flexibility, you know, the ability to kind of completely customize the quote. And I know you can do that in things like Autotask.

But, you know, there's a whole proposal maker or, you know, the ability to upload a Word document, all those kind of things. So I think using a third party quoting tool is sometimes a good option. And as an MSP as well, it's going to link into all of your vendors and all those sorts of things. But if you were using the quoting tool that's built into Autotask, as you say, it has the ability for you to send it out to your customer, have them sign off on that, have them accept the quote, and then once that quote is accepted, you get alerted to say that the customer's actually, you know, agreed to buy whatever it is. And then at that point, you can run the opportunity through the one opportunity.

So that's actually been my problem, is that we are using Autotask to send out the quotes and getting the customer to approve them or decline them, you know, right online, which is great, except that we don't receive the notification that the customer has accepted it. And we've been looking around trying to figure out a way to be notified, whether it was, you know, whether it comes in as an email or some sort of notification through Autotask itself. So the only way that we've been able to identify whether the customer has accepted it is to go into the opportunity, edit it, and then go scroll all the way down to the bottom. And then you can see whether it was accepted or declined. Another, the only other way that we figured that out is that the original link that gets sent out to the customer, if you click on that link, you can go and see the online quotes.

And there you can see if it was accepted or declined. But there's no automatic notification. There's nothing that comes in to Autotask to an email or anything that lets us know that the customer has even looked at the thing. And so I'm hoping that when Glue comes around, because you know that Datto just acquired Glue, and I'm hoping that when Glue comes around and integrates with Autotask, that that problem will be solved. But in the meantime, you know, I'm with you.

Most of the MSPs I talk to are using a third-party quoting tool like QuoteWorks or Quozle, which is now called Connect by Cell. But do you have a solution for anybody who does want to use the quoting tool inside Autotask? Yeah, there's a built-in workflow rule that actually does that. So if you go into your workflow rule under CRMs, there's something that kind of says, when the external approval response has changed, if the customer changes, if they add their response, or it says, I'm actually looking at the checkbox now, that says approval status changed. So when the approval status has changed from whatever it was when you sent it out to what the customer does, it sends an email in to you to say, hey, the customer's changed this.

So there is a workflow rule that does all of that for you. And if it's not working for you and not working for anyone else that's listening to this, by using the built-in quoting tool, it's probably that you haven't got the workflow rule set up to do that. I'm going to check that this afternoon. I'm here to help, right? So and most of the time, that's what happens with Autotask, right?

Is the workflow engine is what triggers the notification. So if there's something that you're not being notified of, whether it be an opportunity closing, or a quote that's been sent out, or even a ticket, or any of those kinds of things, if you are not being notified about that, chances are you probably haven't got a workflow rule turned on to notify you of that. OK, so now we've gotten through the initial opportunity and the quote, and we've sent the quote out, and the quote came back approved. Now it's time to win the opportunity and invoice the customer, right? Mm-hmm.

OK, so my process is, if you don't mind me just jumping right in, my process is to get into the opportunity, go through the wow, right, the one opportunity wizard, and there's a number of things that happens during that wizard, right? So you change the status or the stage to close, and then you push it through. And then it kind of splits off, right? So on the left side, it goes over to the approve and post portion so that you can invoice the customer. And when we get into the invoicing, we'll likely pick it up from the one opportunity wizard.

And then on the other side, it heads over to purchasing and procurement so that you can order the products that you're now selling to your customer. And at the same time, if you have chosen the proper, you know, service items or products or projects, you know, you can set up the project or the contract right there, right, inside the one opportunity wizard. What have I missed? Sounds about right. Yeah, so running the wow, which used to be called the one opportunity wizard, and it's now called the win opportunity wizard.

So I think they've changed the wording a little bit on that. But yeah, exactly as you say, right? So you've got the opportunity out there. You've got the quote. Customer signed off the quote, said, yep, let's go ahead.

Then, yeah, you run that one opportunity. What will then happen is a bunch of workflows will trigger off in the back end. So as you say, it'll take all of the stuff that's on that quote. It'll push it through into approve and post, into the billing so you can go and generate invoices for that. And at the same time, it'll push it through into, you know, into procurement so you can go purchase whatever's on that quote.

So if you've got hardware, you know, routers and switches and what have you, they'll all go through the procurement process. Now, if you have services on your quote, and, you know, later on in this session, we'll kind of get to products and services and talk about the difference between them. But if you have services on your quote, when you are running the one opportunity at that stage, it gives you the ability to, you know, to create a recurring service contract or to add those services to an existing recurring service contract. So, you know, and so many times I'll see people through, you know, who have implemented the product and get to a point where, you know, those buttons are grayed out, right? And they can't add anything to a service contract or they can't, you know, create a new one.

And that's purely because they haven't got any services that have been added to the quote. So if you're seeing that scenario where, you know, that button is grayed out, it's probably because you've only got products or you've got labor or you've got all of that kind of thing. The other thing to mention, and I just talked about labor. If you quote labor on a quote, so if you bring in a labor line item, it doesn't actually go anywhere when you run the one opportunity. It doesn't carry that labor through and send that into a proven post because the system is designed that, you know, the labor gets taken care of from a time entry on a ticket.

But I think the confusion comes in as a lot of people quote labor and then they, it obviously doesn't come through. So what they then end up doing is quoting it as a product. Then the product comes through, that gets billed for, and then they add some time to the ticket and so they double billing. So the important thing to note here when you're setting up the system is, and when you're using the system for quoting is, you know, if you're going to quote labor as a line item, bear in mind that it doesn't come through and you'd have to then create a contract in order to take care of that labor. Right.

I've seen that. I've seen that happen an awful lot too. You know, they'll create a product called labor. And as a matter of fact, I have to admit that I have helped a few people do that a time or two. But, you know, again, making it very clear that there needs to be either a fixed price contract or, you know, it needs to get added onto something that is not going to grab that labor that actually hits the ticket and wants to build a customer again.

Because I've run into that a number of times where the MSP was creating, let me see if I can remember the entire story. They were creating fixed price contracts and they were invoicing the hardware 100 percent and the labor 50 percent up front. And then they were charging all of the labor on a time and materials contract and sending that through. And so the milestones were picking up the milestones, which included the hardware, but also the hardware charges. So there was like double and triple billing all over the place.

So when you are putting together your contracts and your opportunities, think all the way through to the billing process. How is this going to get invoiced to the customer? And, you know, and make sure if it's going to be a fixed price, then go ahead, set up your labor as a product and then create that fixed price contract and make sure that the ticket for that project or contract, you know, lands underneath that, you know, so that Autotest doesn't pick it up. But again, also think about the hardware. You know, if you are using a fixed price contract, are you billing the hardware up front and including it into the milestone billings?

But, you know, or, you know, do you want to build the hardware up front and then just only use the milestone for the remaining labor? You know, so think all the way through it before you start setting it up. Absolutely. You know, I fully agree. And I think, you know, this all stems back to how you implement the product, right, which is part of what the series is all about.

And it's about making sure that you're getting your, you know, your products and services entered correctly into the system so that you can not only add them to the service desk contract, but you can also quote for them properly as well. And your labor line items, right, is making sure that when you're thinking about all of these things, when you're saying, OK, I've now got a quote out there that's got, you know, $10,000 of labor. How am I going to build that labor, right? And like you say, if I've got if I have a line item that says, you know, the labor is $10,000. So when I quote my customers, if I'm quoting them for a block of time, I'm going to say, OK, the block of time is is let's say, for example, it's $2,000 for a block of time.

I'm going to put that on the quote as $2,000 for a block of time. And then what I'm going to say is I'm going to come back into Autotask knowing that when I win that opportunity, it's not going to bring that that labor item through. So I'm going to create that as a block contract or as a fixed price contract, depending on what I'm doing. But I'm actually going to build that contract manually inside Autotask. I'm not going to, you know, I actually put it on to the quote as a labor line item so that I can say, OK, the labor element of this is that much.

I don't sell hardware anyway, but, you know, this is how much labor it's going to be. And then I manually go in and create either a recurring service, sorry, a block contract or a fixed price contract to take care of those blocks. But I never, ever put the labor through as a as a product. And I see this happen all the time is people go, well, you know, I need to put it as a product so that when it comes through, it bills for that product. What that would then mean is when you come to add the time on the ticket or the project, you're either going to have to use a non-billable work type so that you can bill for the times you can record the time and not bill for it because you've already billed for it as a product, which just gets messy because then your engineers have to know to do that.

So I would rather say put it through as a labor item, a labor line item, and then, you know, and then just go into Autotask and actually create the relevant contract on whatever that labor is. All right. So we've now won the opportunity. And let me just ask you a couple of things that we didn't touch on, you know, at the opportunity stage and the CRM piece. At what stage or at what section of the CRM do you start using tickets and have the sales people enter time into a ticket or enter notes?

And where do you start using the checklist and where do you start using the tickets in so that the salespeople can track their time? It'll land on their timesheet. It's not going to be billable to anybody, but you will have a record of it in that opportunity on the wall, right? So when do you start seeing people using tickets at the opportunity or CRM? That's a great question.

And I always do it personally. I always create a pre-sales ticket so that I then say, you know, every single opportunity that I currently work on, I actually log my time as a pre-sales ticket. So, you know, if I go and send an email to a prospect, I'm logging time for that. If I'm on a Zoom call with a prospect, I log how much time it's taken me to actually speak to that prospect. I do all of that as a pre-sales ticket.

What I then do is I close that pre-sales ticket when the opportunity, you know, when the customer says, yep, happy, you know, happy to go ahead. Let's go ahead with this. I then say, OK, at that point, it's no longer pre-sales. It's now going to move into post-sales. So when I close the tickets, oh, sorry, close the opportunity, I have that then create a post-sale ticket for me and I continue to do the work inside that post-sale ticket.

That way, what I can then do is I can run a report that can say, show me how much time I've spent on pre-sales activities, especially if, and this happens from time to time, I'm sure it happens to you too, you know, you can speak to a customer for, or a prospect for maybe a couple of hours during the sales process. You know, you might have a Zoom call with them. You might try and understand their business. Then you either never hear back from them or they just decide they're going to go somewhere else. But I want to be able to capture that time because if I've lost that opportunity, I want to know how much time I'm spending on opportunities where I'm actually not making any money out of.

So I always start every single opportunity that I have. I start with a pre-sales ticket and I have a ticket category called pre-sales and I link that into the opportunity. So I go into the opportunity itself and I create the ticket as a pre-sales ticket and I run it through from there. You know, I think that's really important for, you know, even say like the larger MSPs that have dedicated salespeople, you know, that they should be tracking their time in tickets so that you can see there's a number of pieces of information that you can gather from this, right? How long does it take a particular salesperson to close a sale?

You know, on the average, how many, you know, customer touches does this salesperson need in order to be able to make a successful sale? And you can use that and say, is this typical of all customers or is this typical of just this one salesperson? Because this other salesperson might be able to close an opportunity in five touches, whereas, you know, another salesperson can close an opportunity in 10 touches. Is it based on the size of the opportunity or the size of the company? So these are some pieces of information you can use to analyze your entire sales process.

Not to mention, even though you're not going to directly invoice your customer for the sales process, but it will help you understand the overall cost of providing this project or this opportunity or this sale. So all of that leading time, that pre-sales time, I think should be captured because that's valuable information because those are, you know, dollars straight out of the MSP's pockets, you know, without any way of getting it recaptured. But it's helpful information when pricing future services to know how long, you know, the sales process was and how much that sales process cost you. Yeah. And exactly.

And that's the reason I do it. And I used to do it when I had my MSP business, too, is I used to kind of, you know, if I'm speccing out a server, right, I'm actually going to spec the server. And I'm going to say, how much time is this taking me to build that spec of the server, whatever the case might be. And then when I actually went and installed the server, I also had a ticket at that point, so I could capture how much time it was to actually install the server. Then I could run a report, you know, and look over kind of historical trend of how long does it actually take me roughly to install this kind of server.

So when the customer then says, or when I'm doing the next opportunity for the customer, and they say, how long is this going to take to install the server? I can go, well, I know that I can comfortably do it in two days, or one day, or whatever it is. So I know, based on the fact that I've logged a ticket for every single thing, I know how much those server installs are taking. And I also know how much pre-sales activity I'm normally doing inside that so that the quotes moving forward, I can actually start to build that pre-sales activity into my quote as well, when I'm quoting the time for the customer moving forward. So I think it's vitally important.

And when I talk to customers now that are onboarding Autotask, one of the first things I always talk to them about is that pre-sales ticket. So I go, you know, let's set up a pre-sales ticket category, and let's start to talk about, you know, running this as a pre-sales process through, you know, through the opportunity stage within Autotask, and then capture all of the time. And this is one of the things, you know, so many times I hear MSP saying that they don't use the CRM capabilities of the PSA tool. You hear every word under the sun as to, you know, why it's a load of rubbish and all these kind of things. And the thing is, I think if you're not using the CRM inside your PSA tool, you're losing out on a whole bunch of stuff, like being able to track your pre-sales opportunities and the cost of those pre-sales by not running the opportunities through your PSA tool.

So it's really, really important to make sure that you are using it and that you are setting it up correctly during your implementation to make sure that you're going to get the best out of using your, you know, your opportunity management in your PSA tool. Yeah, so I totally agree with that. And if you're not going to use the CRM inside the PSA, you know, you're going to need a CRM somewhere. You know, there's got to be a place where you, you know, centrally maintain, you know, customer and prospect data, whether it's, you know, Salesforce or HubSpot or, you know, some other place. And of course, you can always go to Salesforce and HubSpot and pay their fees all day long as, you know, if you like their tool better.

You know, however, if you're, you know, looking for a, you know, a one-stop shop built in place, the CRM package inside Autotask is probably a lot better than people give it credit for. So I would at least take a look at it. If it doesn't do everything that you want it to do, then start shopping elsewhere, but give it a shot. Absolutely. And, you know, I think the reason a lot of people think that the CRM in any PSA tool for that matter isn't very good is because, you know, very often it's not a CRM tool they're looking for, it's a marketing tool.

You know, I hear so many people saying, well, you know, I can't do lead generation on it, I can't do newsletters, I can't do drip content, I can't do all these things. And I'm like, but that's not a CRM tool, that's a marketing tool. So what you're really looking for is a HubSpot or an ActiveCampaign or, you know, Infusion Soft or any of these tools that are really good at doing that or MailChimp, you know, those sorts of tools. And by all means, continue to use those sorts of tools because they're really good at doing that kind of thing. But for doing, you know, opportunity management and tracking how much your opportunities are costing you and tracking how much business you're closing on a monthly basis, the CRM within any PSA tool is going to be absolutely 100%, you know, the right thing to do.

And I would recommend every single person that's listening to this podcast and pretty much every MSP out there, I would absolutely recommend that you use the CRM within your PSA tool for those very reasons that you can track all of your pre-sales activity, track all of your post-sales activity, you know, and then in the same tool that you're doing everything else in your business, you also have the ability to kind of bill for that stuff and to, you know, once you close the opportunity, you go and purchase it, you go and bill for it, do all of those kinds of things all from the same tool. So you're not having to use multiple tools to do the same job. So I know that, you know, our conversation ran a little bit long today, but I thought it was a really, really great conversation. There's still a few more topics on CRM that I want to touch on. So I guess we're going to have to do that next week.

Things like sales quotas and tracking commissions and things of that nature, setting up the widgets to track the pipeline. You know, I really, really want to get into that, but I kind of feel like we need to let it go for next week. But anyway, I thought it was a great conversation today, Chris. Thanks. Absolutely.

Yeah, and I had a lot of fun talking about this. So if anyone listening wants to reach out to us, you can get hold of us on our newly designed website, which is psaimpact.net, and you'll find all our contact details on there. You know, and there is an opportunity for you to leave a message, leave a voice message, and we both have access to that. So, you know, if there's anything in particular that people actually want to listen to or want us to talk about, you know, either through the implementation series that we're doing or afterwards, and there's some specific stuff that people want to talk about, then, you know, reach out to us and let us know, and we can talk about those on future episodes. So, yeah, I've had a lot of fun today, Ryan.

Thanks for your time. Always. Happy to be here. Absolutely. Yeah.

And all that's left for me to say at this point, Ryan, is that your PSA is the key to your MSP success. Go out and make an impact on your world today. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners. Bye.