[33] – Autotask Implementation Series: CRM – Sales Quotas, Commissions, Opportunity Categories, Speed Codes

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. Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts, myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. Rayanne, how are you doing?

I'm doing great today. Chris, how are you? Very well, thank you. So Rayanne, I just wanted to kind of follow on on our implementation series and just talk a little bit more around the CRM, talk a little bit more about sales quotas, tracking commissions, talk about opportunity categories, all of those kind of things, just to kind of round out our CRM and sales process. So I guess a question to you at this point, Rayanne, is let's maybe start with talking about sales quotas, and let's talk about what do you know about sales quotas in order to ask?

Do you know anything about when, where to set them up, how to go about it? What's your take on it? And I would love to tell you this is my favorite topic, but it is not. My favorite topic, though. I'm sure it's yours, because I've got a lot of questions for you about this topic.

So interestingly enough, I was speaking with a company earlier this week, and they want to track commissions, but they don't want to just track commissions based on the salesperson. Now they do want to do that, but they also want to track commissions using a pool, because what they said was more than one person might be responsible for making this sale, right? So if there's this big sale, there's $100,000 sale, and three or four people in the company had worked together on it almost as a team, they want to build a commission pool so that at the end of the month, we can pick out who did what and how much. Now, before I get into the solution I picked up, I want to find out a little bit more about these sales quotas, and perhaps one, how do you set them up, and two, what are you using them for? That's a great question, Rayanne.

Of course, you know what I'm going to say, and I always say this in everything Autotask, because it really is my absolute favorite topic. And that is, yeah, what are they and how do you set them up? So sales quotas really are exactly what they sound like. They are quotas for your sales guys to achieve every month. So that is to say, we might say you've got $1,000 of recurring revenue you have to sell.

Maybe you've got $1,000 of software as a service that you have to sell. So you can set up those sales quotas within the system, and then every time you have an opportunity and every time you put the costs and the, you know, the revenue forecasted, the estimated revenue exactly on an opportunity, what that gives you the ability to do is to then break it down and say, you know, how much of this is for recurring services? How much of this is for whatever it is that your quotas are for? And then you can then look at a report and see, you know, how much you've actually, how many opportunities you've closed that are in quota, you know, have you met your quota, all these kinds of things. You can set those up per sales person, as well as kind of put a, you know, a figure overall for kind of, you know, this is what we want the team to achieve as a whole.

So, and those are quite easy to set up in inside Autotask, and they are just set up underneath the CRM section. And it's something that I find a lot of people actually don't really use as much as they should do. And part of it, I think, is because people just don't actually even know that they're there. So, when you go into the opportunity or, and you put the numbers in the different boxes for separating out the estimated revenues, is that what you're calling the sales quota? Yeah.

So really what those fields are called is they're known as the advanced fields in Autotask. So that's going to be things like, you'll see it when you look at an opportunity, you'll see it, you know, under the advanced fields called things like training fees, other fees, those kinds of things by default against the opportunity. And those are where your sales quotas get set up from as well. Interesting. Go ahead.

Finish. I was going to say, if you go into the sales quota section within, you know, under the sales and opportunities, you'll actually see them in there and you can then go and set up, you know, any of the users that you have on the system. And then that will give you the ability to say, you know, what figures do you have for each of those sales quotas each month? So I've renamed mine to be, you know, for example, consultancy and training fees and, you know, monthly user fees, those kinds of things. And then you can put a figure into each one of those.

When you then build the opportunity, it asks you to fill those fields in as a breakdown of how much, you know, how much revenue or the revenue that you're forecasting on your opportunity, how much of that revenue is broken down into each one of those sales quotas. So that's really interesting the way you're talking about when you can rename those fields, those advanced fields, right? And then use those to start tracking, you know, quotas against actuals. Now, I wonder if I could figure out a way to use that for sales teams as opposed to... So let me tell you what I was talking about with this other company and what they're trying to do specifically and how I decided to come around it.

So they want to... Whenever there's a sale made, the account manager gets a commission, that's a given, right? But there are other people that contribute to that sale that... So they want to build this pool to be able to, you know, at the end of the month, okay, here's the money in that sales commission pool and we want to dole it out to the appropriate people. The challenge is how to determine exactly how much of that pool goes to each person because there might be, you know, four people on this sale, but seven people overall in the pool for the month, right?

So how do we break it out? Well, this is how I came up with this and I'm anxious to hear, you know, how you would have solved this problem if you were faced with it. So my solution was to create user-defined fields in the opportunity and make teams, right? So we don't want to create additional autotask users and use up licenses for a user that's never going to happen. So I just really need a team.

And so let's say a team number one consists of, you know, Alice, Bob, and Frank, and team number two has, you know, Alice, Frank, and Joe. And you know, so if we have these teams defined, then at the end of the month, we can simply run, you know, build a live report to run the reports based on all of the sales made from that user-defined field in the opportunities, the closed opportunities. How would you have handled that? That's a very interesting take on it, Diane. The way I would have done it is probably a very similar way.

I mean, Autotask doesn't handle sales commissions very well. So having it in a user-defined field against the opportunity, I think, is a great way to do it. The other way I've seen do it and the way I would sort of tell people to almost do it is through, you know, live reports, is to actually build a live report that will then, you know, work out how much has been sold by each person and then just have a column in there that works out what the, you know, what the commission is on that, so whatever percentage it is, and then that will give you a breakdown of what each person should be earning on the commission based on that sale. Right. And that's exactly what I was thinking, you know, if we were talking about a one-to-one, you know, one person per sale type of thing, you know, the issue here, I think, is that there are multiple people involved in this, involved in this sale.

You know, the account manager is going to get their commission based on, you know, some number and then the remainder goes into this pool that's going to be split out among a bunch of different people. So what I was thinking is, you know, building a live report on the closed opportunities and separate out the time, and that's another thing, didn't we talk about this in our last, when we were talking about opportunities, about the importance of capturing your time on the opportunities? Mm-hmm. You know, so this is another really great point, you know, for that. So as the people are capturing their time on the opportunities, we can see exactly how much effort Alice put in versus the effort, you know, that Joe or Bob put in, right?

So we can start to run these reports and say, out of the 25 hours it took to close this opportunity, Alice put in 15 hours, Joe put in, you know, seven hours, you know, and then Bob put in the remainder, you know, and we can build percentages from that, you know, right in the live report. I know that I'm totally getting into the weeds on this thing, you know, but I had to solve this problem, and I thought, I can't be the only one who's ever had to solve this problem, right? Mm-hmm. I agree, Rayanne, and I think that's a really good point you raised there about, you know, the importance of adding time against the pre-sales tickets or an opportunity ticket. I mean, it's not really an opportunity ticket, it's more a pre-sales ticket that is assigned to that opportunity, but yeah, that's a great way to then determine, you know, what percentage of the commission each person gets based on the effort, based on the time that they enter.

And the live reports can do that fairly well with formulas, so, you know, you'd very quickly and very easily be able to work out a formula that could say, you know, based on whatever effort somebody has put in against that pre-sales ticket, go and work out the, you know, the commissions based on that. There is no real easy way, though, to pull that commission information out of audit task purely just because it's not, there's nothing in there that kind of has a commission field per person or for the pool or whatever the case might be. So, yeah, I guess the only way you can do it is to really look at who spent the most time against those tickets, what effort they put against it, and then use a live report to work that out and spit out a figure into Excel or something, and then you get to go and make a decision there. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good way of doing it. So I ran into another problem with another client this week, and I'm finding that a lot of people, you know, might be putting information into the opportunity, but it had never occurred to them to actually close the opportunity.

So they were, well, here's what they did, they came to me and they said, Brian, we want to know the profitability on these opportunities as they're won. And I'm thinking, well, you know, run a report on the closed opportunities. And they said, closed opportunities, what does this mean? So they had all of these opportunities going back six years, and nobody has ever closed them. And I know that I'm revisiting the entire opportunity, but as it turns out, I'm finding that people begin to use it a little bit and then abandon, you know, everything that it does, like literally putting in notes and tracking in, you know, to-dos and follow-ups, but also, you know, closing out that opportunity and turning them into projects and contracts and tickets and purchase orders and all of the things that the opportunity can do.

I mean, that's where it starts. That's where the relationship with your customer starts. Because it's the opportunity. And then it really fills out and carries on when that lead turns into a customer and that customer turns into a contract, you will have all of this history with this customer in one place. And so it just seemed so odd to me that they would spend the effort to put the opportunities in, but then never follow through and use it what it's to be used for.

Absolutely. And, you know, and I think you really do need to close the opportunities down once you've won them, because otherwise, like we alluded to earlier on, you know, otherwise your revenue just kind of shows as projected. And that's when you close, then it actually shows as actual revenue that you've made against that opportunity. So, you know, you're never really going to see it as actual revenue until you close the opportunity. Closing it, there's multiple ways you can close it.

And a lot of people, I've seen the same thing happen is people leave them open because they say, well, we didn't actually win the opportunity. But closing it is also a close lost, right? So when you've lost that opportunity for whatever reason, you should close it as a lost opportunity. And actually getting back to that, Ray, and I think one of the really important things that people don't do a lot of, and I think really should be, and certainly, you know, part of implementing the system is all about making sure that you're understanding what all of the fields and the information mean in there. And one of them is, you know, the lost opportunity reasons.

And I can't hit home enough how important not only are the one opportunity reasons, but the lost opportunity reasons too. Because when I lose an opportunity, and I do from time to time, you know, I have a customer or a prospect who contacts me about consulting. And then for whatever reason, I don't win that opportunity. And I always try as best I can to find out what the reasons is that I've lost that opportunity. And I put that into the lost field.

So I actually say, I lost the opportunity because of this, it could be timing, it could be pricing, it could be whatever it is. And the reason being is I can then run a report that can show me all of the opportunities that I've lost and the reasons why, whereas most people are only sort of really interested in why we're winning more opportunities, you know, let's go after those opportunities again. But I'm thinking if I'm losing opportunities, and I'm starting to see a pattern and a trend as to why I'm losing opportunities, then something's going to change, right? So I now need to go in and fix whatever it is, so that I'm actually starting to win more opportunities rather than lose more opportunities. So it's really, really important when you're coming to set up the system and you're looking at using opportunity management within Autotask to make sure that you, you know, you understand the difference between closed one, closed lost, and also the one and lost reasons.

And one of the things you can do is you can actually predefine those reasons when you set up the opportunity as well. So you could say, my projected win reason is going to be on price. And then when you actually win the opportunity, you can win it and say, my reason I won it was on reputation or on whatever it is, relationship, right? And then you can compare the two. So you can say, when I created this opportunity, this is what I thought I was going to win it on.

This is what I actually won it on, or this is what I thought I was going to win it on. And now I've actually lost it for these reasons. Now you can compare those. So really, really important to make sure you do close the opportunity. And also, as we mentioned in the previous podcast, it's all about, you know, not just closing it for those reasons, but also it triggers off a whole bunch of workflows on the backend, like taking all of the charges that are against the quotes and creating tickets for that and creating billable items and, you know, projects and contracts and all that kind of stuff as well.

Yeah, and to mention, you know, I mean, and all of your reasons are totally valid for, you know, closing opportunities, whether they've been won or lost. But as you are running these reports, let's say you're not just a small company with one or two people in the sales department. Let's say that you're a much larger company with 10 or 15 people in the sales department. And you want to know which salesperson is hitting the home runs and which one is consistently losing opportunities. And if somebody is consistently losing opportunities because of price, is it because they're overpricing in order to boost their commission, you know, but not realizing that they can't get it?

I mean, sometimes, you know, sometimes you'll, you know, you'll get lucky and you'll get a customer to sign, you know, for an overpriced contract, but more often than not, probably not. And that's really not how we want to do business. Right. You know, we want to be fair. We want to offer good value for our for our services.

But if there is a sales department and you want to know, you know, who is performing well and who is perhaps not performing so well, running those reports based on the won and lost opportunities is going to tell you so much information about what's going on in your sales department. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's, you know, it's not just about I mean, because, you know, if you're a smaller company and you might be the only sales person, again, it's it's the reason for saying why, you know, why are we losing and winning them myself as well? And, you know, and I see it from time to time when I actually have two customers that appear to be identical.

So they appear to be the same kinds of of customers, the same size. And I can look at that and say, I know I can easily sell a block of hours to this customer because I sold the same block to the previous customer, you know, and I know that the previous customer, the price was was exactly spot on, you know, and then I can get to to another customer that seemingly is exactly the same. And for some reason, you know, the price isn't right or something isn't right for that customer. So so I use it really even just myself to really start to look at that information and say, where am I going wrong? What do I need to change?

How do I need to change it? Or is it that I'm just going after the wrong kind of customers? Right. And maybe I need to change the types of customers that I'm going after. Those who who will kind of pay the fees that, you know, on on a block of of hours or whatever the case might be.

So so, yeah, it's you know, it's really, really vitally important to do that. And the other thing, you know, where I see a lot of people not using inside opportunities is the categories. And, you know, I really want to spend a little bit of time talking about the opportunity categories, especially from a, you know, an implementation point of view, because categories, just like you get on tickets, allow you to completely customize the look and feel of the opportunity. So now what I have on an opportunity is I, for example, have, you know, if I'm going to sell blocks of hours to customers, I have a block hour category and there's a whole bunch of information I capture on that opportunity. When I talk to the customer on the phone or talk over Zoom, I'm capturing information inside that opportunity on, you know, how many users they've got, how many you know, what kinds of things they want to achieve during during the implementation, all of that kind of stuff.

I'm capturing on each one of those contracts or those those opportunity types as I'm sort of working with a customer and as I'm I'm building out those opportunities. So it's really, really important to build different opportunity categories and capture different information about those types of categories as well. So, again, if you're an MSP that you might have a category for, you know, selling a service to a customer versus selling a workstation, for example, and then capture different bits of information on that. Well, you might have a whole new onboarding of something for a customer. So maybe you've got some project that you're going to be doing and then you want to be able to capture the information against that opportunity category as well.

So why don't you tell people where they would go in order to set up those opportunity categories? And also perhaps we should touch on the new opportunity speed codes. Yeah. So, I mean, so the opportunity categories are very easy to set up. So under the admin module.

So you simply click on the burger menu at the top left corner, go into admin and then click on features and settings and underneath sales and opportunities, you'll see opportunity categories. And then in there, you can just go ahead and set up those categories and change, you know, change various fields, various information. And you can add your own as well, which is really good. So you can capture, you know, I create user defined fields for one category that I don't have in a different category. So.

Can I just point out a little tip here? Before you go in there and start developing all of these categories, have yourself a plan. Make sure that you actually know what you want this, the categories to look like and the opportunities to look like, you know, start with the end in mind and then and build it to produce those results. And more importantly as well, then that's a great, you know, a great thing to bring up. But more importantly is get your team to understand what those categories are for and when they should be using them because it's no point having a whole bunch of of really cool, really slick opportunity categories and no one knows how to use them or what they for.

Oh, I can't stress that part enough. Every time I talk to a company who's looking to implement or update or fix or change their auto tasks, the first thing I tell them is that you need an entire company buy in because we're talking about changing literally everything about the way you do business. And, you know, and if you don't have the complete company buy in, you know, it just takes one bad cog and that wheel is going to go flying off. Absolutely. So I'm intrigued about your thoughts on the new opportunity speed code.

So I'm interested to kind of get your take on them. So quite frankly, I haven't had much opportunity myself to go and play with them. You know, but I imagine that if you have opportunities that seem to recur when you've got the categories that you can use to set up the opportunity, but you could also populate a bunch of information instead with the speed code. So let me ask you this. Do you prefer categories over speed codes?

And if so, why? Because I know that you seem to lean more toward the categories over the speed codes. Just out of curiosity. Awesome question, Rayanne. And I think honestly, I think on every podcast we've done, I honestly think that's my favorite question.

And I really genuinely and I know our listeners are probably so sick and tired of me saying it's my favorite thing, but literally that is my favorite question and one I like to answer because people ask me that all the time. So really, the difference between the two is a speed code is purely going to fill in a field, right? So it's going to say, hey, I'm going to fill in the status or I'm going to fill in the stage or I'm going to fill in the description, whatever the case might be. And it's just going to fill in the fields that are currently there. What the category allows you to do is not only fill in the fields that are there, but also define what fields you actually want to see.

So you might say, I don't want to see, you know, for example, the stage or the status or the projected close date, or I don't want the projected close dates at the top. I want it down near the bottom. You might want to have, you know, user defined fields against that category where you can then have user defined fields and not only have those fields, but pre-populate them as well. So the ticket category allows you to do so much more than just using the speed code. The speed code is great for, you know, I've created the opportunity.

And I just want to fill in a bunch of stuff and do it really quickly. But it's only going to fill in what's there. It's not going to allow you to change anything. It's not going to allow you to move it around. It's not going to allow you to, you know, to completely customize and change the look and feel of the opportunity.

So I, for example, you know, have things like on those those advanced fields that we have in some that we mentioned earlier on in some of the categories that I have, I don't even have those fields displaying. I have them pre-filled in. So inside the ticket, the opportunity category, when I when I select that category, that stuff is already pre-filled in because I know that based on that type of opportunity that I'm doing, those those quotas are effectively filled in so I don't have to manually go and fill them in. But then for other opportunity categories that I have, I might want to manually fill those in or have the quoting tool come in and fill in those those quotas for me. And that's the kind of thing you can do.

And then you can just completely hide those fields because I don't need them. So I hide them from within inside the category. So so my recommendation to anybody is use categories instead of speed codes, because it's kind of almost like speed codes on steroids. You can do a lot more with the categories than you can with just the generic bog standard speed codes or form templates, as they call them now. That was an awesome explanation, by the way.

Thank you. Well, you see, that's what I mean. You just get me excited about the stuff all the time. I just love talking about it. So, you know, I think for any of our listeners out there, you know, if anyone wants to reach out to either myself or Rae-Ann and just, you know, ask us any questions about, you know, anything we've so far discussed in the series so far or just anything else that you want us to talk about, you know, from an implementation perspective, but also, you know, just if you want some generic questions answered.

You know, by all means, visit our website, PSAimpact.com. We have a facility there where you can record a message and leave us a message. You know, we'd love to get some feedback from you guys in terms of, you know, what it is that you want to hear, you know, is is what we're talking about now and in all these previous episodes. Is this useful to you guys? You know, or are we just, you know, is it just Rae-Ann and I having fun chatting together?

Exactly. I always wonder how many listeners we've got because I sit there often and think, you know, maybe the one person who does listen to us, you know, at least they're hanging on, right? At least they're carrying on listening to us. I think we actually got a shout out from a British IT marketing site on LinkedIn this week for our podcast. I can't remember the name of it.

What was the name of it? We did. Yeah, we did. Breeze Marketing. So thank you.

Thank you, Breeze Marketing. For the shout out for our podcast. So, yeah, I mean, you know, I know we sort of, you know, have talked about a lot of things in the series and we're going to continue to talk about a lot of, you know, things to get the best out of your implementation. But we really do value your feedback and really, really do want to know how it's going and answer as many of your guys' questions as we can in, you know, future episodes. And if there's, you know, if there's any particular people that you want to hear from, we've had a few interviews over the past and there's a few really, really cool guests that we've spoken to recently coming up.

So it'd be really good to kind of get your feedback on whether you like those or not and want more of those. So, yeah, please, please reach out to us on our website at PSAimpact.com and all the socials. So, Chris, what's next on our agenda for the implementation series? Have we finished with the CRM or do we still have more? So now we are finished with the CRM and sales and that kind of thing.

So the next thing we're going to talk about is possibly the most important part of the PSA and something that's right up my street, really to do with kind of billing and profitability. Well, billing is probably more up your street and that kind of thing, but profitability, you know, work types, roles, contracts, all of those kinds of things, I think is really, really important. And then from there, we'll move on to service desk and project management and some of the other things. So, yeah, I mean, it's been a really good, fun episode today, Rayanne. Yeah, me too.

And I'm looking forward to the contracts and the invoicing and all of those things, because like you said, that is literally, you know, my home plate. So, OK. Yeah. So thank you, everyone. Thanks for listening.

And Rayanne, all that's left for me to say is your PSA is the key to your MSP success. So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Rayanne. Cheers.

See ya. 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.