Halo Implementation Series – Sales and Opportunities – Video 12

foreign and welcome to another installment in the Halo implementation series with me today uh again I have my favorite person I have Mr Halo himself the legendary Legend of all legends um I think by now you you know who he is uh Mr Morgan aspinel and um today we're going to talk all about the sales process in Halo kind of all the way from quoting to sales kind of everything in between so hey Morgan how you doing and thanks for joining me again hey Chris always a pleasure um yeah as Chris mentioned so the last few sessions that we've done we've taken a look at projects and we've spoken about the creation and tracking of projects today we're going to take a step back and we're going to think about what happens before that project is created uh namely tracking the opportunity raising a quote that gets accepted that then subsequently uh has a project created from Emerald so let me share my screen cool I suppose we'll start off by highlighting the fact that our opportunities in Halo are just tickets of a certain type now what that means is all of the configuration options that we've seen previously regarding our service desk and our projects are applicable here to our opportunities as well by which I mean rules views column profiles workflows actions statuses these are all applicable to our opportunities there are some specific configuration options that we'll take a look at that are specific to Ops but generally speaking we're talking about tickets of a certain type and the associated configuration behind that so I think what we'll start off by doing is just taking a look at our CRM area uh breaking that down highlighting the uh the similarities between the other areas that we've seen then we'll go through the process of tracking an opportunity from start to finish and we'll have a look at the configuration configuration options along the way and make a couple of changes to improve the the opportunity workflow in this instance so without further Ado what we'll do is we'll head into our CRM area and you'll see here very similar setup to our service desk in our project area we've got our viewing pane on the left hand side we're at the minute we're viewing our opportunities by agent again we can create bespoke lists viewed by status and so on and then on the right hand side we have the main list of Ops in here now one of the key differences or one of the special configuration points for Ops is the ability to use or add a potential value to the article something that would not be applicable to an incident or a project per se for something that is applicable to our opportunities so we have our potential value uh field which is simply added to the field list for our opportunity type now again way back when we looked at field lists for ticket types well the information that goes on to an opportunity is added via the field list for an opportunity type which you get to again in configuration instead of going into tickets this time we're going to go into sales and then we're going to go into opportunity types and we'll see in our opportunity in the field list we have our potential value here so this is a build specific to our Ops we also have a conversion probability we'll see how we can manipulate this shortly and then we have our opportunity value that is potential value multiplied by conversion probability cool um so yeah as you can see very similar setup we can use our column profile just like we can with any other area of the service desk or projects so now let's take a look at tracking an opportunity where we see the next key distinction between Ops and service tickets and that is the ability to raise an opportunity against a new contact or an existing customer so with our service tickets and our projects we have to raise those against existing customers existing end users in the system however with opportunities of course this could be a brand new Prospect no users or customer record in Halo at this moment at which point we can create this against a new content where we can fill our company name yeah and the good thing actually about this just while you're doing that is you know in in a lot of the other PSA tools you have to actually create an account first um and then you you know you have a drop down on the account that says what type of account it is is it a lead or a customer or Prospect or whatever the case might be but the account has to be essentially created first before you can create the opportunity so this is kind of nice because this just keeps it completely separate so if they never really turn into any kind of business you're not you're not kind of messing up with your customer list and um you know and separating your customer list essentially between leads and Prospects and customers and stuff like that so I kind of quite like the way that that it does it here I think yeah I I agree to a certain extent I think we are going to be making changes at some point in the future to allow for that type of behavior to occur because I guess there's two sides to it on the one hand uh you're absolutely correct you want your customer list to contain your customers uh not your customers and your prospects but on the other side it does make things a little bit more difficult to actually see at a glance the list of prospects that you have in the system uh you know whereas a more conventional CRM tool would or or some of the other PSA tools would have that facility so it is something that we're going to be including in the future at least include the option should people want to to use and I think yeah I think that's one of the things that that is is quite hard at the moment is being able to want you know once this has entered in there there's no real place to kind of go and say show me a list of who all my leads are um yeah and so even if you did it from the lead screen or from you know from somewhere within the opportunity screen rather than doing it from the customers or the the client's screen do it do it here and then you know just have a button and say you know show me all my active leads or something like that but yeah I think yeah I think that well yeah yeah for sure and you know thinking out loud we could achieve that functionality with Halo configuration today uh I've seen in the past instead of just a generic opportunity type several different opportunity types new customer existing customer sale you know account management upsell or something like that so um that we could we could go down that route and create different opportunity types which again we could do from configuration sales opportunity types we could just clone the existing opportunity and call it new customer sale or alternatively we could create a custom field for a type of opportunity which we do have here based into the trials but we might want to have a separate field that it's exactly that you know new customer or existing customer and then add that to our column profile and uh return that information accordingly so there are ways that it can be done it's just yeah it's not native right now um but that's not to say that you can't get that list uh very easy managed service five licenses Plus onboarding projects cool um so again the form that we're filling out here is just composed to the field list we have in our opportunity type and we've covered that on a couple of occasions in previous session so I won't go into too much detail of that okay cool so again very similar screen to what we've seen previously we can break this screen down into four sections as well where we've got our activity we've got our opportunity information we've got our end user or in this case contact information and then we've got our actions at the top here one key difference is as we're raising this opportunity against a new contact I.E a user that does not exist in Halo at this moment in time we have the ability from the op to create the customer uh without you know going into a separate module and having to remember all of the information we can actually do that straight from here which we'll see uh shortly oh so let me follow the workflow through um where initially we're going to be qualifying our opportunity which then leads us on to our next action where we're going to be creating uh our quote proposal so let me click into this so yeah at this point we're building building our quote out um now various configuration options here of course we're going to be adding our lines to our quote we're going to see how we can add groups and templates and so on so let's just pull this one new managed service so yeah the first option against our quote when we're adding our lines into our quote table is to add from our existing inventory and this is the list of items slash products that we already have in Angelo so let me just do a uh let's do an implementation and laptop and then we'll do five places so we're adding to this table by selecting the respective quantities of what we actually want to add in and you'll see that I can add more than one line at any given time just by populating the more than one quantity box save that and that's then going to direct me to the uh sort of the product edit screen I suppose or the quote line edit screen now everything that we see here it has been inherited from the configuration of the associated product however I do have the opportunity on a quote by quote basis to amend these details uh one point to bear in mind is if we make changes on this screen we're not editing the default information against the product so our default price here is 150 I can make that 180 however the next time I add this new manage service onto another quote it'll be 150 again so this is just editing the information at this particular quote correct yeah so it's for the quote it's for that line that line on the quotes only yeah it does yes it doesn't go back in and change as you say it doesn't change the product I think it's the same in in most tools and most of them are the same it allows you to override stuff here specifically rather than doing it at a global level yeah for sure for sure okay um not going to worry too much about stock location we will cover stock another time um the important points to consider for this session is obviously the quantity the cost this is your internal cost for this line uh you know if this was Hardware this would be what you're paying your supplier um of course there's the price which is what you're charging the customer um and you've got the markup here as well so we might actually want to put our cost in here and specify a markup at which point we get our price returned to us a more recent addition as well is this opportunity or this ability to Mark a quote line as being a bundled line now what that means is when we Mark a line as being a bundled line the price the customer facing price gets set to zero and the line is not returned on the quote or invoice PDF from Halo and the intention for this is uh you might have a security package that might have you know like bitdefender um it and rmm costs something like that um and you don't necessarily want to show the customer the breakdown of what that Security package uh is charged at because at that point the customer might say okay well you know if your bitdefender line I'm happy with that price but actually I don't want this uh I don't want to pay for this ninja agent so can you take that line up so instead of having a complete breakdown of every single line within a package what you can do is Mark lines as being bundled and the customer won't see them but they will still be present on on the quote in Halo and on the invoice in Halo and on the invoice in an accounts package if we're syncing over to an accounts package um the cop you'll see the cost as well is still present here so you can report on profit analysis without having the prices for the customer all skewed and the intention of using this is you have one line on your quote invoice the the customer can see that is the price for the bundle and then you have a series of lines below that are marked as bundled that the customer doesn't see but you as the MSP will see more yeah make sense and lovely stuff okay another important Point regarding our quotes and proposals is we have the ability to mark certain lines on our quote as being optional now we're not going to make our implementation or our onboarding project uh optional that is going to be mandatory but we'll come back in and we'll add a bit of hardware and we'll make that audition so I can go ahead and click save here and then that's going to iterate through all of the lines that we're adding to our quotes I had a laptop let's make this laptop optional and then we've got our business basic licenses we've got quantity of five in my stuff cool um so that's adding products from an existing inventory of course there are situations where you just want to add a line onto the quote that doesn't equate to anything in your inventory it might just be a one-time line that you know you're never going to be adding in again at which point you can click add generic products and that takes you straight to that edit screen that edit window that we just saw a moment ago everything is blanked out so we can actually put our own description in here and of course again with that that doesn't then right back into the product catalog right that's just for this specific quote perhaps that is correct yeah yeah so this is just adding a line onto the quote this does not create a product um you'll never see this again effectively and that is the intention for these you don't want to be too heavy-handed with your generic products yeah because again further down the line when you're starting to uh report on profitability for different product groups and different categories of products these generic lines are going to make your life very difficult right the intention is to not use this as your inventory if you're adding something two quotes multiple times then you want to create a product for it that would be my advice yeah but in those Fringe cases where you just you know once a year you're adding this line on for a very specific quote you can use the generic products or the yeah generic yeah and the use case of this and I've seen this a few times you know is maybe the customer has a specific requirement for a particular piece of Hardware that you don't normally sell right they might want to you know an HP keyboard but you normally sell Dells or something and they they specifically want or this Microsoft keyboard or Logitech you know this specific keyboard that you never normally sell then you can just come in here and and do it as a one-off you never have to sell it again because it's only that customer so yeah there's the or yeah or it could even be a you know a specific piece of software that you know you bought it as a one-off for that customer and you'll probably never buy it again so you don't need to editing away to your your product list that's it that's it and then you can actually disable that generic product option altogether if if you don't want your sales team to be you know uh using that at all and you want to make sure that everything is in your inventory then uh in configuration bill in general we do have the option to remove the use of the generic product altogether should you again in Halo there's a checkbox for everything so yeah I wouldn't recommend turning that off for that exact reason because you know you you may want to just get to a point where um like I said it's a one-off or something like that and you because if you turn if you tick that box then you're going to have to go and create it as a as a product or an item or whatever and you don't necessarily want to have it in your item list as you say moving forward so um so I'd recommend not turning off that that option yes yeah that is that is a very valid point um I also believe there's an option in configuration items and stock control where we can in fact allow items to be created directly from the quote screen so there's a few options that you're dispose of here you can use generic items or generic quote lines bearing in mind that that will never be added to your inventory you can disable that if you want but as Chris mentions that's not necessarily something that you want to prevent from occurring the happy medium here might be to actually allow items to be created directly from the quote screen so instead of if you can't find something in your inventory instead of adding a generic line and you know having to remember to go in and create the product again after you create that quote we could enable this option in items and stock control and actually create the items straight from the quote screen again that comes with its own risks of you know do you want to start creating items for every single line on a quote it's up to you exactly how you use this but these are the options that you're disposing cool yeah I'll leave that one lovely so what we'll do this ad hoc line is we'll mark this as bundled just as an example of what the customer will see brilliant save this okay a couple of points I've forgotten there actually um let me hop back in so I've saved that and after you saved the quote what you'll find is that uh the quote is then opened on a separate tab for you to review and if we only further let me just highlight some of these other options so uh that checkbox that we were just referring to allow the creation of products on quotes by enabling that I now have this create new item button here where we'll see we're actually directed to the new product screen where I can create the product and then add that straight to the quote we'll come back and look at the options in these tabs in more detail in some upcoming sessions around billing and stock and all that good stuff um but yeah after the generic product option we have this ad group of items so I'm a big fan of this feature um um a lot of people are what I'm saying so you'll find that with quite a few of your quotes and proposals you're actually looking to just add the same lines they might diverge slightly but you know a new managed service might include an onboarding project some licenses some Hardware just as a an example where and a service agreement um line as well and that's going to be added every time and this again you can start thinking about your packages and your your bundles you might have a security package that you sell quite frequently and you don't want to have to add the individual lines in each and every time and you don't have to what you can do is you can click your ad group of items so what I'll do is I'll just pick my group here and I'll specify that I want to add everything in straight at once save that that's added three lines onto our quote um and they fall under this group header of standard laptop group yeah that's the feature I always like because I think you know a lot of a lot of msps are just like you know you're always selling that kind of stuff right it's a mouse and a keyboard and a um and I really like it setting up groups where you can just say you know I've got all these these things that I'm selling and not having to go in and and manually add them all the time and and I don't know um well a lot of other PSA tools obviously don't have this option so this is really good um and and whenever I'm on calls Consulting calls with customers on on Halo I always point out this feature because I think it's it's something that most people tend to use quite a lot of so for sure for sure um yeah so let's have a look at how we create one of these program templates so we do that within our configuration panel uh under our quotations module click in here and right at the top we've got this quote group templates button so uh we've got our existing program template there standard laptop group let's add in uh let's just say new manage service right um now basically what I'm doing here is I'm building the quote lines out but I'm doing it once and then once this is saved I can call on this group template in the future and add that in with what we saw to be free clicks instead of you know 10 15. especially as these become more comprehensive and you've got maybe eight or nine lines in here uh you'll find that adding this in it's going to make things quicker and more straightforward for the sales team which I think everyone agrees we all want yeah cool so new managed service that's going to have our new managed service project it's gonna have our managed service agreement and it's gonna have some premium licenses and again you can imagine um you can imagine building these out to include the different types of packages that you do offer maybe you've got you know the the the old example of like a bronze silver and gold package that include different types of licenses and some might include um tools that others don't if if that is you go down then these different templates can accommodate that yeah cool so we made our quote group sampling we've added our three lines in once and now what we'll be able to do go back to our quote adult group of items and there it is new managed service and then I can add everything in straight away Bang they've all been added in now we'll see that are those quote group templates of this header above them so these are our group headers and we can actually add ad hoc group headers to our quotes and we can do that by clicking the add new group option I might just want to say Hardware and then I can go into my particular lines where we have this group drop down and I can move my quote lines under their respective group headers you might have noticed as well that there is the ability to hide products within certain groups so again that's giving us that granularity of okay well I want a breakdown of all the different bits of Hardware that I might ring the customer but I don't want a breakdown of the services this is the package that they're getting they just need to know the price for all of that you know it's the MSP your trusted to provide the best services and so giving the customer too much control over that might actually be their their own downfall so yeah you have the option to show or hide products within individual groups yeah yeah that makes sense that's yeah and that's really cool I love that feature I love the the ability to be able to um to to do this and I you know I know there's a there's a bunch of um kind of third-party tools that do this but it's nice to have this built into into the PSA tool that's kind of you know doing this level because you don't you don't see this again in lots of other PSA tools um from a from a quoting perspective so that's really cool sure sure cool um and then finally we have the option here well finally we have the two options here to either increase the price of all of our products um you know by a particular percentage or we can add all of the existing lines from a previous quote onto this quote so similar to our quote group templates you might have a quote that a proposal that you previously quoted another customer and you actually want to take that and put that onto this point for this other customer um at which point I can just find that quote and add all of my lines in cool so um that's the creation of our proposals uh I think we might wrap this video up here um there's plenty more to talk about that we we will be discussing shortly but before I go on to the next section which also is about another 20 minutes I I think to keep the videos digestible we'll leave this here um and then we'll catch up on what happens to this proposal after it's been created have a look at the PDF have a look at some of the options there um what do you think Chris excellent Jen I agree I think we want to try and keep these short because I know and we've we've made some long ones and yeah um you know we want to be respectful of people's time and just make sure that we keep these short and sweet so yeah this is a great place to stop um and and on the next video we'll we'll carry on with this process we'll kind of as you say we'll talk about you know how to actually see what this quote looks like how to send it over to the customer um you know all of those kinds of things so um yeah so as always Morgan really appreciate it um appreciate you appreciate your time and you know really appreciate that Halo is allowing us to do these um they are really really really helping the community so um really appreciate it guys then thank you to everyone for watching and uh we'll see you on the next video always a pleasure thanks guys see you in the next one cheers