Prospect Management

Alejandra Regazzi

Hi all,

I'm diving into our prospect management setup in the database and was wondering if you have any tips you could share.

Right now, we handle prospect management through various actions, and I'm curious if there's a way to set up NXT to give us a snapshot of how long prospects stay in each stage of the pipeline. NXT displays the number of days constituents stay in each stage in the constituent records, but I haven't been able to find a way to view that data via a query or report.

How are you currently managing this?

Many thanks!

Alejandra

Christine Robertson

@Alejandra Regazzi If you link the Actions to an Opportunity (Proposal in database view) and change the status on that, you can see how long they have been in a status at the Opportunity level.

Alejandra Regazzi

@Christine Robertson Thank you! I should have mentioned earlier that I would like to track as well the time it takes (number of days) to qualify a prospect, so we can flag those who might be neglected.

Christine Robertson

@Alejandra Regazzi I would think that you could still use the Opportunity for that. I would use a Purpose specific to the Qualification process so that you can keep them separate from any other Opportunities in RE.

Ashlee Eda

@Alejandra Regazzi
Following this because I am also working on developing our Prospect Management tab this year.

We currently use actions and opportunities, but we do not know how long the qualification process takes.

I am exploring how to use Status & Classification better. In our Action Types we have (Qualification, Cultivation, Solicitation, Stewardship), but it is not trackable like the prospect management tab.

Karen Diener

@Alejandra Regazzi:

Hi all,

I'm diving into our prospect management setup in the database and was wondering if you have any tips you could share.

Right now, we handle prospect management through various actions, and I'm curious if there's a way to set up NXT to give us a snapshot of how long prospects stay in each stage of the pipeline. NXT displays the number of days constituents stay in each stage in the constituent records, but I haven't been able to find a way to view that data via a query or report.

How are you currently managing this?

Many thanks!

Alejandra

This is a key data element that has been sadly missing from RE. When we needed this in a former job (10+ years ago), we used Actions.

The category was always Task/Other, and the Action Type was the Prospect Status. The current prospect status was an open action, and as soon as a prospect moved to a different status, the action was closed and a new one added. We used the Completed checkbox and date to close an action. I think the Action Status field was already used for something else, and using the Action Type to represent the Prospect Statuses worked very well.

Easy to query and report from the front end, and for ad hoc reports we would just run a formula in Excel to find the number of days in status. For ongoing reports, we had a data warehouse and Crystal Reports, so could build the formulas and calculate days in status as well as other things.

Jennifer Briganti

@Alejandra Regazzi We use classification to put prospects into different tiers, which helps when assessing the composition and also goal setting.

For the statuses, we use those as the development stages, and you can set them up to put the time amount your org has decided prospects should remain in each stage. We just really started trying to get all of these things in place, but here is how I plan on using it.

There are then some dashboards that report on days in stage or actions by prospect status etc.

Unfortunately with goals, the only goals that you can track have to have a dollar amount associated with them. So we have a combination of canned reports and dashboards/custom dashboards to report on actions.

I want to use opportunities to enter proposals for all prospects in the active cultivation cycle. I will also set days in stage for those as well.

We recently purchased Insight Designer which should help tremendously in managing the composition of the portfolio and movement of prospects.