Greetings and welcome to the program today! My name is Warren Stokes. I’m your host and presenter, and we have a very popular topic today: how to get started with Prophet CRM! Now, this is going to be useful for anyone who is just getting started with Prophet for the first time, but it also serves as a great refresher on some of the basics, and for those who are just curious as to how it all works. So welcome to the program!

This is being recorded – a video will be made after the webinar today. The topics cover all the things about getting started with Prophet CRM – stuff like how to prep your computer, how to get your contacts organized and prepared, installation, setting up views and lists, etc etc – you know, just getting started with Prophet. And very importantly, just how to start managing your contacts effectively. I’ll show you through the slide deck and through a live demonstration.

Basically, on the computer prep, all you really need to think about is having a fairly modern computer with, hopefully, Windows 10 on it (though we also support older versions of Windows). And you need Outlook, either standalone or as part of Office 365. 32 bit is fine but 64 bit is better – has to be a PC unless you’re going to jump through some hoops to run it on a Mac. If you have a Mac, contact me separately, we’ll get you sorted out on that.

One of the key things to start with is to prepare your contacts. One of the key concepts that Prophet uses is the ability to mark contacts as private – it’s just an outlook function. There’s a little lock symbol on an outlook contact – you can also put them in a list view by adding the column “private” into your outlook list using the field chooser. You can just go down the list and check the box for all of the contacts that you do not want to be in Prophet; if you miss some you can go back and mark the contact private – that’s just a way to segment the contacts so you don’t end up with your dog groomer and aunt and uncle in the CRM.

On a new installation, the first thing you have to do is create a password. I’ll also make this slide deck available – simply email me later, and if you want a copy of it you can have it or just watch the video. But it’s on Prophetondemand.com , and you go there and you’re going to see a sign-in screen where you put your email address in. A little shortcut, click “forgot your password” because you don’t have a password yet – this will give you a link to create a password.

It’s pretty painless to download the software. Go to our website, avidian.com/install/client and download the software – it does require admin rights unless you happen to want me to show you how to install it as a non-admin – don’t worry about that too much right now.

Close Outlook and then run the file. It takes you through all the normal little windows install stuff – terms and conditions – it goes through some setup stuff and then at the end you’ll see a button that says finish. It’s going to launch you into this page here which is your initial setup, and all you’ve gotta do is put that new password in, along with your email, and away you go.

You are going to be launched into Prophet, which will automatically open Outlook. It’s going to put you into the contact manager. You may or may not see any contacts in here – depends whether or not you are already part of an implementation of Prophet – but basically it’s going to launch you into a view called “all contacts” – and I’ll show you all this in a moment, so essentially what this has done is added a set of folders over here in your folder list. They might be fairly deep down but you can move them up and add them to favourites. I’ll show you how to do that but essentially you’re done installing and now you’re ready to either sync your contacts or just look at all the contacts that might already have been assigned to you

Setting up views is a key part of it. Think of a view as just a list, we call them views. To create a new view you go to “contacts”, hover over tools, and just say “create new”. This is a very important concept – setting up views. You can set them up by geography, assignment, etc – so you can give the view a name – in this case, this one’s called “Hollywood Contacts”. Optionally you can give it a description if not obvious. Then you set this – “select contacts by” which is assigned to me or you, assigned to specific users or all contacts, but that happens to be an administrative function, only you’d have to be a Prophet admin to bypass all of that.

It’s simple to add, you know, views by city, state, you just go to “additional filtering” once you’re in that view. “Options”, set the match here to this filter or another filter – all criteria must be met, so in this case state that they must be in the state of California, city of Hollywood, then you select your comparator, I use the term “equals” – up to you, equals is an exact match, contains works as well – and if you don’t know what that means just ping me afterwards in terms of what a comparator is when you’re filtering.

The next thing you could do is choose the columns that you want in the view. These are just the columns in the list, and on the left are all the columns available, including all the custom fields. You just use the little right arrow to move them to the right, move them up, move them to the left – that sort of thing. Then you choose your sort order – maybe by most recently modified date, or oldest modified day, or state/province – and then your view will look something like this.

Now you’ve got your list and it’s all of the contacts that meet that criteria. Voila! You’ve got yourself your first view, and you can replicate that throughout Prophet. You use the drop-down list to navigate between views – I’m going to expect that most of you will have multiple views here. For example, I have one called “prosp” – my current prospects – you get the idea.

So you set up these views. This works the same way for the company manager and the opportunity manager – we’re mostly focusing on contacts and companies today, but we’ll talk a bit more about getting data into Prophet. So all of your Outlook contacts come over natively right through Outlook unless you mark them private. The company records are created automatically if there’s a company name in the contact – that’s really handy. We’ll also associate the contacts with the same company name to that company’s record.

Here you can drag and drop inbound emails to create a contact. You can import data from excel – another topic I won’t cover today, but it’s not that hard – you can use that import utility to mass update records. We also offer website form integration to capture contacts and leads and such. You may or may not be interested in an ERP integration or an accounting system integration – those are add-on services we have.
And I’m going to go through the searching in some detail because really, it’s all about finding things. Searching is how you find things. There are three types of searches. There is the search of view, the advanced search, and a really handy one that allows you to search for records that have certain notes in them, which can be handy if there’s something specific like project names, and you wanted to find contacts with that in there. Then there’s a very powerful global search function which does all sorts of things, including finding contacts or companies, but it can also search and find things like images, documents, emails – very powerful! Though it also tends to generate a lot of results.

Then we’re going to show you how to manage your contacts. Basically, “check for missing data” – there’s a handy function to filter by null values to find that; cleaning up duplicates is handy and very important, which is why we have nice functions in Prophet for that. This is where it all culminates, why are you doing this? Well, it’s not just to have lists – it’s to use these lists to perform important tasks like making outbound calls – maybe you want to create a list of contacts to make calls out to, or to send email blasts, or maybe to prioritize your activity by some criteria – there’s a lot of different ways you can use them. It’s also very useful to track how many new contacts you’ve created, or your team has created, or company accounts created, etc.

You can export from Prophet as well. If you want to export to excel – this is a permission-based function – your administrator will have to give you rights to export to excel. But let’s go in and show you how this works. So right now I’m just in my email, where Prophet lives. Remember we talked about the three folders that were created – I’m going to show you what it looks like to prep your contacts.

You would go into a view of people. I’m going to perform a filter search here – say, all my contacts that I have in Hollywood – and we change it to a list view. I’m going to remove the column, first of all, to show you how to add it, because it’s not a default column. So here’s what you do to add a column, any column, to your contact list. Notice where I’m at down here in my people folder.

Let me sidetrack for a minute. There’s a secret little three buttons here, and you go to “navigation options”. Most computers and outlook instances come with “compact navigation” with little icons – I prefer the words. Uncheck compact navigation, so it’s all spelt out.

Let’s go back and put the column called “private” in here. YOu just have to hover over a column header. Right-click and find the field chooser. Once you’re in that field go to “all contact fields” – find “private” – and you’re gonna see that I can just drag and drop it to my column up in there, anywhere – you can put it between a couple of other column headers, and there you go. Now we’ve added Private in there, so I can go through and mark contacts that are not intended to be in the CRM private.

So that’s the idea of getting your contacts organized and set up. Let’s now assume you’ve just installed Prophet. It’s going to launch you into a view called “contact manager”. Before we go too much further, find the “Avidian Prophet” folder and put it in your favourites.
So again, it’s going to launch you into contact manager, a view called “all contacts”. So what we’re going to do is create some different views. I’ll go and load my view. One of the unique things about Prophet is that it lets you load lists of virtually any size. Many systems like google search retrieve, say, 25 records at a time; many CRM’s work that way. We elected to not limit the size of the list. Just bear in mind that if you have a really large list of contacts it could take a little time to load.

But in any event, I’m in a view called “all contacts”. I’m going to show you the view that I was showing you earlier. I went in and created certain filters – you can see this little icon that says “edit this view” – well, when you click “create new view” it works the same way. I’m going to show you the “cooking show approach” – I’ve already created the view, so you have the choices. User assignments is a good one; I used comparators to get Hollywood. I could add other filters just by putting my cursor here. Other criteria – which columns do you want? Let’s put in “modified date” by moving it with the right arrow to the list, and you can move it around.

So what I’ve just done is added a column, “modified date”, and put it over to the left. You can just drag and drop to move the columns around. You can hit F12 or right-click and say “save changes to view”. You can add columns through the “edit view” button, or shortcut by right-clicking and saying “choose columns” to bring you to the same view as before. Pretty awesome!

Now, one of the reasons you want to set up views like this and choose the right columns is so you can create filtered lists of all of these types of contacts. For example, in my prospecting views, maybe I want to create a filtered list by state. You can see that I can just start typing it in – I typed in part of the word “California” and found all of those – I can create a list based on criteria. Now there are other filters like type of contact and so on that you can add and there’s no limit to how many filters you can add. Let’s say I add a city – maybe San Francisco – and so I’m just adding more and more filters – narrowing down, you can see I only have nine of those types of contacts in San Francisco. So that’s one of the things you can do with Prophet, create these very valuable lists.

Now there’s a number of things you might do here. Let me clear the filters. Let’s say I wanted to search somebody’s last name – I type “Adams” in here and it’s going to bring up all the contacts who have “Adams” in the name. Pretty cool, simple to do. Clear the filter and away you go.

Now let’s go back to the Hollywood contacts because I want to show you how to do something really fun. Let’s say I want to shoot out an email to everyone that’s on this list. I can simply right-click or select them with my keyboard – I could select some or select all. One of the handy things in Prophet’s basic contact management is outreach – I can right-click and send a group email, which I can still edit – choose between HTML & text, I usually do HTML, which is on by default – this gives you the ability to personalize the email by adding a salutation like hello, “firstname”. “Importance” is an Outlook function – puts a little red exclamation point on the person’s inbound email box. Then you simply do, “create email”. All this does is brings up the first email, where I can compose the email that’s going to be sent out to all these contacts.
You may know that Microsoft 365 has a function called templates. I could go over there and pick content from a template. You can see all these content blocks I’ve got here – you can add as much as you want. Of course, you can simply type stuff in as well, use the “signature” function, give it a subject line, double-check, and send them out – be doubly sure there are no typos (you can inspect it before you click send again).

Now all of these emails are being generated out to that list of contacts. It takes about half a second per email, which is why, practically speaking, this tool is not useful for sending out thousands at a time. But it’s very handy for sending out ten, fifty, one hundred – no exact limit.

Now, one thing that just occurred was, whenever I do that, a note was put into the file that shows time and date, who sent the email, what the type of activity was (in this case the automated note says it’s a group email, tagging with the subject line). It’s also something you could run reports on if you wish, but it just gives you an idea of what’s been going on with that contact.

Continuing on that idea, one of the basic ideas throughout Prophet is this whole notes area. It’s pretty simple – fundamentally, it helps you manage your contacts. I’m in this area down here on the bottom where it says general notes. In another webinar, we’ll get deeper into customizingProphet. Suffice it to say that your administrator for Prophet (or you, if you are one) can create these customized activity entries – the whole point of this is so you don’t have to type things in all the time. It puts time, date, modified date, type of activity, etc – so you can just put a quick note in, “left the voicemail”, “did a quote follow up”, etc., just a handy way to log your activities in here.

We’re going to cover opportunities in a different session, but one of the things you can do is just look at emails, appointments, or tasks – I’ll just do emails – this will just simply search all emails sent to or received from that person. If you’re in a shared environment, this can be set up so that people can see common emails that are in the system/database – if you would like to set that up just reach out to us.

You can also see things like appointments or tasks set for that person. Notice I don’t have any setup – another thing you can do is set an appointment with somebody – just going to say “meeting with Mel Gibson” – this is just an OUtlook appointment, I use colour coding a lot – and I’m going to save that meeting. Now down here in my activities, you’ll actually see it, but the cool thing is, it’s actually on my Outlook calendar. By putting it into Prophet it actually puts it here on my Outlook Calendar! Pretty awesome!

That’s just one of the Outlook integrations that we have. So again we’re just in Contact Manager – let’s search the view and add a little spice to this. We did a fairly recent update that added the ability to do an advanced search, which also gives you the option of searching through the notes in the contacts. I’m going to just use the term “Madagascar” – kind of a unique word – and this is going to find all contacts with “Madagascar” in the notes somewhere. It can take a bit of time to do a search on that but might be useful for looking for project names or things of that nature. And there we go – a LinkedIn invite talk about “Project Madagascar” – there it is, I left a voicemail about Project Madagascar.

There’s an interesting function called Global Search, really just going up a level. You click on search – notice you can select different types of data, which is why it’s called “Global” – it’ll even search local documents, spreadsheets, and things like that. Let’s pick “contacts” and put Mel Gibson in – let’s go over here and look at images – notice it found the picture of Mel Gibson embedded in his contact. Pretty cool!

I will often just search Prophet data if I’m looking for someone and I don’t want to go outside of the world of Prophet – this will just give me Prophet data that’s related to Mel Gibson. You can see here, there’s opportunities, contacts, companies, and other types of records, just by searching in the Prophet database.

So these are some of the search functions that you’ll find handy throughout Prophet. I wanted to get a little bit more on creating contacts. Look at that, I just got an email from Anthony Hopkins. So one of the things you can do is take an inbound email and use the Outlook function to do a drag and drop. I’m going to drag it and drop it onto my People folder. Prophet introduces a duplicate checker, that’s a big thing. But it gives you the chance – maybe there really are two Anthony Hopkins in your world, so you could create a new one anyways. But in this case, I would simply open that contact instead of creating it – hope that makes sense.

But let’s say I wanted to create a new contact, maybe there wasn’t a match. I click “create new contact”. It’s warning me again that contact like this exists, and it creates the contact card for you – it’ll put the first name, last name, email address in automatically. You’ll often have an amail signature – notice that I’m not even copy-pasting, I’m just dragging it. I’ve created a new contact – it gives you another, the third, warning, I’m going to say “Create a Brand New Contact” – the reason I’m doing this is that I wanted to show you how you can use the deduping function in Prophet.

We’re going to see that sometimes you’ve accidentally got a dupe in there somehow. Well, there’s a nice feature in Prophet that lets you fix that. One of the concepts here is that you can choose which one of these is the overwriting contact. There’s business logic built into this function, but the way it works is whichever one you save and close last will show up as the override. Now I’m going to select these duplicates and right-click, “merge contacts” – it’ll fill empty fields from one contact to another, append notes (not overwrite them) – there you go, you’ve successfully “un-duped” that contact! Pretty Awesome!

With companies it will work similarly – for example, these two companies are the same but one has space. Let me check to make sure we have the right one – yep – I put in a note to make absolutely sure we’re updating the record. Now we’re going to do a company merge, same thing. Remember it won’t overwrite notes, and in case you’re worried bout it, we’ve successfully de-duped companies.

Let me check my chat – no chat messages, awesome. I’m just going to post my contact information for a couple of minutes, any questions?

Q: When saving a view, how do you save it to include filtering options that have been selected?

That’s a very good question. Let’s just say I was in the contacts view – let’s go in and say we only want California. Over here on the right you can hover over tools and it’ll say “save view as”, give it a name, “Prospecting CA” and now that view will be saved. Thank you for that question, that was a great one.

All right, so I’m going to post my contact information. Thank you everybody for joining the session today, really appreciate it. Just let us know how we can help, and hopefully, talk to you soon. Take care, and have a great rest of the day.