Activity levels play a crucial role in all types of sales, particularly when you're prospecting and building your pipeline.
Naturally, there are different types of activities that you want to track - whether it's emails, meetings booked or proposals sent to give you better insight into the amount of time and effort being spent on a particular Sales Project or Prospect. Activity Goals can be applied to team members to help motivate and keep up the right level of activity for each opportunity. And activity custom fields can be added to certain activities, allowing you to track whatever is important to your organization for that particular activity type. Learn more about Using Custom Fields with Activities.
Creating New Activity Types to suit your workflow
Membrain comes pre-configured with some default activity types, which you can customize, or even add your own to match your team's workflow.
Admins can create, edit, merge or delete Activity Types from the System Setup area of Membrain. Follow these steps to create a new Activity Type:
- From System Setup, click on Activity Types.
- Click on the +New button (top right).
- Enter the name of the activity you wish to create, for example, Exploration call, or Customer Meeting.
- Select a color code for this activity. This color will help quickly identify which type of activity it is in various areas throughout Membrain like the Sales Calendar and the Dashboard.
- Choose an icon and color that represents the activity. The icons available represent appointment, task, note, email, or phone call.
- Choose who has access to this activity type by changing the Selectable By settings. You can set these to individual users, teams, and permission groups. Only Admins and users who have the "Add/Edit/Remove Users, Teams & Permission Group" permission, can select permission groups in these settings.
- Include a default duration time. When this activity is completed by a user, it will log that it took the amount of time that is set here (30 minutes in this case).
- Used in - A count of the total number of times this activity type has been used in your organization. This information can be helpful if you want to Merge two activity types into one for ease of use. For example, First Phone call and Exploration Phone call.
- Add any Custom Fields you want to use as part of this activity. For example, if you want your sales representatives to enter some Meeting Highlights for this Customer Meeting, or what the Outcome of a Prospecting call was.
- Click Save.
Automatic Activity Type Tracking
To make activity tracking even easier and more automated, you can use Membrain's functionality for Default Activity Types. So rather than relying on each individual sales professional to remember to enter the correct type of activity each time, you can set up default activities, based on where in Membrain the activity is triggered.
For example, a phone call in a Prospecting Campaign will default to "Exploration Call" or an appointment in the 1st Stage of a Sales Project will always default to "First Meeting" automatically. Taking away an extra step for the Sales Professional, and helps them easily track their activities and work up to any goals that have been set for them on activity levels.
How to apply default activity types
Use the visual grid of activities to help you plan out where and when you want your custom activity types to be assigned to as defaults.
The top row outlines the main Activity Types there are - Appointment, Task, Note, Email, and Phone. The side column outlines where these activities will be applied. You can drill right down not just to a specific Sales Process, but also to the Stage where this custom activity applies. The main section of the grid is where you set your custom activity relating to these areas.
Archiving Activity Types
In addition to creating and managing activity types, Membrain also allows you to archive activity types. Archiving an activity type helps you keep your list of activity types organized without deleting them, while also retaining any historical data associated with the archived types.
To archive an activity type, follow these steps:
- From System Setup, click on Activity Types.
- Locate the activity type you want to archive and click the Archive button.
- If you have goals attached to the activity you're archiving, you will receive a warning that archiving the activity type will remove any associated goals and future goals. Confirm if you want to proceed.
- Once an activity type is archived, it will appear grayed out in the list of activity types. You can still view and filter archived activity types to find any historical data associated with them through dashboards.
Archiving Default Activity Types
When archiving a default activity type, you will see a yellow flag at the top indicating that the archived type is still mapped to other default activity types. To resolve this, you will need to remap the affected default activity types to a different, active activity type. Please note that you cannot remap them to the archived type, as it cannot be selected again.
Restoring an Archived Activity Type
If you need to restore an archived activity type, you can do so easily. Follow these steps:
- From System Setup, click on Activity Types.
- Locate the archived activity type you want to restore and click the Restore button.
Please note that you cannot create new tasks with an archived activity type unless it is one of the default activity types. You can still edit existing activities that have the archived activity type. If you change the activity type from the archived activity to an active activity it cannot be changed back to the archived type.
