Why HaloPSA's sales order is the glue holding your CRM together

Connor: HaloPSA CRM. I'm going to do a bit of a, I don't really know how to describe this, a bit of a concatenation I suppose of all the moving pieces in CRM and what you can actually do with it. And I'm just going to kind of showcase how we typically build kind of the bare-bones first structure of it and some things you want to be aware of. So let's jump straight into it and see exactly what the CRM can do for you in HaloPSA.

Good day, my name's Connor Fagan and we're Renada Solutions and today we're going to be having a bit of a deep dive into the CRM module in HaloPSA, showing you a few tips and tricks and showcasing you some of the things you can do with it and some of the things that it doesn't do so well, so you know exactly what to be doing when starting to build the CRM module.

So one of the first starting foundations with CRM is, for me especially, is do we need to use the CRM? And that really comes down to you and your sales cycle and your sales process. And what I mean by this is we could have a normal incident ticket and we could have a button to raise a quote and away we go. We don't need to jump into the CRM and have a whole sales cycle around it. In some cases, however, if you are doing quite a lot of sales and you want, you know, homogenisation between them, the same communications, the same process, the same due diligence to be carried out, then maybe the CRM is what you want to leverage. Also if you're doing more longer sales cycles, so maybe a new managed service offering or something new to a stack, you might want to leverage that so you can start building out your process.

And as a good chat with Mendy, and I'll link his video recently about capturing data. One of the most important things in Halo is understanding what data you want to leverage. Mendy's argument, not to take this video off topic, is you want to capture everything. My approach is a little bit different, is you know really sitting down and really thinking about what data we want at the end, at the beginning, to make sure we capture it, rather than just throwing tons of data at a system without leveraging it. Neither's right or wrong, it comes down to how you build. But one of the things that I always start with the CRM is what data do we need to get out of it right? So what are we capturing?

So obviously customer information is vital, right? We also need information about how big they are and how they found us. So you know, if we have 50 prospects and they all found us via YouTube, well we should probably stop funnelling all money into Facebook ads because we get no business from it, right? Data sets like this can really help you look back in time and grow your business. But what I always normally leverage it with is we start building dashboards straight out of the gate so we can leverage and see that data.

So some of that data is here, and this is very, very basic, but the idea being is I want to see what, you know, where we're at in our sales cycle. I want to see our projected monthly sales and I want to see what we have by type. So if we have managed service opportunities or hardware, because typically hardware could be quite quick wins, but managed service could be slightly longer engagements. I also want to know the split between monthly recurring revenue and one-off, because that's really valuable. So we have to think about when we're building this out how we're going to get that data out in a manageable way.

So make sure when you start any CRM journey you kind of pen and paper all this out. And what we typically recommend is you literally do it on pen and paper and you draw out a lovely fancy workflow of all the steps you want to take in your sales process and then start building it into Halo. What do I mean by building it into Halo? Well, if I show you my build over here, we go to config, tickets and workflows. This is kind of a basic opportunity workflow that I like to start with our partners to get the ball rolling in a decent sales cycle.

So from left to right, I suppose, the first thing we do is we triage the opportunity. Now I'm not asking a bunch of things here, it's more about who's going to do it, which is why I've called it claim. And when they're going to start it, right? If you've got 50 leads you want to claim them and then start working on them in this opportunity workflow because this isn't a quick opportunity, this is an opportunity for many things. We have the ability to qualify it, right? So these are qualifying questions we need to ask when we're assessing the value or the opportunity value of that opportunity in your system.

Now depending on what it is you sell and what it is you want to retain, this is the point when you want to start capturing that data. So if I go into this build and look at my CRM opportunity for this managed service offering and click qualify, I have all these custom fields and data points that I want to be capturing. Now currently these aren't required in my build, they are, but again, this is just an example to show our partners is how many employees do they have? How many devices? How many sites? How did they hear about us, right? If it's a referral, then you can ask leading questions like who from, right? So you can build up who's a really good partner that's referring you a lot. When do they need support from, et cetera, et cetera.

Now we always ask our partners, how do you qualify your opportunities, right? How do you determine what is worth going for and what isn't? And then we build that out into here. This is just quite a generic thing to do. Again, you've got Prime Networks in here, which are a horrible MSP, so we know we can easily steal it from them. Joking, Ben, love you. But the point is that when we are qualifying opportunities, it's asking those questions so we can get the data out later down the line.

And depending on the opportunity type, so if I do here a hardware sale, you might want to qualify and ask if questions you might not care about. How many stuff they have in the referral of it, you want to know what hardware they have, so desktops and how many they want. Again, being able to report on this is really valuable if you're running five simultaneous hardware refreshes for desktops and you have 50 of them. You might look at maybe bulk procurement. You could say to a few partners, hey, actually we've got a few other companies of ours that have also wanting desktops. Let us go away and try and get a quote for 50 of them to bring the cost down a little bit so we can lower your price, right? Just a lot of things you can do to add value to your partners.

And again, it's about building up the data set in a way that you want. And again, I'm not saying this is the right way to have all these custom fields. It's about leveraging the data that you need in a way that you can leverage it. I would always recommend asking a bunch of questions that you don't need to capture, but for the most part, this is about getting the data out, right?

So once you've done that and you're qualifying it, if we go back to that workflow, you then want to understand how you get from that, you know, asking the questions to running the business, right? And this is where you're building out your process. So you know, we're raising a quote and then we're sending the quote, then we're at a negotiation stage, which basically is if it's won or lost, where does it go? Um, you then want to make a sales order. You want to check if they're a customer and then you want to close out the opportunity, right?

Now there's a bunch more things you can do in here, but I don't always do it from here. So something to understand when you're doing the CRM stuff is when you send out a quote from Halo, like here, right? You can have it so you click send and then you can send the quote to the client. What's nice though is you can have it so it takes them to a portal and no logins required for this, unless you want it to, where they can go and accept the quote.

Now don't get hung up on how this looks. There is a new feature coming into Halo very soon. It's currently in beta, which allows you to make these as HTML pages and it allows you, if you're a little bit clever and creative with CSS, to make really fancy looking documents. However, let's not focus on that right now. What you can do though is allow the customer to click the accept button, fill out the name, the email address, if you like. This option also, if you can have it, I don't really love it, um, add any comments. They can sign it and away they go. Again, making that quote to acceptance process really simple.

The good thing about leveraging this in Halo is the fact that when they accept the quote, you can have it automatically make the sales order. So nothing, no interference needed. It just automatically closes the quote as accepted and makes a sales order. If you're doing that journey, make sure you go to configuration in the bottom left, go to quotations, scroll down, and what you want to make sure is enabled is the setting that is here. We go: automatically create a sales order when a quotation is approved.

And then from the sales order, that is really the glue that ties everything together in my opinion in Halo. From here, what you can do is you can create purchase orders, you can create projects, you can add or create new recurring invoices and you can really build out your entire flow in Halo of how all these moving pieces fits together. You can even make agreements from here. That's exactly how we work at Renada. So we have an opportunity, we have a little bit more automation in place about creating customers in various environments, there's a video on that coming soon, and then we make the project, we make the agreement, we make the invoices, we make the recurring invoices, and what's nice is every part of that puzzle then links together.

And again, what you can do is you can click create an invoice from here and you can select what you want to invoice, whether it's a part of it, whether it's all of it, whether it's a single line, et cetera, et cetera. And you can have the sales order as the glue that ties everything together. And again, remembering on your CRM opportunity, that this really is for, in my opinion, more process-heavy stuff.

However, let's say you have someone internally that always does sales. You can make this as low friction as possible. So you can have it so they can raise a quote from the ticket. You can have it that they send the quote from the ticket and you can see and have that visibility of where they're at, how much time it's taking and how much time they're spending doing all of these moving pieces.

One of the things that we do at Renada is we make our proposals from here. Now I don't recommend doing that for the most part because they're really laborious and time-consuming. However, for us our proposals always look the same. They're always the same pricing. So for us we spent the time investing in doing it because what I realised was that time to get a proposal out took us ages. So we improve that process in HaloPSA.

So some of the things you want to be aware of when building out these workflows are there's a lot of moving pieces here that I'm obviously not going to be able to cover today is things like, um, if I just add a step quickly, there are built-in actions here for approval process, step, step outcome. If you're doing approval processes, there is quote sent, so if you send a quote, it can automatically move it in the workflow. There is even things like the sales orders being created, which you can leverage, um, and just a bunch of things that you can use in here to help you speed up your workflow so you're not having to press loads of manual buttons every single time.

There is a video that I'll be doing soon on the full quotation process. However, today I thought I would kind of leverage this a little bit and tell you what Halo CRM can do. I think the biggest takeaway for me is that this isn't a CRM in the fact of doing, you know, loads of email campaigns out of here or any drip feed campaigns. You know, doing proposals out of Halo is a complete nightmare because making the proposal documents look nice is currently not functional. That will hopefully change in the coming months, but for now it is really about baking in process into your sales and leveraging the data down the line in dashboards or reports that you can leverage to grow your business.

So that's just a bit of a high-level overview today for what the CRM is in Halo. And the takeaways are is you can make different ticket types that have different opportunity workflows or ticket workflows that mean you have to do certain things at certain stages within that workflow. And then you can leverage quotes and sales orders to tie it all together.

So my name's been Connor Fagan. I hope this gives you a quick insight of what the CRM module is in HaloPSA and how you can leverage it. Hope you have a fantastic day and I will see you all soon. Take care for now.