What is the best way to manage a follow-up?

There are a couple of important factors in making a good decision depending on what you need to accomplish.

If you need

1. 'heads up' display of notes? Comments are good at this. Activity notes are buried and take about 10 clicks to see 5 notes inside activities.
2. disciplined follow-up? Activities are good at this, but comments are not. With activities, you can schedule your first call with a couple of clicks on the activity widget and it’s easy to complete your calls, take notes and schedule the next call.
3. display/manage your activities on a calendar or dashboard? Activities are good at this, but comments are not.

The problem is, everyone wants both. Here are a couple of options you can use to have your cake and eat it too.

• If you manage a commercial sales force you probably want the standard follow-up system of activities linked to contacts/organizations. It has worked forever and good salespeople are comfortable with this system. The problem is that the notes are buried and hard to get to when viewing the contact/organization record. You can’t ask the salespeople to make notes in both activities and comments — they won’t do it. So you can add a workflow that creates a comment for every activity that has notes. This way you get the best of both worlds.

• If you manage a retail sales force, the sales reps are less sophisticated and simplicity is important. We have helped our clients successfully implement filters that pull up leads/contacts for follow-up based on a ‘Next Follow Up’ date field. So the sales agent simply loads a filter, opens the first one, updates the comments, a status field and/or the 'Next Follow Up' date field, and goes to the next record. It’s simple and effective.