Making a sale is the lifeblood of every business. In fact, the sales process is one of the most important things to manage if you are serious about running a successful business. This entails activities such as looking for potential clients, qualifying these leads, making contact with the prospects, and negotiating for a sale.

Without a system for sales lead tracking, this would be a very difficult process to follow. Smart business owners use sales lead tracking software to organize the system. PandaForm is a possible tool that you could use for this.

Systematize Your Sales Lead Tracking With PandaForm

PandaForm was designed as a comprehensive online form builder so that small-to-medium sized businesses would have an easy time with the different kinds of forms that are needed, including those for sales lead tracking. Here is what you can do with PandaForm as a Sales Lead Tracking form:

• Consolidate all information on the sales process
• Monitor your progress on every sales opportunity
• Review your sales leads within a single PandaForm screen
• Read comments and messages from your sales team
• Get email alerts for every change of status of your sales leads
• Cut potential issues in the bud before you lose your prospects

How To Create A Sales Lead Tracking Form

To use PandaForm as your Sales Lead Tracking Form, you can layout your form with section breaks, using the Add Fields feature of the app to place in the details necessary for the form you are creating. Here are some of the fields that you could place in your sales lead tracking form:

• The date of contact with your sales lead
• How you made contact (whether via phone, email, or in person)
• The source of your initial contact (whether at a trade fair, a forum, through a referral, or via online advertising)
• The name of your staff who did the follow up on this particular sales lead

Section Break: Information On Prospective Customer

After this section, you could make a section break, give this another label, and add more fields detailing information on the prospective customer. Here are the fields you could add for the section prospective customers:

• Name
• Company/Organization
• Contact details (phone number, address, email)
• Products/services he is interested in
• Number of times in contact
• Deal closed on (y/m/d)

The Status Feature

Another great thing about PandaForm is the Status feature. You could actually set the Status of each of your sales leads, This makes it easy to manage everything because with this feature, you can keep close track of each of your leads, and be informed of changes in status through the Notifications feature.

Here are the statuses you could add to your Sales Lead Tracking Form:

• Lead. Someone who is a potential customer, based on your target customer demographics.
• Qualified Lead. Leads who show interest in your offer.
• Deal Closed. For leads who have already bought.
• Deal Lost. For leads who have decided not to buy.
• Follow-up. If the lead is undecided or hasn’t committed to a decision and requires a follow-up.

By following the steps above, you can turn PandaForm into a sales machine that helps your people go through the sales product more efficiently.

Do you have a product to sell? Are you wondering how to go about managing your orders? With PandaForm, it is easy to process online sales orders! Just use this application form builder as your customer order form and see how effortless and uncomplicated sales order processing becomes.

PandaForm is designed for small-to-medium sized business owners. It is a simple but comprehensive online professional form builder and manager. This tool will help you create your forms and then track and process all sorts of data to keep your business running smoothly.

Here is what you can do with PandaForm:

• Put your data within a centralized database
• Configure the app so that the data can be accessed by the people who are in charge of processing these sales orders
• Control the settings within PandaForm so that you receive email notifications every time you get a new order

Using PandaForm for Online Sales Orders

Step #1: Creating Your Customer Order Form

First of all, you need to create your form. Here I placed the form title: Customer Order Form.

Next, add your fields. Choose the ones that are necessary to your order form such as Name and Email. You can also create an Address field or a Company Name field by editing the label of the Single Line Field. For other details that you might want to include about customers and their order, you could use the Paragraph Text for additional data input.

With the Layout Elements feature in the Field section of PandaForm, you could choose to place a Section Break on your sales order form. You could then title it Order Details, or Order Information. Under this section break is where you could input data such as the name of the product, the quantity of the order, and then price.

Step #2: Setting The Order Status In PandaForm

It is quite easy to set the statuses you will need to keep track of your orders through PandaForm’s Settings feature. Just go to Settings at the upper right of the form and go ahead and click it. This will take you to the page where you can choose from among these functions: General, Notification, Payment, User Permission, and Process. Go to Process and then click On.

Once this feature is turned on, you can input the statuses you need to track your orders. Suggestions for order form statuses are the following:

• new order,
• received,
• processed,
• shipped,
• and returned.

After setting the status, you can now go to Notifications to set up email notifications for every new order your company gets.

By using PandaForm for your online sales order form, you and your staff will be promptly informed of any data in your company involving sales. You will never miss an order. PandaForm helps you to avoid making costly mistakes in sales order processing.

Click here to try it for free!

Successful events run smoothly because of the people behind it, and the system that is used to run it. PandaForm can be your secret tool behind organizing a seminar, workshop, or conference. This online form builder is the perfect app for making the whole process of events management easier.

With Pandaform, you can:

• Customize registration forms — choose your fields, upload your logo onto the form
• Export data to Excel or Google spreadsheets– you won’t have to worry about collecting data, sifting through it all, and moving it from email to Excel file
• Collect payment through an integrated Paypal gateway– an automatic payment feature in PandaForm allows participants to securely pay fees through credit card or Paypal
• Send reminder and confirmation emails to registrants– providing that personal touch to your events is easily done with the click of a button
• Limit the number of submissions for attendees– let your participants know that there are a limited number of seats
• Set a deadline for registration– solve the problem of late registrations with this feature

Using PandaForm for event registration is easy. Here’s how:

First, you open PandaForm then click on Forms at the upper left side of the screen. This is what you will see:

To start with, you can type in your own Form name to replace “New Form 12.” Then there are a variety of fields to choose from on the right hand side of the screen. You can create and edit your form from here.

Basic Information

When you click on “Add Field,” the app will give you choices for editing the Basic Field, the Layout Elements, and the Advanced Field. Let’s start with the Basic Field for creating your Event Registration form.

Under Basic Field, you can choose from among a variety of fields: Single Line, Number, Name, Email, Paragraph Text, Checkbox, Drop Down Box, and Radio Button. All of these are useful for creating your online form. For instance:

In the Add Field tab, choose the Single Line field. Then go to the Field Settings tab. The form builder opens up to a window where you type in your preferred Label, Help Text, Field Size, and Default.

Here, I already placed my form name: Workshop Event Registration. The single line label has also been changed to Organization, which prompts the registrant to type in the organization they belong to.

You can change the field size to small, medium, or large. You can make this a required field. You can make it restricted so only the admin can access. You can do all these just by checking a box on the PandaForm app.

You can then move on to add another field for the next line in your form.

Workshops and Giveaways

Aside from getting the basic information that you will need from you registrants, PandaForm makes it easier to plan events with multiple talks or sessions. The participants can actually select the talks/sessions they want to attend in advance. You can also create a field for T-shirt size and other giveaway options. The process is basically the same when creating fields in PandaForm.

Settings

After creating your event registration form, PandaForm gives you the option to send notification emails, collect payments, send a confirmation message, limit the submissions, set a deadline, and use CAPTCHA on your forms. You can access all these under the Settings tab at the upper right side of the PandaForm screen. It is right beside the Edit Form tab.

Sending notifications to registrants

Here is what the Notification screen looks like, where you have the option to send confirmation emails:

Sending Files

You can use the Files option to collect photos or other files for quick creation and printing of ID cards for the event. In the Edit Form tab, click on Add Field. Scroll down to Advance Field. Choose File Field. Click and edit with Field Settings.

Collection of registration fees

And this is how you use PandaForm for convenient payment collection of registration fees:

At the Settings tab, choose the Payment option. You can select a merchant, choose your currency, assign prices, and fix other details of your event registration payment. It’s all there on the PandaForm app, with ready fields for you to fill up.

All you have to do next is click on Save and you’re ready to manage a successful event. You could then share or publish the event registration form you have created with the help of PandaForm.

Yesterday, we discussed the importance of blogger outreach for businesses. We also mentioned that it has the following benefits:

But this doesn’t mean that blogger outreach will be easy.

One of the main challenges of blogger outreach is that if you try to reach 20, 50, or even 100 bloggers – especially during an important event like a product launch – individually sending those emails can be tedious. The good news is that there’s an easy way to set up PandaForm to make blogger outreach easier.

Here’s how to do it:

Set Up the System

1) Create a form with the following fields:

• Blogger’s Name (Field Type: Name)
• Blogger’s Email (Field Type: Email)
• Outreach Email Body (Field Type: Paragraph Text)

See the screenshot below on how it would look like:

2) Set Up the Right Statuses:

Status or Process tags are a very useful feature – you can trigger specific actions, such as sending an email, once an entry is marked under a specific status. This is how to set the statuses you need to set for blogger outreach:

Go to the blogger outreach form you created. Go to Settings > Process

Click “On”.

Add these following statuses (including notes on what they are for):

• Submitted. This is for when the entry (a blogger’s contact info and the outreach email draft) has been submitted to the database.
• Send. When you’re ready to send the outreach email, this is the status tag you’ll use for the entry.
• Negative Response. You’ll mark your entries “negative response” if the blogger has responded but showed no interest in your business.
• Positive Response. On the other hand, mark entries “positive response” if the blogger agreed to discuss your product/service with you, or if he/she wrote about it.
• No Response. This is for those times when you don’t receive a reply from the blogger.

3) Set Up Email Notifications:

Next, you’ll be setting up email notifications. This is important because this is the feature which will automatically send out your outreach emails for you.

To do this, under the “Settings” section of your form, go to “Notification”. Make sure that it’s set to “On”.

Then, under “Send Custom Email”, set up your blogger outreach emails. In the “Send email when submission enters this status:” select “Send”. Then, type your email under “From:”, and select “Blogger’s Email” for “To:”.

See the screenshot below on how to do this:

Make sure to customize the email you send to the bloggers, to contain only the paragraph email you’ll be designating later. To do this, click “Customize the Email” within the blogger outreach email notification that you just made:

Then, customize the formula/template in the window that pops up. It will look like the following:

Here’s what the formula above stands for:

• {{=name}} calls the content for “Blogger’s Name”
• {{=paragraph}} calls the content for “Outreach Email Body”

Optional step: Set up additional notifications for reporting purposes.

Apart from sending emails to the bloggers, you can also set up additional email notifications for the following people:

• For yourself, in case you need it for your records.
• For your client, if you’re doing blogger outreach in behalf of a client. These can be useful as updates, especially when a blogger has a positive response. So under “Send email when submission enters this status:” you can select “Positive Response”.

 Fill Up the Templates

One thing you can do is to send the published form URL to anyone who is supposed to help you with blogger outreach. This could be members of your staff, an assistant, etc.

When you’re done filling up the form, go to the “records/entries” section and evaluate or make changes to everything (check the email template, any duplicates, errors or mistakes, etc.)

Send Out the Emails

Once you’ve checked all the entries, it’s time to start marking some of them for sending.

Go into the individual entries, then, under “Choose your action”, select “Change status to Send.” (See below.) Then, click “Submit”.

Your email is now sent!

TIP: Make sure to send test emails to yourself first – this can help you prevent any mistakes or errors when you start sending your actual outreach emails.

It’s amazing how many entrepreneurs make key business decisions in a vacuum – without any input or feedback from their customers. But good market research is the foundation of any successful business. It helps you identify your customers’ desires, pain points, and hesitations. Once you know this, you can create products and services that they would be more than willing to pay for.

You can’t do this via guesswork – you’ll always need research. To conduct market research, no matter how informal, you need to ask the right questions.

The 3 Question Types You’ll Need

Believe it or not, apart from the necessary demographic data such as age, location, gender, and other specifics, you won’t need more than 3 question  types.

In fact, when it comes to businesses who are already sure of their customer demographics, these 3 question types are enough for an anonymous survey. Without further ado, here they are:

#1 – The Goal Question

This question type identifies what your customer wants to achieve, do, or reach. A goal question helps you figure out what your customers want.

Here’s an example of a goal question from one of PandaForm’s users. In this example, the user is trying to figure out the career goals of freelancers:

Some examples:

• What is your #1 goal when it comes to [---] ?
• What do you want your life/business to look like as a result of [---]?
• If you could wave a magic wand and achieve anything about [---] in 3 months, what would it be?
  

#2 – The Barrier Question

This question identifies the things that are getting in your customer’s way – usually preventing them from achieving what they’ve answered to The Goal Question. By asking about a customer’s barriers or obstacles, you can address these barriers and either prove them completely surmountable, or break these barriers yourself to lower a customer’s hesitation.

Some examples:

• What is the #1 obstacle that is keeping you from achieving this goal?
• What is your biggest frustration when it comes to [---]?
• What do you fear the most about [---]?

TIP: Essay vs. Multiple-Choice

How do you know whether to pick an essay question or a multiple-choice question? The rule of thumb is that if you are starting from scratch and don’t have an idea what your customers generally think, then it’s best to use essay or comment box questions on your first survey. But, if you’ve surveyed your customers before and have a more concrete idea about the range of goals or obstacles they have, then go for multiple choice.

#3 – The Experience Question

The answers given here will help you differentiate your product or service from previous methods that didn’t work. You can use your customers’ answers to this type of question to point out why your solution works better than the other things they’ve tried.

Some examples:

• What methods have you tried and how did they work for you?
• How have you invested in [---] in the past?
• How do you usually [---]? What are the typical results?
  

Creating the Market Research Survey

Now that you know the basic questions to ask, it’s time to create your survey. Here’s how to do it via PandaForm:

Step #1 - Go to your account dashboard and click the “+ Create a new form” button.

Step #2 - You’ll be taken to the Form Builder. Once you’re there, your form will be assigned a temporary name, such as “New Form 1″. Change the name to something you prefer by typing over the form name in the section highlighted below:

Step #3 -Using the “Add Field” panel on the right side of the Form Builder, create your questions based on the what your business needs.

Step #4 -When you’re done creating questions, click “Save” at the bottom right hand side of the Form Builder. A window will notify you that your form is saved.

If you’re ready to publish your form, you can share it to your customers as a link by copying the URL located under “Share”. See the highlighted section below:

Alternatively, you can post the form itself on your website or email it to others. If you want to do these things instead, click on the “Publish” button (see below).

That’s it! All you have to do now is wait until your customers send in their responses.

Do you survey your potential customers? What questions do you ask them?