Sales Automation Manager

Examples of Sales Automation Manager Campaigns

Click a link below to see a screenshot of a sample SAM campaign.

BirthdayCard – waits until 7 days before the contact's birthday each year and sends an email

Faxit – for each contact in the campaign, if field SendFAX is Yes, fax that contact the document whose file path is stored in field DocToFAX.

Renewals – watch for the end date of a service contract or lease and send renewal reminder letters 30 days before and 7 days before expiration. Finally, if the contract has not been renewed, schedule a ToDo for the Record Manager.

SimpleEmailFollowup – send a series of emails to a contact

How SAM Campaigns Work

The following definitions are intended to help you understand the sample campaign diagrams. You only need to understand a few elements to understand how SAM campaigns work:

• Stages – a stage is “where the contact currently is” in your campaign. You can name stages so they are meaningful to you. Examples of stages are: Start, Send First Letter, Send Proposal, Make First Call, etc. Stages are shown on the campaign diagram as bubbles containing the name of each stage. The contact's current stages is stored in ACT! field <campaign name>_Stage, which you can put on a layout and view or change; if you blank this field, the contact is not “in” that campaign.
  
• Transitions – a transition is a rule that a) specifies the list of PRECONDITIONS that must be TRUE for a contact to move from one stage to the next, and b) the list of ACTIONS that will be performed when the contact moves. Transitions are shown on the campaign diagram as arrows going from one stage to another.
  
  
• Preconditions – a precondition is test that is evaluated by SAM and must either be TRUE or FALSE. “Wait 1” is a precondition that is true after 1 calendar day. “CompareField” is a precondition that is true only if a database field is equal to, less than, or compared otherwise to some value. For example, a CompareField could be used to test if the contact's Country is equal to “US”. There are several useful preconditions that you can use to allow your campaign to make decisions. Preconditions are shown on the campaign diagram as bold text in a box called the transition label.
  
  
• Actions – an action is just that – something that is performed, either by SAM itself, such as a SendEmail, or by the human user, such as ScheduleCall. There are several useful actions that you can use to do the “work” of your campaign. Actions are shown as non-bolded italic text in the transition label box.
  
  
• The Firing Rule – the firing rule is used by SAM when it “runs” a campaign. When you command SAM to run a campaign, SAM's goal is to try to move each contact (which you can envision as a bouncing ball) to the next stage. When running a campaign, SAM visits the next contact in the campaign, then it determines what Stage they are in, then it looks at each out-transition of that stage (in some random order). Then, SAM evaluates each precondition on the transition; if there are no preconditions or all the preconditions evaluate to TRUE, the transition “fires” – that is it makes an irreversible decision to move the contact down that transition. If there are no actions, the contact simply moves to the next stage; but, if there are actions, whether to be performed by SAM or by a human, they must ALL be executed – SAM waits for all the actions to be completed before fully transitioning the contact into the end stage of the transition.

The beauty of the Firing Rule is that it is a very simple way to make decisions – all preconditions must be TRUE – and perform actions – all the actions are performed. Another key strength is that, because SAM waits for ALL the actions to be performed, SAM is always “in synch” with the sales person or ACT user – it doesn't run ahead and flood the database with future activities that may not make sense, and it can change course based on the latest feedback from the contact.