How To Add Users

A CRM is just a set of tools that are used to organize or manage business processes. In addition to tools, you also need users who will leverage the tools to produce results, e.g a sale.

Being the owner of your business, you want to offload certain responsibilities to some of your employees. For example, you may want to hire a customer support representative who will regularly check your CRM for new customer interactions and respond to them as and when necessary. This frees you from the overhead of responding to messages, you can now utilize your time on other things and focus on tasks that are more important.

Similarly, if a prospect is interested in a deal, you would want a sales guy to take command of the "Deal" and ensure that the "Sale" is made. You just can't do all these things on your own, all day long.

Whether you want to automate specific business processes, segregate routine workflow or ensure that the "Lead - Deal - Sale - Support" pipeline is smooth, you need to add different users to your CRM and assign them unique set of responsibilities.

Add Users To Your Distributed Source Account

1. Login to your Distributed Source account. If you do not have a Distributed Source account yet, sign up here. It's free to try!

2. Click "Settings" on the top navigation bar.

3. Choose "Users" from the left sidebar

4. Click "Add a new user"

5. When you click "Add new user", you will see three text fields to enter the name, email address and phone number of the user. Enter the user's

•  Name
•  Email address 
•  Phone number.
•  Select the user type to either a basic user or an admin

6. Now, click "+Add a New User" button.

7. If the email address you just added is not already associated with another user of your Distributed Source account, you will see a notification on top of the browser window -"User has been added and an email has been sent with his login credentials".

8. The user whom you added to your Distributed Source CRM will get his login credentials in a welcome email from Distributed Source.

How To Use Your Website's Form To Capture Leads

Distributed Source offers a simple lead capture URL which you can integrate with your website's existing contact form. When your prospects or customers submit the contact form, their details will be saved in your Distributed Source CRM account as a new "Lead"

For this to work, you will have to ensure the following three things:

1. Get your unique Distributed source web to lead URL.
2. Integrate the web to lead URL in your contact form and send it as an HTTP Post request.
3. Ensure parameter names of your contact form matches with Distributed Source's naming convention.

Sounds too geeky? It isn't, just follow these simple steps:

Step 1 - Get Your Unique Distributed Source Web To Lead URL

1. Login to your Distributed Source account. If you don't have a Distributed Source account yet, sign up here. It's free!

2. Once you're logged in, go to "Settings" page.

3. On the left sidebar, click on "Capture leads".

4.  In this page, you will see different lead capture tools Distributed Source provides.

Copy the web address under "Use this URL in your form to capture leads in Distributed Source". You will have to use this URL in the contact form of your website.

Step 2 - Add the Web to lead URL in your Website's contact form

Now you will have to include Distributed Source's lead capture URL in your website's contact form.

Here is the HTML code of a typical contact form which uses the <form> HTML tag:
<form action="" method="POST"><br>
<label>Name &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text"name="name" /><br>
<label>Company Name &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text"name="companyname" /><br>
<label>Phone &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="phone" /><br>
<label>Email &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="email" /><br>
<label>Address &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="address" /><br>
<label>City &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="city" /><br>
<label>State &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="state" /><br>
<label>Country &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="country" /><br>
<label>ZIP &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="zip" /><br>
<input type="submit" name="submit">
</form>

Remember the URL you copied from the "Settings" page of your Distributed Source account? Now paste the same URL under the opening <form> tag, enclosed within the action parameter. An example is shown below:

<form action="https://my.distributedsource.com/webToLead/XXXXXX" method="POST"><br>
<label>Name &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text"name="name" /><br>
<label>Company Name &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text"name="companyname" /><br>
<label>Phone &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="phone" /><br>
<label>Email &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="email" /><br>
<label>Address &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="address" /><br>
<label>City &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="city" /><br>
<label>State &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="state" /><br>
<label>Country &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="country" /><br>
<label>ZIP &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text" name="zip" /><br>
<input type="submit" name="submit">
</form>

Please note: The request should be a HTTP POST request.


Step 3 - Ensure parameter names in your contact form matches with Distributed Source's naming convention.
Every text field of your contact form has a "name" attribute. For example, the following code represents a text field with the name field "address"

<label>Name &nbsp;&nbsp;:</label>
<input type="text"name="address" />
For Distributed Source to understand the data and map it with the corresponding fields of Distributed Source's web application, you need to use the following name tags within your contact form:


Text field type Name tags
     Name              name
     First Name     first_name
     Last Name     last_name
     Phone              phone
     Email              email
     Address     address
     City              city
     State              state
     Country      country
     Zip              zip
     Return URL    returnURL

Note: It is not mandatory to use all of the above text fields in your contact form. Use only those text fields you need.

For example, if you want the contact form to have a field for "phone number", use a text field in the contact form with the name attribute equal to "phone" (without quotes). If you name it to something else e.g "phone_number", Distributed Source won't be able to recognize the data and map it to existing fields of Distributed Source's web application.



The following example shows the correct and false implementations of Distributed Source's web to lead form. The one in the left is correct; the form action URL points to Distributed Source's web to lead form and all the name fields match our field naming convention.






But the implementation on the right has got two label names wrong - "company" and "city". The form action URL points to Distributed Source, so Distributed Source will be able to map rest of the data into the CRM. However, any data entered in the field "Company name" and "City" will not be saved.

How will the new contact form work?

When the name fields of your website's contact form is in the correct format and the form action URL points to your Distributed Source lead capture URL,  you're ready to roll. Let your website's contact form be the bee- hive of leads.

Got questions? Tell us in the comments or write to us at support@distributedsource.com

How To Add Followup Tasks

In business, "forgetting" is worse than "failing"!

Forgetting is a sign of ignorance and ignorance can cause loss - loss of sale, loss of opportunity and more importantly, loss of trust and goodwill.

This is when the Distributed Source task manager can make a big difference to how you prioritize business tasks.  With Distributed Source's web based task manager, you can:

• Add tasks and associate the tasks with your contacts and deals.
• Keep track of all your tasks from a single page.
• Add follow-up tasks, making sure that you are in constant touch with your customers.
• Assign tasks to different employees of your company - a great way to delegate work and manage your resources.
• Plan your workflow in advance. 

The best part - our task management tool is so simple and intuitive that even your grandma can learn to use it in minutes! This brief tutorial gives a walkthrough of how you can add a follow-up task in Distributed Source .

Adding Follow-Up Tasks

1. Login to your Distributed Source account, go to the "Deals" page and select the deal for which you want to add a task.

2. When you've finished the task, mark it as "Complete".  Learn how to complete tasks in Distributed Source.

3. When you click "Finish task", the task will be marked as "complete" and you will immediately see a prompt to add a follow-up task to the currently selected task.

4. Type in the description of the follow-up task, choose a due date and click "Add this task".

The follow-up task will be added to the deal page, and the original task will be moved from the task pane to the bottom of the page, under the "History and Comments" section.

Follow-up tasks are a great way to stay in contact with your customers. It helps to keep tabs on your work as well. Follow-up tasks are particularly useful when multiple people are collaborating on a deal. Typically, you can create follow up tasks and assign it to your team members to follow up. Its like passing on the baton.

How to Complete Tasks in a Deal

In our previous post, we showed you how to add tasks to a deal. When you add tasks in Distributed Source, you can assign the task to a user in your Distributed Source account and associate the task with a deal or contact.

Later, when the task is completed or resolved, you would want to mark it as complete and remove it from your tasks queue.

Here is how it works.

Let's say you have a client named Mr Brown, who runs a Brick and Mortar business. You have scheduled a business meeting with Mr Brown on the second Wednesday of coming month. You want John, your Sales executive to accompany you in the meeting. Also, you want John to prepare a PowerPoint presentation before the 10th of coming month.

In order to address this situation, you create two tasks in your Distributed Source account. The first task is assigned to your employee John, you add the detail "Create PowerPoint Presentation for Mr. Brown" and associate it with your business contact - "Mr Brown". Also you set the completion date of this task to "10th" of coming month. Next, you create another task e.g "Meeting with Mr Brown" and set it a completion date of 14th".

Now, when John submits his PowerPoint presentation on 9th of coming month, you mark the first task as complete. This is important as when you go to the "Deal" page of "Mr Brown", you see two tasks

• Create PowerPoint Presentation 
• Meeting with Mr Brown

So now you instantly know that the first task has been completed by your employee and now you're ready to execute the next task at hand.

So When John is done with the PowerPoint presentation on 10th of coming month, you would want to mark the task as complete and proceed to add a new or followup task. Here is how to do it

Completing Tasks From The Deals Page

1. Login to your Distributed Source account. If you do not have a Distributed Source account yet, you can sign up here.

2. On the top navigation bar, click "Deals" to go to the deals section of your Distributed Source account.

3. Once you're on the deal page, click the deal name to go to the corresponding deal page.

4. When you arrive on the desired deal page, you should see the tasks listed under "Tasks".

5. To mark this specific task as "Complete", select the checkbox placed right left of the task name.

6. After selecting the checkbox, you will see a pop-up appear on the same page. This pop-up will be titled "1 task marked for completion".

7. When you click "Finish task", the task will be marked as complete.

The same "completed" task will be added to the task history on the selected "deal" page. Additionally, before marking the task as "complete" or "resolved", you can enter a resolution comment and choose to define whether the lead was "contacted" or "not contacted".

Please note that once a task has been marked as "Complete", there is no way to undo this action. Precisely, you cannot unmark a task which has been marked as "complete" or "resolved". However, you can always add a new task and add the same to your tasks queue.