Working with Cases
A Case represents an advisor that has been qualified for the pipeline’s opportunity that you may or may not do business with. They’ve spoken to your business team, and for example have expressed interest in continuing the conversation, or maybe even agreed to complete a business continuity plan.
Cases often start as leads, but have passed your internal qualification process and have graduated into a legitimate opportunity to complete a business goal being represented within the pipeline.
You can access your Cases and Pipelines by clicking the Pipelines menu item in the left panel.
In this article we'll look at Cases in detail.
What are Cases?
A case is any kind of business development effort you’d like to track. Generally, it is the opportunity you have to either protect your distribution from attrition or generate new revenue.
Each case is moved through a series of business stages that you can create yourself to match the defined process of your business. These business stages are collectively called a Pipeline. Some Pipelines are automatically generated with defined stages and based on user activity, like the Catastrophic Planning and Deal Tracker Pipelines.
As you go through your project process, you will move your opportunities through each stage of your pipeline, until you reach the end of the pipeline stages and the opportunity is marked won, lost, or abandoned.
FindBob allows you to create your own customized process and move your cases through each stage, allowing you to see how much value is in the pipeline and take action accordingly.
Why should I use Cases?
Organization -- Cases create consistent processes, leverage best practices from your top performers, and is a great visual representation of this aspect of your business.
Transparency -- The Pipelines section acts as a single source of truth to identify bottlenecks and low performers within your team; it ensures everyone is on the same page and accountable to each other.
Reporting -- Tracking and storing data is integral to forecasting value protected, revenue generated and managing performance of your team as you grow.
Knowing Next Steps -- Using pipelines to track cases helps you to identify where in the process your value is sitting which in turn helps you to understand what needs to be done to keep up momentum.
How should I use Cases?
The way you use the Cases section will be highly dependent on the nature of your business.
You should use your cases to help you keep track of important information regarding your potential opportunities to protect assets in your distribution.
What is the case you hope to close? Is it placing a job-seeker in a position? Placing a business acquisition loan? Executing a valuation or an appraisal? Write down your answer to this question before you set out to create pipelines.
A case can represent the protection of assets / premium through a merger or acquisition, completing a catastrophic succession plan between 2 or more advisors, or even an activity with no direct monetary value like increasing the number of valuations.
Your process could be simple, having only 3 stages from Identified to Closed, or it could be complex, where it might move to a different pipeline once you close the case within first pipeline.
Tips for using Cases
Always input your important data, such as:
Projected Close Date
Projected Value (eg. revenue generated, assets protected)
Primary Advisor
Relevant Files -- these can be stored directly on the Case
Set tasks for the next steps that you need to do to progress through the stages of your opportunity. Your tasks can also be related to other cases.
Understanding Won, Lost, and Abandoned Case Statuses
As you move your case through your pipeline, you will reach the end of your process and will mark your case as won, lost, or abandoned.
Won indicates that your case was a success and you were able to complete your opportunity by closing the deal making the sale, or whatever a win would be considered in the opportunity you’re managing. Add a closing date to indicate when you were able to complete your deal.
Lost indicates that the opportunity was not completed and did not move forward. Select a loss reason, and change the close date to the current date to keep your reporting accurate.
Abandoned indicates that your opportunity is in a limbo state; this is usually because the advisor has asked you to put a hold or delay the timeline for the case. You will normally have a related task to follow up with this advisor at a later date.
Marking your case with the proper status will make your reporting much more accurate as you’ll be able to filter out abandoned opportunities so they don’t affect your won or lost reports. It will also make your Pipeline more clean and manageable, as you'll only be viewing the cases you're actively working on.
Creating a Case
Cases are created in one of two ways:
Adding a single case at a time
Case Automation
Importing Cases from another source
In order to add a new case manually click the blue ADD CASE button at the top of the leftmost Pipeline stage.
Adding a Single Case
Click the ADD CASE button. A new dialog box will appear.
Fill out as much information as you have in the Create a New Case dialog box.
Case Automation
One of the benefits of FindBob is increased efficiency through automation. Certain pipelines will automatically populate case data and move cases through each stage based on the activity of the advisor within the FindBob Marketplace.
Importing Cases
Because every business is different, FindBob offers importing of cases as a professional service. For more information on importing cases send an email to success@findbob.io.