Salespeople are getting better about entering activities and future plans with their customers, but one of the things we still notice is that the follow-up is often forgotten within Monarch. For every Activity a salesperson has they should have a next step and ideally should fill out the notes with the outcome of that last activity that they just held.
Monarch is designed to show you upcoming activities, but often we show recent incomplete activities too trying to nudge the salesperson to fill out that post activity information and schedule a follow-up. Unfortunately if you don’t stay on top of it the past activities pile up and became more of a daunting task to get through than a nudge to fill out information.
Monarch can now be configured by the admin to automatically complete activities with a date in the past. Admins define how many days must pass before an activity will automatically complete itself. This helps keep a focus on next steps while providing a cleaner way to adding post meeting and call notes as you’ll see.
Configuring Automatically Complete Activities as an Administrator
It’s up to the Admin within Monarch to define if you wish to use this feature. You can use Monarch without automatically completing activities and it will continue to be entirely up to sales teams to police their activities.
You can find the setting as an Admin in the Settings menu. A section entitled Activity Options exists with a new setting “Automatically complete past due activities”. This is defaulted to NO. However, enabling it then presents another option to define how many days past due an activity must be before it will be automatically completed.
For example, if today is Nov 10 and you have this defined as 3 days then we will be automatically completing activities from Nov 6 and earlier.
Activities to be Automatically Completed Notification
In order to help salespeople stay on top of their activities we have a new default notification when the automatically complete past due activities functionality is enabled. The Activities to be Automatically Completed notification displays in The Feed (bell notification center) and will show you those past due activities that will be automatically completed if you don’t get to them first, add your notes, and schedule a follow-up to help ensure your customers don’t slip through the cracks.
Clicking through the notification displays each of the activities along with their associated Account and Agency if one exists. The date of the activity displays as well as the number of days until it will be closed. The results will display any activities that are past due but not yet over the days past due threshold as defined by the admin.
For example if today is Nov 10 then you will see results for Nov 9, 8, and 7. Nov 6 and earlier would have been automatically completed already.
I can complete one of these activities directly from the result list by clicking the Actions button and then choosing Complete Activity.
When doing so, you have a couple of options to take that should help you get in the habit of adding the outcome of this activity and scheduling another future activity so that your customer’s don’t fall through the cracks.
- You can simply complete the activity or complete and schedule a follow up activity without adding any notes.
- You can add your notes from this activity and then choose to complete it or complete it and add a follow-up activity (the latter is the best choice to ensure you don’t forget anyone after adding your notes!).
Either way upon completing the activity you will find the notification results to refresh and the activity that you just completed will be removed from the results.
Opting Out of Automatically Completing Activities on a Per Activity Basis
Sometimes you have activities that you do not wish to be automatically completed. You have your reasons, and we don’t need to know why. Monarch makes it easy to note these activities on a per activity basis as these should be the exception rather than the rule.
When adding a new activity, there is a checkbox on the Add an Activity dialog box for “Don’t automatically complete activity” that when checked will prevent that specific activity from being automatically completed in the future and it will not show in the Activities to be Automatically Completed Notification. This is not selected by default.
When editing an existing activity, there is also a checkbox on the Activity Profile page “Don’t automatically complete this activity” that when checked will prevent that specific activity from being automatically completed in the future and it will not show in the Activities to be Automatically Completed Notification. This is not selected by default, but if the option was used during activity creation then it will show as selected when editing or viewing an activity.
