Logging Interactions

STEP 6: Logging Interactions

The tracking of our interactions with a church is vitally important. It helps in many ways. Firstly as a team we want to be able to show the work that we have been doing. Secondly it helps us understand how to interact with churches as we can track our conversations and what helped towards our ultimate goal and what did not. It’s important to make sure that all of our significant phone calls, emails and meetings are kept within Salesforce.

Logging interactions is relatively easy. You find the contact that you have been interacting with and on the right hand side of the screen you will find the Activity Centre.

Here is where you enter all the information.

Log a Call is when you have made a phone call to this person and you want to record the information.
New Event is a meeting that you have with this person and you want to record the meeting notes, (these meetings will also appear on your home page)
New Task is a reminder that you have tasked yourself with that relates to this contact or church, (these tasks will also appear on your home page).
Email is where we send email to this person. We can also send email templates from here.

We strongly recommend that when logging any interaction and adding notes that you think in three categories.

Achieved: what did we, as Alpha, get out of the meeting? Examples: Connections, the meeting itself, interest in Alpha/Marriage/Parenting etc
Challenges: what are the potential challenges we see in the future of interacting with this contact and church? Examples: Doesn’t believe in the Holy Spirit, no team, needs to convince eldership etc
What’s Next: what do we need to do next? What is the next step for this church? This is where the engagement level process can really help but it can also be really simple as sending some information, a video or some other promo material. Think about if you are not the next person to interact with this church what do they need to know to keep the relationship heading in the right direction.

It’s important to think about what will be helpful for the next person that interacts with this person. It may be you in 3 months time or it may be another staff member. Make sure the information is in bullet points, easy to read, clear and concise.

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Exercise 3a – Log a Call

You’ve called the church to make initial contact with them and set up a meeting to meet with the youth leader as she answered the phone. And you know that quite often the youth group is an easy way into a church. Once the youth run Alpha the senior church leader see the possibilities and wants to run it with adults. So you are keen to move forward. The youth pastor gave you some insight into the church and you want to make sure it gets into Salesforce.

Logging your call to the church

Get Jessica’s contact details up on your screen. You can either search for her, search for the church and then hover over contacts and then click on her, or go to contacts and then Jessica will appear under the recently viewed.
In the Activity Centre on the right hand side of the screen click in the “Create new” box on the Log A Call option.
The Subject line is really important. It gives you a quick hint of what the rest of the content will be. Ours is going to be: Call – Initial Contact, connected with Youth Leader.
I recommend thinking in bullet points and trying to think “What if I am have left the organisation and the next person is here, what will they want to know?” a.
1. Comments:
  1. Achieved: Made call to church. Youth Leader the only one in the office today. Booked Meeting
  2. Challenges: Jessica is the only leader but keen to develop team. Struggling with thought process around discipleship.
  3. What's Next: Very keen to hear about Alpha and what we have to offer. Make sure to mention: how it develops team, youth can run and she can mentor, verify church details, importance of invitation.
The final thing you want to do is relate this information to something. In 9 out of 10 cases this will be the church.
1. To do this click on the drop down arrow under the related to heading.
2. Then click on the Churches / Organisations option
3. Usually as you go to start typing the name in the box of the church it brings that name to the top of the options.
Press Save.

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Exercise 3b – Create A Meeting

Now we want to add the meeting that we have planned. In Salesforce meetings are called events. So in the same area click on the New Event tab.
Type in your subject line. Again I recommend making this as informative as possible. You want to be able to glance at it and know what it is. In my case the details will be:
1. Subject: Initial Meeting, Jessica @ St [YourChurchName], re: Alpha Basics
2. Start Date Time: Create a week in the future @ 2PM
3. End Date Time: Create a week in the future @ 3PM
4. Name: Jessica [Your Favourite Breakfast]
5. Related To: [Church Name]
6. Assigned To: [you!]
7. Location: Favourite Coffee Place
Press Save.
You can do this historically as well. So if you have the meeting and then need to add the notes you will follow the same process.

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Exercise 3c – Add Notes to the Meeting

Quite often after the meeting you need to add notes to the meeting. To do this for our contact Jessica:
1. Make sure you are in Jessica’s Contact (Detail) Page
2. Click on the hyperlinked text so that you bring up the details of the meeting.
3. Once that page loads click on the pencil that is at the end of the description field
4. This will enable you to edit the description field and we recommend that you put your notes from the meeting in here. We recommend that you, think in bullet points not essays, use the headings, (or at least think in the process of) Achieved, Challenges, What Next.
5. Once you have entered the meeting notes click save.

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Exercise 3d – Giving yourself and others tasks to complete

Tasks are the way Salesforce keeps you on track. It enables you to put reminders in to call a church or make contact with someone or send them something. It also enables you to task someone else. For example say you are the youth person for an area and you go see a church and they are really keen on The Marriage Course but you don’t know much. You can task someone else in the team to follow up with the contact or church. Here’s how:

In both Churches / Organisations and Contacts you can add tasks. For the time being we are going to work on the Senior Church Leader we created earlier. Mine is called Michael Ferrari.
I’ve used the search at the top of the page to bring him up in the search and then clicked on his name to get to his detail page.
On the right hand side of the screen I am going to select the New Task option.
Again it is really important to make the Subject descriptive. As it is the thing that you will see to remind you of what to do. I am going to create a reminder to call Michael as I didn’t get hold of him last time I called the church.
1. Subject: Call Michael Ferrari re: Initial Contact and Meeting / Coffee
2. Due Date: I’m going to put mine a 2 weeks in the future
3. Name: Is already populated with Michael’s name
4. Related To: I can relate it to the church if I also want the information there.
5. Assigned To: It has auto populated with my name but I can click the little “x” at the end and choose another team member but in this case it will be me.
6. Status: In Progress
And press save.

You will now see under Next Steps your task that you just created. It will also now appear on the home page as a task reminder.