Activity Management
Activity Management helps customer-focused teams plan, execute, capture, and track customer interactions across multiple channels throughout the customer life cycle. These interactions include emails, meetings, calls, and key customer touchpoints such as discovery, product demos.
Activity Management benefits
| Benefit | Feature | Users |
|---|---|---|
| Provide a single, consistent system to plan, capture, track, and act on all sales and service team activities such as discovery calls, demos, and customer business reviews across channels. | CRM Touchpoints | Sales and service teams |
| Eliminate context switching by accessing CRM data directly from Microsoft Outlook without opening a separate browser or application. | CRM Outlook Add-in | Sales representatives |
Use case: Improve seller productivity with Activity Management
- Sales Development Representative (SDR) and Business Development Representative (BDR) team runs early qualification and schedules first meetings (lead stage or early pipeline).
- Account Executives (AEs) own opportunities through discovery and proposal stages.
- Solution Consultants (SCs) and Sales Engineers (SEs) support discovery and demo outcomes, collaborate with AEs.
- Customer Success Managers (CSMs) run account reviews such as quarterly business reviews (QBR) and track follow-ups.
- Sales Operations team and sales leaders need visibility into engagement volume and health to coach teams and assess productivity.
Northwind’s sales agents spend a large part of their day in Microsoft Outlook, but customer communications live inside personal inboxes. Agents must switch to ServiceNow to log emails, create leads or contacts, or associate communications to CRM entities. That context switching leads to lost engagement history, delayed follow-ups, and inconsistent CRM data, which makes it harder for account and opportunity teams to collaborate, and for leaders to understand engagement health.
At the same time, sales teams need a repeatable way to track micro-interactions such as emails, and macro engagement steps such as discovery, product demos, Business Value Assessment (BVA), and CBR, tied to CRM entities such as lead, opportunity, or account.
- CRM Outlook Add‑in: Email capture and association in Microsoft Outlook
Sales users can log in from Outlook, search and view CRM entities (Leads, Contacts, Opportunities, Accounts), and associate an email to one primary CRM entity (lead/opportunity/contact/account), or create a new contact from an email and automatically attaching that email to the new record, eliminating manual switching and lost context.
- CRM Touchpoints: Structured engagement steps and consistent metadata
CRM Touchpoints provides a framework for a repeatable, business-defined engagement step across sales and customer success motions with consistent attributes such as state, priority, owner, due date, outcome, notes, and so on. Touchpoints help ensure a single source of truth for engagement and support an activity stream so teams can see what happened and when.
- Stage 1: Lead qualification
- Scenario: An inbound inquiry arrives from a prospect at Contoso Manufacturing. The SDR needs to respond quickly, set up the first conversation, and ensure the engagement is visible to the rest of the team.
- Stage 2: Opportunity discovery
- Scenario: The lead converts to an opportunity and the AE runs a discovery call to understand pains, goals, stakeholders, and buying process.
- Stage 3: Proposal preparation
- Scenario: The opportunity progresses to proposal. The AE and SE run a BVA to quantify return on investment (ROI) and align on value drivers.