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Using Ruly it is easy to develop a Sales Management application that rivals what many of the leading commercial sales applications do. In this article, I will show how to build the sales application that comes as a free template application in your installation.
To try out this application go to rulyapp.com and select the free trial option. If you are a customer you can install it from the Configuration/Templates menu.
The sales application is built using the following five key data Models.
An Account is equivalent to a customer.
A Lead is a potential customer. Once they become a customer, they become a Contact and an Account.
Campaigns are made up of one or more Opportunities. You set goals for a campaign, and then as opportunities are created, the campaign is updated automatically and you can visualize progress towards goals as in the example below.
To create an app, open the Configuration menu and select Applications. Select ‘new’ at the top of the list. Name your application Sales.
When creating an application, multiple models will need to be defined. For this sample application, there are models for account, contact, campaigns, opportunities, and leads.
Some of these models will need to be linked together. For example an opportunity will be linked to a campaign. Rules will be created later that will sum up the linked opportunities to the campaign totals.
For your sales app, you will need to start by creating an account model. This model will hold a record of all your company’s client records. Use the ‘models’ tab on the left and select ‘new’ to create a model. In your model for ‘account’, create a text field for the name of the account. Other fields to include are phone, type, industry, billing info, shipping info, and other miscellaneous info that may be useful to your company, such as annual revenue, or number of employees. For each field you create, make sure to select the corresponding type; phone number should be selected as ‘phone’; revenue should be selected as ‘currency’ for the Type column drop-down picklist.
In field names, don’t use spaces, use a capitol letter at the beginning of each new word to signify the spaces between different words.
In your model, you can switch the toggle for any field to be required, so that any new entry won’t be able to be saved unless this field is filled out.
For fields where the user should be presented a list of options, create a picklist type field. These types of fields are good for up to around 50 or so options. If the list is bigger than this, it can be better to create a separate model or lookup table to store the different options. For the sample account model, there are two fields with picklists: Industry and Type. Create picklists and picklist options by going to the Configuration/Picklists menu option.
Picklists can be displayed either as a traditional pulldown format or as a button or radio list. If the user can select more than one option from the list, then select a multi-select type.
You can select icons or colors for each option on your list to make options stand out. This benefit will be more apparent when viewing your charts and forms.
The example picklist below is used in the Leads model to identify where the lead originated from
Linking tables together allows you to take advantage of many of the automated features in Ruly. Screens will automatically show the linked records and when you add a record it will be automatically linked with its parent.
The contact model is linked to the account model as each account has one or more contacts. To link these tables together, create a field in the contact model (shown below) called AccountName for example, and then set the field type to Linked Table, and then select the Account model as the table it is linked to.
That’s all you need to do. From now on Ruly will manage the linkages, and you will see the linked tables as Tabs or Chips fields on screens.
Ruly will automatically calculate values as you enter data into your application. In this sample application, we will calculate totals for the campaign by summing up the values from each of the opportunities in the campaign. Create the following fields in the campaign model to store the totals:
Note that you can also create calculated fields directly on the model but this only applies when the fields used in the calculation are on the same model or in a parent model.
Create a rule on the opportunity model as shown below that will run any time an opportunity is changed:
Create an operation on this rule that will count the opportunities and then store that in the campaign in the opportunities count field.
Ruly creates Forms for you automatically from your data models, but you can easily modify these forms. Once you have completed your models and entered some data, you should organize your form layout into separate sections. To get to an entry form, click on any entry in your model and a form will pop up. Organizing your entry form can make entering data more user-friendly.
For the sample account model, the form sections are organized so that the most relevant information is in the top section. Below, are separate sections for the account, billing, and shipping information. Use drag and drop to move fields around on the form.
If you have a picklist option in one of your fields, you can select to view your data in a Kanban chart pivoted by your picklist. If you have multiple picklists, select the most relevant for filtering your information. Kanban charts are traditionally used to show different stages in a process.
A good example of a Kanban chart is for the sample campaign model; there is a Kanban chart pivoted by the status of the campaign: planned, in progress, and completed.
The dashboard is the first thing your app users will see when opening the app. This is where you can add views of your data models, additional charts, and shortcut buttons. The dashboard should include the most relevant information to your app, as well as various charts for an alternate and useful visual representation of your data. To add these, click on the edit mode icon on the right middle of your dashboard and squares will pop up on your dashboard that allow you to add views and buttons.
By default the first menu option in the application is a dashboard
To create the dashboard you add views, or link views you previously created using the buttons as shown below. Individual cards on the dashboard can be resized or moved using drag and drop.
This sales template application can be a useful application to manage the activities of a team of sales and marketing people. It can also be easily extended or modified for your own needs.
This application comes as a free template with your Ruly system.