What happens when you go to lunch and an employee receives a call from the BIG DEAL you have been trying to close this month.

They may write down a message and forget to hand it to you because the employee doesn’t know it’s the BIG DEAL!

You come back from lunch and proceed with your day while the BIG DEAL gets impatient waiting for your call and closes the sale with your competitor!!

So it’s all in your head which now is frustrated because…

YOU LOST THE BIG DEAL OF THE MONTH!!

This example may be a simple one but it illustrates why you need to have a contact management system in place.

If your business was using a contact management system your assisant could have assigned a high priority alarm to call the BIG DEAL when you came back from lunch. You would have made the call and closed the BIG DEAL!! That’s a great ending to the story!!

Why is a contact management system
better than having it all in my head??

What you learn from one contact can in some ways be applied to others.

• Some are contacts that you will continue to do business with on an on-going basis.
• Contacts have unique and special needs.
• Each contact can be a profit center to your business.
• As an owner or sales manager you can track the contacts of your sales force and determine whether your sales team is working efficiently.
• With the information live and at hand you can provide assistance to your sales team to close a sale if necessary.
• Forecasting sales based on your sales pipeline will help you determine if there will be enough products in stock to handle the increased demand required.

Spreadsheets don’t work anymore!

• Many businesses today still work with a spreadsheet list and try to update it with notes.
• Try to search for the hot leads or follow-up on existing leads and customers is very cumbersome.
• Losing track of leads is highly probable with spreadsheets because there is no centralized system to track every lead for the company.
• Losing track of when your customers last purchased from you.

It is imperative that today you have a centralized contact management system. Without it, managing the sales and marketing efforts of your business is like driving down a road with blinders over your eyes. You need to know where you are going and take any corrective action during the year to stay on target.

When the next BIG DEAL comes along be ready and up to date to close it!!

Tags: ACT!, Business, Contact Management, CRM, eMarketing, Infusionsoft, Marketing, Sales

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 13th, 2008 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Business, Marketing, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.