Winning and Retaining customers is the key to your business growth.
Winning and retaining customers,this sounds like and easy process. The
process is anything but, and in is just as complex as the procurement
process, the manufacturing process and other critical building blocks
which make your business successful.
Many years ago, great direct marketers mailed out offers for soap,
or cereal and other products to houses. The cost of these campaigns
were very high and the sponsor held the copywriter accountable. To be
blunt, if the cost of the campaign was not covered by the repsonse, the
copywriter was out of a job.
Advanced online sales software is built on the open source stack: linux, apache, mysql, and java. The user friendly sales workbench is powered by ajax. Sales management software has come a long way. Older technologies can not communicate and collaborate with direct sales and indirect sales as effectively as online sales software.
Onlinesalessofware.net is built on the open source stack using mysql, apache, java. Our architecture is designed to aggregate account and customer data from other systems and to organize this data into a sales tool. The sales tool provides account and contact management, lead and sales management, pipeline and forecast management. SOA hooks can pull data from ERP, and other systems and be aggregated into the sales tool.
New technlogy like ajax, and datagrids have enriched the sales user interface. Traditional CRM tools are hard to use and burden sales users with heavy clicks. Even simple tasks require multiple forms and screen changes to enter and to edid.
I have a friend, a VP of Sales for a Microsoft Gold Partner, that is certain that CRM tools are sales force De-automators. He claims when CRM is rolled into a sales team, sales efficiency is rolled up. Is deploying CRM into a sales team akin to grinding your gears? Probably.
Manufacturers representatives, companies that carry many manufacturers’
products, can be a rewarding business. The manufacturer rep can pick and choose
what lines to rep and will run his business has he sees fit. The manufacturer or
product supplier may put demands on the manufacturer rep to report sales
progress and these demands can be heavy.
Ajax, jsp and other technologies can make data entry easy for busy sales people. New online sales tools accept copy and paste, use type aheads, data grids and work flow like automatic lead updates and opty updates from directs and in-direct salespeople. Our goal as a CRM and online sales tool maker is to give our customers a platform to do all work in one view with one click. This is sales force automation. I define this by making data entry simple and easy for the sales team.