Sales Management Software

Win Business with a new business system
Aberdeen put out a paper on sales lead management the other day. This paper caught my eye and drove home a point. The best thing a company can do is manage their sales leads. If a business does not have a formal sales lead management system in place, the fumes they are breathing, is money being burnt.
Why is this? Because your marketing people care more about sales leads than your salespeople do.

Now is the time to get more efficient. Make sure all sales steps are clicking. Look at the sales process and fix it to make it better. What are your sales stages? What steps are done to win business? Just look at deals that close and do a little soul searching. What stalls a deal? Why does one sales person close more than others? A tell tale measurement for sales managers is what I call stage duration. How long is a sales cycle sitting at a sales stage, like quote, or assessment, without showing progress. 

Case Study: :Lead Nurturing in the Manufacturing Industry

At a recent PackExpo tradeshow I spoke to a VP of Sales at a packaging equipment manufacturer. We spoke about how the leads being gathered at the show were to be managed and , what tools the company used for lead management. This company sold through distributors. Leads were fed to the RSMs or regional sales managers and the RSM would email the lead to a distributor sales person. There was very little follow up and if any follow up was done, it was manual using phone, emails. 

Lead Nurturing Best Practices

Lead nurturing tactics have made the big companys successful, yet only 43% of all sales enterprises use a lead nurturing process. A recent Aberdeen report states this number and other surprising statistics. Like these: 

• 28% of all leads are not followed up by sales
• 16% of leads which are converted to a sales opportunity close 

The stats are interesting.

Cold Calling Refresher 

I picked up an old book from my library Sunday. Written by Steve Schiffman, Cold Callling Techniques, is the name. I have been cold calling for a long time. But sometimes one gets stale. Or in some cases to smart to stick to the basics. One point Mr. Schiffman makes is the ratio of calls to deals, saying that to get one deal, 5 presentations are needed and that 25 calls should pull the 5 presos.

In our work with electronics companies, both electronic manufacturers and electronic manufacturers representatives, we see huge opportunity in streamlining the work with distys. Often a rep firm has hard costs spent managing distribution, in both human resource and time spent. Another rock to turn over, levered by our automated followup module, is the unmined potential in the disty customer base. If nurtured by top problem solvers like your staff, the prospect companys which your disty partners are calling on can become your next biggest revenue producers.

In our work with electronic reps, we see huge opportunity in streamlining work with distributors. Often a rep firm has hard costs spent managing distribution, in both human resource and time spent. LeadNET, our automated follow up technology, can be used to route and track all sales records to and from the distribution sales channel. This will save huge cost and time. Another rock to turn over, levered by our automated followup module, is the unmined potential in the disty customer base.

Marketing managers and sales managers lives are spent tracking leads and opportunities. Generating leads, routing leads, qualify leads and lead updates eat up time and money. Automating this process has several advantages first, you know the lead is passed to the right sales person quickly, second you know the sales person is working the lead.

Attract New Customers Using Google Adwords

The internet has caused a perfect storm. The average salesperson has been washed away in the flood. Old sales ways and the old sales process have been buffetted to submission. The old sales methods, which used to work, have died, a death by internet. 

Happy New Year all, and an extra Happy New Year to all the prospects which I am about to call, starting today. My sales software pipeline is teed up. All the friendly and cooperative prospects are just sitting in their offices or cubicles, holding their breath, and wishing the phone would ring with me on the other end. And even better, my autoresponder which has been sending out automatic interesting and informative emails like clock work, has pulled a handful of responders asking me to call them. Yes, autoresponders rock.