Using a Contact Management solution to manage the Sales in Progress

I am Sales Professional who has used a Contact Management system for most of my last 25 years in sales. When they became available in a software package about 15 years ago I grabbed one, and have used several since. I can set up an easily manageable system for you. I understand how important it is for small business owners to not get bogged down in complex system management.

How to manage your Sales in Progress:

The system is designed to be set up for you to operate it within 1 – 2 days. It is advisable to set it up with your parameters and a couple of sample prospective clients, trial it, then review it and set up reports to suit your requirements. If you do not have a software based Contact Management system I will install one first. Then I follow three steps:

Set up a Contact Database

• Develop a customer contact database to tell you the sales activities you need to do and when.
• Record what you have done and what the next step is for a prospect or group of prospects.
• Decide which prospects need what information and how often they need it.
• Define which parameters to segment prospects into e.g. different market and product areas.
• Contact our prospects in a way that suits them, not us, and wins their business (i.e., newsletter, telephone, email, text etc).  This assists in following up on our commitments we make to a prospect and helps build trust we will do what we say we can do.

Track the Sales Progress

• Prepare a Sales in Progress report to show when a sale is likely to close, the value, and the chance of it closing.
• Record what each prospect is buying and where we are in the sales cycle. We don’t want to be trying to close a prospect who is not ready to buy.

Measure your Success

• Decide on criteria to measure our sales people’s performance. We can only help them improve when we know where it’s needed.
• Measure our businesses Sales performance. If we understand why we win and lose sales we can improve our sales process.