The most valuable asset a sales person has is time.  Seasoned sales pros are adept at focusing their time on the right opportunities at the right time.  This can mean thoroughly qualifying new prospects early in the sales process but, it can also mean tuning up the day to day time management techniques used by individual sales people.

Following are 5 simple time management techniques any sales person can implement today without spending much or any money to significantly increase their sales results.  To be clear, while contact management or CRM software is one way to get organized and better manage time, these techniques can work without ANY technology so, don’t let the lack of the latest cloud based CRM stop you!

1)      Keep everything in one place

New business cards, phone messages, emails, rumors, ideas – new sales opportunities can come from anywhere.  Make it a point to be diligent in corralling all the sales intelligence you’re gathering every day in one place.  If you’re not organizing, you’re drifting toward disorganization and that costs time and money.  Use a day planner, rolodex, your iPhone, or your company’s CRM solution.

2)      Separate sales contacts based on status

When things get crazy, you need to be able to put your fingers on the sales contacts you hope to close this month and focus on them.  It takes too much time thumb through all your contacts to find the hot ones.  Use a card file or a color coding system to make obvious the status of each contact, including existing customers.  This is also helpful when it’s time to beat the bushes for new opportunities.  If you’re able to quickly grab the list of old prospects that did not buy last year, you’ll be able to jump start your pipeline with a quick email blast or calling campaign.

3)      Track follow up action items

Every time you talk to a lead or prospect, you agree to do something, “I’ll call you next Tuesday to see what you’ve decided.”  Your follow through on these commitments, no matter how small, builds trust with your customers.  Plus, spending time trying to remember who to call today can gobble up lots of time.  Use Outlook or a day planner to write down follow up actions while you’re committing to them so you’ll always know what to do and for whom.

4)      Keep a daily call list

Staying in touch with prospects can be a big competitive edge.  It strengthens the relationship and keeps you in the driver’s seat.  Making follow up calls and cold calls to new leads is an area sales people tend to procrastinate.  Don’t let it happen to you.  Plan a window of time in each day to make your follow up and prospecting calls.  Make it early in the day, get focused and smile and dial!

5)      Create a lead qualification and status sheet

When you connect with a lead or prospect, it’s easy to let the customer take charge.  However, this can lead to the sales person spending too much time with the wrong prospects.  Sales people can stay in charge of the process by focusing on qualifying each prospect by asking the right questions early on.  Create a “Lead Qualification and Status Sheet” that lists the questions you need to ask each prospect and provides the typical answers in multiple choice form so it’s easy to circle the right ones.  Create a place where you can note the size of the opportunity, product specifics, etc. that are helpful in your industry.

Following these simple suggestions can easily save hours per day for a typical sales person and increase sales results significantly by focusing time on the most productive activities.  Of course, technology solutions like online CRM and email marketing systems take sales organization up to the level of sales automation.  However, no sales person should be guilty of waiting for the perfect technology to be provided by their management.  Get organized now the old fashioned way if you have to and you’ll be ready to leverage online CRM solutions to take things to the next level.

Related posts:

1. 3 Ways to Profit from Customer Relation Management Software on Day 1
2. How to Stop Chasing Sales Prospects and Start Getting Call Backs
3. 3 Ways to Measure Advertising and Marketing Return Easily

It’s a take off on the American Idol theme but, for CRM companies.  Paul Greenberg and a team of CRM industry insiders have launched the competition for 40 “small” CRM companies in the US.  Small means the competitors have to be under $12m in annual revenue to participate.  There’s also a similar group of 20 or so CRM companies in the Europe and Asia.

SalesNexus Online CRM and Email Marketing solution is one of the competitors.  You can check out our profile on the CRM Idol site here.

Paul and his team have done a great job of getting the Buzz started about the competition.  There’s the web site of course but, there’s also been a lot of talk on Twitter (use the #crmidol has tag) and there’s even a LinkedIn Group.

The competition begins in earnest on August 15th, 2011.  Each contestant will present to a group of judges over the course of the next couple of weeks.  Then 7 finalists will be chosen to submit videos and go through a more rigorous selection process.

We’re proud to be participating in the competition amongst some really strong contestants and teams.  Its a great opportunity.  We’re working hard on our presentation now.  If you have any suggestions for us, we’d love to hear from you!

Related posts:

1. Review of All New SalesNexus
2. Cloud Computing – What are the Costs After the Subscription?
3. Are Sales People Email Marketers?

The trouble is that qualifying prospects can be tough.  It really is more art than science.  Sure, in a highly regimented selling team, the “escalation” of an early stage prospect to the more time intensive steps like presentations, demonstrations, proposals, etc. can be completely contingent on thorough technical qualification.  Approved credit applications or other very specific criteria must be met first.

Of course, this takes the decision making out of the hands of the sales person completely.  Most sales people make the judgment of a prospect’s worthiness based mostly on instinct.  After all, in typical B2B sales, there are many factors that are completely subjective.

Sales people commonly see a stronger opportunity with prospects with which they have a strong relationship, even though the prospect’s company just announced layoffs.  It just costs less time to work with that prospect so, the risk is smaller.

In my experience, there is only one method of qualifying a prospect that is virtually guaranteed to be accurate, time after time.  Just as the sales person is making their own assessment of the return on their investment, of course, the prospect is doing the same.

Will the investment of their funds yield an acceptable return?  Cool features, a strong brand and other sexy aspects don’t always add to the bottom line.  Will the purchase save production time, reduce maintenance costs, improve quality, etc. in ways that will increase the bottom line more than the investment?  Further, will the prospects investment of time in researching your solution yield a return for them?

As seasoned sales pros know, customers will often spend time with sales people with no intention of ever buying anything.  Often, it’s not a malicious effort to extract free lunches, just an aimless search for answers to challenges and problems.

As a sales person, if you can’t identify how the prospect will realize return on their investment, then you can bet that the prospect has not identified it either and will not be making a purchase any time soon.

Yet, most sales people still pontificate on the features and benefits of their solution without ever doing the ROI math for themselves or the prospect.

For every sales person working harder than ever to find qualified prospects and bring home the bacon, it’s a two step dance to success:

1)      Can you clearly articulate in simple terms how your product or service yields a quantifiable return on investment to your customers in general?

2)      For the prospects you’re working with today and the ones you’ll meet tomorrow, focus your questions and dialog on identifying the ROI equation for each specific prospect.  If it cannot be identified, then move on down the road.

Related posts:

1. Should your sales people spend time on LinkedIn ?
2. Are Sales People Email Marketers?
3. 3 Ways to Measure Advertising and Marketing Return Easily

There are thousands of seasoned pro there to chime in and lend their experience to whatever is keeping you up at night.

I recently spoke with a client that was having a dispute with a former sales rep that had taken a list of customers with them to a new job.

So, I went on LinkedIn and started a discussion. Wow, crazy the wild variance of opinion you find!

The discussion on LinkedIn illustrates clearly that businesses assume they own leads, prospect lists, customer relationship information but, have no formal written agreement with their sales people on the matter. Meanwhile, sales people feel they’ve developed the information and relationships and therefore, it’s theirs.

And never the twain shall meet. Of course, my theory has always been that using an Online CRM gives the business an element of control over this issue that many don’t enjoy.

But, of course, there is more to it than just storing the information in customer database. I published an article on Technorati on the subject. Click here to read the article.

Related posts:

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3. Should your sales people spend time on LinkedIn ?

Well yes, except for a couple of details…

1)      In many small businesses, there is no Marketing Department

2)      In the course of communicating with leads, prospects and customers, sales people probably send out the vast majority of the emails sent by their company.

So, like it or not, your sales people are the primary purveyors of email messages to your customers.

It seems to me that this is one area where sales automation and CRM systems miss the boat.  If you really want to make sales people more efficient and effective then automate the repetitive tasks and make it easy for them to document the status of a given lead or opportunity.

All day every day, sales people send the same sorts of emails to multiple prospects and customers:

1)      Lead follow up – Thank you for your interest, please click here for more info, etc.

2)      Post presentation follow up – Summarize client needs, your businesses value proposition and next steps

3)      Customer follow up – How are things?  Feedback on the product/service?  Future needs?

Sure, the details of each may be personalized but, most of them are exactly the same.

Then there are the coordination emails…  “I’d like to schedule a meeting/phone call…”

And most importantly there are the emails that include an attached proposal or contract.

In all these cases, does it really make sense to leave it up to the sales person to write each one from scratch?  Of course not.  Sales people are not necessarily great at writing and certainly can be prone to grammar errors, etc.

But, more to the point, there are certain messages that you know your prospects and customers need to hear about your company.  There’s also the age old marketing principal that a prospect must see/hear a message several times before they remember it.

Of course, the point here is that sales people ARE really a big part of your email marketing strategy.  Even if your company is already doing a great job of email marketing, then those emails are seen by customers side by side with what is sent out by your sales team.

Does it make sense to use your CRM solution to give your sales team email templates they can quickly grab, edit a sentence or two and send out to a given prospect?  You bet!  This will save your sales team time and ensure their emails are professional and include the messages the business wants to emphasize.

Does it make sense to create on-going campaigns for leads, prospects and customers that send a series of timed emails out in a pre-planned sequence?  Yes.  However, this is where things typically get complicated.  Most online CRM systems, such as Salesforce.com, can’t do this and that means marketing would need to extract leads and prospects from the CRM, move them into the Email Marketing solution of choice and execute the campaign.

Should CRM and Email Marketing vendors find ways to put this capability directly in the hands of sales people?

In any size business, putting the power to broadcast messages out to hundreds of customers in the hands of sales people could be scary.  In a small business, lack of marketing staff makes the decision either make it easy for sales people to do it or don’t do it at all.

In 2011, can you afford to leave it to sales people to define your marketing messages for you?

Related posts:

1. Should your sales people spend time on LinkedIn ?
2. 4 Steps to Closing More Sales with Online CRM and Email Marketing
3. Why Should a Sales CRM Include Email Marketing?

As a part of our announcement of this new capability, I started a few discussions on LinkedIn to see what people thought.

The question I asked was “Why are sales teams still using ACT software?”.

The point of the question was to get at the core reasons businesses and sales people resist jumping on the SaaS or Cloud bandwagon.

Here are a few quotes from the responses -

“It is still arguably the easiest to use software for sales people, who tend towards strong interpersonal skills and weak technical skills.  I’ve got to say that ACT software, for core functionality, is still the simplest of them all.”

“We use ACT software to track opportunities. I love being able to attach documents to a customers file so they are right there when I need it. We rely on it to schedule follow up and as a manager I can see who my reps are calling.”

So essentially businesses have very basic needs.  In my experience, businesses that rely on ACT software want to do the types of things that any sales organization would want to do – stay on top of follow ups, record notes, track the sales pipeline and archive communications like emails, proposals, etc.

I’ve spoken to many sales leaders and business owners that have depended on ACT software for years and due to changes in their business, they’re looking to move ACT online.  But, they can’t find a solution that won’t be too complicated and expensive.

Just the migration to another system is surprisingly challenging and costly.  If you tell Salesforce.com that you’d like to move your ACT database online with them, and you’re smart enough to get very specific and ask about your valuable notes, sales pipeline, etc., they’ll tell you its going to involve buying some software, learning to use it yourself and migrating tables from ACT software into Salesforce.com one at a time.  Or, they can connect you with a consultant to do it for you but, there’s plenty of problems with that approach too.

Not to mention the change for the users.  If your sales team has been using ACT software for years, they’re going to need to learn a new system and that’s probably the most costly part of the transition.

So, you’ve got to have VERY compelling reasons to move your ACT database to the cloud to make it worth all that.  Of course, there are HUGE benefits of moving to the cloud.  Ultimately, it should be worth it.  Now your team is always in sync and up to date with real time information.  Less time spent trying to get the latest information and more time spent using it to find and close opportunities.

Of course, there is one web based CRM vendor that focuses on making the transition from ACT software to the cloud very easy for management and the sales team.

Related posts:

1. Moving ACT CRM to the Cloud
2. Is Online CRM Safe and Secure?
3. Why It’s Time to Move On From ACT! Contact Management

The subject is near and dear to my heart….  Cloud Computing solutions are often very competitive in terms of subscription costs and features but, often the “hidden costs” are greater than the subscription.

What are the costs of customizing it?  Training?  Support?  Consulting?  Of course, we see the confusion around these questions every day when talking with businesses searching for online CRM and Email Marketing solutions.

Read the article here.

Of course its an honor and a great opportunity to be published on such a popular and authoritative site as Technorati!

I’d really appreciate it if you’d Like it and Tweet it and comment on it so they’ll be glad I’m an author!  Thanks!

Related posts:

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Well, it hasn’t worked out that way.  Customers that planned to hire sales people in early 2011 have now slowed or halted their plans.

The economic news this week has not been encouraging at all.  Now, I’m an optimist at heart and certainly there is good news out there.  I see customers in certain segments growing robustly.

Of course, sales people hear about all this from their customers every day.

And how do they respond?  Well, each will respond differently but, for certain sales pipeline meetings will include reports of plans “on hold” from customers, etc.

We know that often customers use “excuses” to avoid the uncomfortable truth.  Of course, that’s what separates great sales people from the rest.  They know the difference.  They have the skills to build relationships of trust that let them know what’s really driving the customer’s decisions.

For some sales people, for some sales teams, this bad news will take hold and make it easier to accept these put offs and excuses.  And the bad news from the sales team goes up to the board and the board reports it to the analysts, the news reports it, etc. and the vicious cycle is in full swing.

How can a sales person, a sales team or a sales manager avoid all of this?  How can you turn bad news into good?

Its all about the fundamentals.  Its all about the sales process.  In baseball, when a pitcher is off his game, the coaches take him back to the mechanics of his wind up.

Back to Mechanics, Back to Sales Process

For sales people, the mechanics are the sales process.  Sales people that win in tough times are the ones that respond to bad news by rededicating themselves to the fundamentals of their sales process.  And what are those fundaments?

A sales process is…

1. How do you find leads?  Getting referrals, cold calling from a list, contacting existing or previous customers?  Increase your time spent finding leads.
2. How do you qualify leads and identify hot prospects?  Of course, expertise and focus here will minimize bad news later in the process.  Ask the hard questions up front.  If you’re unable to identify a strong case for the customer to make an investment with you in which you can clearly show that the benefits of the investment are so compelling that they cannot be delayed, then you may need to go back to finding more leads.
3. Building trust, managing the multiple influencers in a complex purchase, proposals, presentations, etc.  Typically, these are the mechanics that sales people naturally focus their time on.  In the later stages of the sales process, if the customer starts pulling out the excuses about plans being on hold, go back to getting more leads or go back to building a stronger case for the return on investment.

It should be a process.  The more objective the decisions, the more consistently the sales team will get the mechanics right and find their way to the best prospects in any economic climate.

And how do we make the decisions clear and objective for sales people?  In my experience, defining the sales process very specifically is where organizations come up short.  The business leaves room in the sales process for sales people to make their own judgements and that wiggle room is where the seeds of sales pipeline doom and gloom are found.

Most business owners and sales leaders hesitate in defining a clear process because they don’t have a good way to track and measure the process.  And there in is the answer.  You have to start.  Start tailoring your sales pipeline tracking system or online CRM to track your specific sales process.  Don’t expect to get it right the first time.  Just start looking at the measurements.

Use information to determine where the sales process is working and where its not.  You’ll find that measuring whatever rudimentary process you have today will point the way to completely counter-intuitive improvements in the process you won’t likely see by listening to stories from sales people about customers with bad news.

Related posts:

1. What is a Sales Process and Why Do I Need One?
2. Getting Contact Management Implementation Right Takes a Bit of Time
3. Can Online CRM Be The Recipe for Sales Success

“Move it to the Cloud” is the mantra in all the CRM trade press.  However, there are no shortage of businesses that are still using 5 or 10 year old versions of ACT CRM and other contact managers because they aren’t willing to believe that their valuable customer information is safe “out there” on the Internet.

It really is a rational fear.  Especially for a business that’s accumulated years and years of customer relationship information, its a strategic asset and letting it fall into the wrong hands or just not having access to it temporarily could have dire consequences.

However, my life in sales, both before the cloud and “in the cloud” has taught me that managing customer information inside your own four walls is actually less safe.

4 Reasons Online CRM is Safer than Your Office Network

How can that be?  Well, here are 4 reasons customer relationship information is safer and more secure with online CRM vs. ACT software or any other contact management system you could run on your own server.

1. Most data theft is committed by internal employees.  (source: Data Monitor)  In this case, its your sales people we’re talking about.  If a sales person knows they’ll be let go soon or have taken a job with an industry competitor, are they likely to consider making a copy of their customer information?  You bet.  In fact, if you customer database is on your local area network, they can probably make a copy of the entire thing!
2. A competitor that attempts to steal your customer information is far more likely to success penetrating your company network than those of reputable online CRM providers.  You might have a fire wall but, most any hacker can get past that.  Most online CRM providers have multiple layers of security in place including state of the art intrusion detection systems.
3. You are more likely to have a failure of your internal network, servers or computers that disrupts the use of your contact management system than for the Internet to fail or your online CRM provider to have unscheduled down time.  Most sizable online CRM vendors have redundancy built in so they are highly tolerant of hardware or software failures as well as Internet outages.
4. Finally, a lot of this is driven by the profit motive and economies of scale.  The costs of redundancy and top notch security is probably beyond most businesses even if they had the expertise to implement and maintain it.  Online CRM providers have their entire businesses depending on their ability to provide reliable access to customer information to their customers.  They have thousands of customers paying them for it which allows them to invest in the security and rednancy required.

More Control, Not Less, with Online CRM

We’ve all heard the stories about sales people that walk out the door with a business’ customer list and go straight to the competition.  With most online CRM solutions, no one has that type of access.  In fact, most online CRMs allow the business to control the rights of each user to see only certain customers or territories and their ability to export or save any data at all.

Related posts:

1. Moving ACT CRM to the Cloud
2. Software CRM vs. Online CRM – The Pros and Cons – Part 2
3. Why It’s Time to Move On From ACT! Contact Management

This week we hosted a webinar with Wendy Weiss, The Queen of Cold Calling™, and Beth Rush of Rush Marketing Group entitled “Maximizing Sales Funnel Conversions through Combining Sales Calling and Emailing”.

What a great discussion!  The webinar was very popular, Wendy and Beth were great, and the slides, video, etc. are available here.

Online CRM and Automated Email Marketing Really Does Impact Sales – What a concept!

It hadn’t really dawned on me until we heard the type of questions being asked by the group but, there are a LOT of businesses and sales people that want to add emails into their sales process but, just don’t know how to get started.

So, with that in mind, here are the 5 things I think any business should know as they add emails into the sales process.

Have a system – dare I say an Online CRM…?

This is a point Wendy Weiss hammered home during our webinar.  We’re all busy and if you don’t map out the steps in the process of pursuing and closing a prospect, you’re going to get lost, forget, procrastinate and mis-time things.  Wendy is a big proponent of voice mail scripts.  Plan out what voice mails you’ll leave on the first call, the second call, etc.

Well, the same is true with your emails.    And of course, your calls, voice mails and emails should all complement each other.  In any business, there are a series of messages you need to communicate to potential customers that highlight the need for your service, differentiate you from your competitors and demonstrate the strength of your solution.  Your campaign can hit these messages one by one, in voice mails, calls and emails.

Keep it simple – don’t waste months on complex online CRM implementations

It seems, in talking with our many online CRM customers, that most sales leaders get stuck trying to develop a system that’s way too sophisticated.  For instance, if you’ve never done email marketing before, there are a lot of unknowns.  However, all day every day, your sales team is sending emails to prospects manually.  Just ask them what they send out most frequently and develop standardized emails to accomplish the same goals.  The same is true for voice mails.  Start with making a more consistent system out of what you’re doing today.

The secret is to understand that you will never get it perfect.  But, you have to start somewhere.

I think the easiest way to take a step forward with adding emails to your sales prospecting process is to create simple emails asking for an appointment.  After leaving two voice mails, send an email asking if there is a good time to call.  Some people respond to emails more frequently than calls.  This is an easy win.

Measure it – that’s what online CRMs are great at!

Figure out how you’re going to measure how many dials are made, conversations are had, voice mails left, emails sent and of course, orders taken.  If you can measure these things, then you don’t have to sweat the details of what the voice mail script is or the email says.  You’ll quickly see which ones are working and which ones are not and can make adjustments as you go.

If you’re only way to measure the process is to see what sales get closed at the end of the month, then you’ll never know which parts of the system are working and which are not.

An example is email tracking.  Email marketing systems let you measure which emails get opened or clicked on and how often.  If a particular email is not getting opened as much as others, then there is something wrong with the subject line.  If an email is getting opened a lot but, no one is clicking on the link, then the call to action is not compelling.  This is actionable intelligence that you can use to make quick adjustments.

Start Now

As above, this doesn’t have to be rocket science.  However, the potential return is HUGE!  If you have sales people calling prospects all day now, then just increasing their success rate in connecting with prospects by 5 or 10% means significant dollars on the bottom line.  By organizing your campaign to be sure all prospects hear all your key messages, you’re more thoroughly branding your company and even those that don’t respond today will know to call you when they need you.  Sales people will spend more time on the phone with serious prospects and less time with tire-kickers.

The great news is that sales people aren’t going to resist this as much as they typically resist new technology.  It’s just intuitive that sending out automated emails via an online CRM that coordinates the emails with their calling efforts is going to help them connect with prospects and sell more.

Related posts:

1. ACT CRM Users Combine Calling and Email to Grow Sales
2. Succeed in 2011 – Turn off your mind and turn on your Online CRM
3. How to Stop Chasing Sales Prospects and Start Getting Call Backs