As less leads present themselves, each lead becomes more important. Those things that we might not have done before as sales reps and customer service reps -- tracking those touch points with customers, proactively following-up with customers and leads -- have become exponentially more important. We need to double our efforts to make sure we are retaining every existing customer as well as taking advantage of every opportunity that presents itself.
It is in these times that you may want to take a closer look at Opportunity Management, Campaigns, and Expenses (if you are not already using them). These three pieces tie together to provide a...
- sales funnel for managing active deals, tracking successfully closing deals, and seeing why deals are being lost,
- measurement of marketing and sales event success, including budgeting and cost analysis, lead generation and closure rates, and analysis of money spent vs. sales dollars generated,
- expense analysis for where we are spending out money and how effective that spending is,
- tool for measuring effective sales practices for use as training points for sales rep and customer service rep development.
If you are interested in tracking your efforts and successes more closely, here are a couple of places to get started:
For your next marketing campaign (e-mail distribution, postal mailing, or distributor show), create a Campaign. Assign it a budget, a lead goal, and a sales goal. As expenses are incurred for attending and delivering on this event, enter and link the Expenses to the Campaign. As qualified leads comes back, enter them as Opportunities associated to the Campaign. As you work on the leads from this campaign, you will have a picture of how many leads are coming back, whether they are closing successfully, and how much it cost to close those deals. You can continue to track against this campaign as long as it is viable; when it is done, close it and start another.
You can certainly track multiple campaigns at once as well, whether they are different shows attended by each sales rep, multiple flyers being sent out to different market segments, or monthly sales goals for the company, sales rep, or inside sales department.
In difficult times, use the tools that increase productivity, add to the total sales dollars, and track rapidly changing customer behaviour to better work with those customer and close opportuntities as they are presented.
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