Bill Rice Internet Marketing > contact management software

Contact Management-Top 10 Secrets to More Contacts and More Sales

August 29, 2008 By

Increasing your sales contact rate and sales conversion should not be a mystery. It takes discipline and diligence. Is your contact management system designed to maximize sales performance? If you are operating off an Excel spreadsheet or flipping through contacts in Outlook or ACT!–you are static. These are not contact strategies–they are contact miracles.

Here are 10 contact management strategies that will get you more sales:

1. Centralize Your Contacts: Stop the madness with sticky notes, address books, rolodex, business cards, and Outlook. Find one place for sales leads and get them all in there. This is about to become your most valuable asset as a sales professional–so, I suggest you have a sturdy, backed-up, easy to maintain contact database-based system.

2. Script Your Process, Not Your Conversation: Sales scripts kill more sales than they bring. However, knowing exactly how you want to target and the process you want to take a lead through to become a happy customer is valuable. Map the process, and the potential deviations, of your ideal sales process. This mapping process will help you measure your performance and process better as well as making you sharp in front of the prospective client.

3. Put Your Contacts Database in Motion: Static databases cause sales prospects to rot on the vine. Put your contact management system in motion. Unfortunately, most lead management software does not have an automated mechanism to constantly optimize and suggest the next best lead. So, you may have to do a little work here. Segment and build a call list based on last contact–daily. Do not randomly meander through your address book–that is another sale miracle strategy.

4. Don’t Think, Call: I’ll make this real simple. Dial–Hang-Up–Dial. Repeat until exhausted. This is the MOST IMPORTANT SALES TIP you will ever get!

5. Let Email Help You: Email is a great tool to remove barriers and anxieties between you and a new prospect. Make it work for you. Automate email campaigns based on various statuses within your sales process. The primary objective it to create response while you are calling–increasing your overall sales velocity.

6. Schedule a Time, Even If They Don’t Answer: People are busy and increasingly hate to be interrupted–especially by sales calls. Prevent this initial objection by always scheduling a time. This works for an initial conversation, follow-up to the current call, or even a voicemail. Voicemail appointments is a powerful tactic that is rarely used, and it is a dandy. When you leave a voicemail tell the prospect when to expect your next call. This simple psychological trick sets expectations and reduces the perceived interruption on your call back. You will be amazed by the contact rate lift.

7. Try ALL Contact Information: I can’t tell you the times I have seen smart sales people kill sales leads over one bad phone number or incorrect email. Try all of the contact information available data errors and contact information migration is rampant. There is also a wide range of personal contact preferences too. Do loss a sale because of laziness.

8. Never Kill a Lead–Nurture It: Leads should never be killed in your contact management software. People don’t say no because they don’t buy things–they are simply waiting for the right time and value. Treat them as such. Place withdrawn or less promising leads into a lead nurturing campaign that keeps you in a light touch and education mode.

9. Work in 30 Minute Bursts: Calling and sales is an intense emotional business. Like an athlete driven by adrenline and achievement you need to run your race, recover, and then run again. Approach any sales activities in burst of energy and use recovery periods to tidy up lose ends for the next burst.

10. Set A Daily Contact Goal, Not a Daily Sales Goal: Here is another powerful technique that is often overlooked. Don’t base your day on sales quotas. Measure and manage you sales day on activity and contact rates. If you apply the effort and hit your activity rates the sales will come. Continue to tweak and reset your activity goals based on known conversions to consistently hit your monthly quota.

Reread 4!

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Bill Rice is the founder of Kaleidico, a leader in contact management sales software. He is a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on marketing and sales. He is passionate about helping organizations execute more profitable sale management strategies.

Filed Under: Contact Management, Lead Management, Social Selling Tagged With: act, Contact Management, contact management software, contact rate, Lead Management, leads

Sales Pipeline Management, The GTD Approach

August 28, 2008 By

Getting Things Done (GTD), the powerful efficiency concept from David Allen, is often applied to our task list and our email inbox, but rarely to more complex processes like our sales pipeline. However, the principles are the same and the effects could be staggering.

Sales is an Art, Not Really

Sales as an art form is the lead myth and barrier to consistent sales performance. Sales is a process that is performed. Granted some better than other. Just like an Olympic athlete–the technique is consistent, some just get better at it.

Unfortunately, for our sales organizations somewhere along the way we got the impression that there were a variety of better ways to swim the 100M freestyle. Rubbish!

Sales is about making efficiently making contact, delivering value, and collecting money. Most of those you can’t control. I have said it before, but it boils down to this: If the product sucks–you don’t need sales. If the market sucks–you don’t need sales. So, lets figure that out as fast as possible by contacting more people more efficiently with GTD.

Collection

Get all of you stuff in one place. That means all of your contacts, leads, people. Whatever you want to call them–you need them together. When you start calling you don’t want to be hunting for names, phone numbers, or who they are. Dial–Hang-up–Dial.

This means you need a database, spreadsheet, or contact management software that lets you efficiently move from one contact to the next. I suggest contact management software with a robust lead management database. This is going to allow you to scale and make a lot of notes. Hopefully you are building a rolodex for the ages.

Processing

You need a system. Calling fast and frequently is great, but you need to know what to do with each contact based on the results of the call. GTD has a nice 5 choice process. Make your sales lead management process just as simple:

  1. Trash it
  2. Close it
  3. Transfer it (hand it up or down)
  4. Schedule it
  5. Nurture it


There is nothing else.

Organizing

When you organize your sales pipeline manage it in the same way as GTD. Set-up the right buckets and make sure your processing system gets the right contacts into the right buckets.

Here are the buckets I use:

  1. Attempted
  2. Contacted
  3. Proposal
  4. Closed
  5. Withdrawn
  6. Scheduled
  7. Bogus


The nice thing about creating buckets in your contact management software is you can use it to automate your contact flow, lead prioritization, and any lead nurturing campaigns you have. Manual or automated–organizing into predefined buckets makes sales happen faster.

Reviewing

No system is perfect. Review it. See what is working and what is not.

This is again where a good lead management database comes in handy. Look at your reports and do some quick analysis. Don’t get overwhelmed by the minutae–eyeball your reports for oddities.

I like to look for what I call–”slowing and heaping” in my reports.

What processes seem to be happening slower or less frequently than expected? Try something new to speed them up.

Where are leads piling up? Try something to process them out of the log jam.

Doing

Want to know the number one cause of most poor sales performance? Ssssssh, come close for the secret…NOT DOING ANYTHING!

That’s right. Just doing something even without a contact database, or a system, or a process, or organization will yield more than standing around organizing sheets of paper, counting your pencils, or labeling your folders.

As Nike says, “Just Do It!”

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Bill Rice is the founder of Kaleidico, a leader in contact management sales software. He is a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on marketing and sales. He is passionate about helping organizations execute more profitable sale management strategies.

Filed Under: Contact Management, Lead Management Tagged With: contact management software, gtd, sales pipeline, sales pipeline management, social selling

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