Bill Rice Internet Marketing > Contact Management

Sales Management-Motivating Sales Teams in Down Markets

September 10, 2008 By

The economy is hitting every aspect of business hard. However, if you are managing a sales team you have an even tougher challenge–motivation. The upside is, if you get this right you are in for big wins.

Expect Wins

Expecting failure is a sure fire way to get it. You should continue to expect performance even when markets are tough. Continue to set goals and demand people pull their mark. Simple goals setting for the team and individuals is critical. This fundamental exercise will drive people to exceed their own beliefs–as they see the team slipping or surging they will pick up their individual game.

If they don’t, you know where to go for your next cuts when you miss your sales revenue projections.

Encourage Creativity

Tough times require creativity and risk taking. Now is not the time to discourage that. Challenge people to reach out and find new ways to get prospects, pitch product, and close deals.

Make these innovations and kudos center stage at your sales meetings.

Rally Around Success

Every success is a chance to prove your vision is possible. Make every win, every met goal, every exceeded goal and turn it into a rally cry.

Don’t limit this to your own successes. Set-up the motivation board–tack up external sales team successes, competitor statements, stories of famous sales winners.

Michael Phelps’ coach was famous for tacking up articles in Phelp’s locker from people and competitors that said he couldn’t. Convince your team no one gets to tell them to quit.

No Excuses

Excuses are a cancer. They often invade a sales team and there is little prognosis of cure. Reject them out of hand and if they spread cut them out immediately.

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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: Sales Management Tagged With: Contact Management, motivating sales, sales goals, sales motivation, sales team

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

Lazy Man’s Daily 8 Step Sales Plan

August 28, 2008 By

Sales is hard. It runs on emotion–full of ups and downs. That is why having a daily plan is so important. It certainly won’t be everything you do, but it will be a foundation for sales growth. Make it simple. Work it.

  1. Build Daily Contact List: Query, by last contact date, your daily contact list. Some contact managers, like Kaleidico’s icoSales , allows you to automate call back periods for calls and emails allowing you to skip this step–making sales even lazier.
  2. Segment Contact List: Logically split your list into email contacts and phone contacts based on your preferred process, but certainly use a combination throughout your prospect phase. Then slice again by prospect, proposal, customer.
  3. Personal Brand Building: Post to your blog. I suggest posts about what you do and how you do it. Someone may want you to do it for them.
  4. Learning and Sharing: Cruise your RSS reader (make sure you have your Twitter listener too) for opportunities to learn more about potential customers. Comment and add value to the conversation.
  5. Follow-ups: Dive into your email. Certainly follow-up on any inquiries, but also send out status updates to any proposal phase customers and teasers updates to customers. This is a great way to activate a static sales pipeline.
  6. New Outreach: Using the same daily email list concept, blast out sales letters or emails to new contacts and prospects.
  7. Daily Call List: Now that you have email working for you in the background–make your calls and leave voicemails for call backs. Don’t forget to set expectations and schedule the next call back on every messages you leave.
  8. Take Calls: Always take the call! If at all possible, live and directly answer every call. It is such a shocker these days to immediately connect to a real person–that alone will get you sales.


This sales plan is simple. Consisting really of only three concepts: list building, brand building, and making contact. By spending only a few minutes a day preparing a contact list, leaving a few comments, and leveraging email you will be building a steady flow of inbound inquiries.

Enjoy making your sales day lazier.

If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice

photo credit: kirainet
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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: contact database, Contact Management, contact manager, sales plan

Sales Contact Management–What Should It Do?

August 26, 2008 By

Sales contact management should discipline YOU. It should look at your contacts and understand what stage of the process they are in, when they need to be called next, when they should be sent a specific communication by email.

Sales contact management is not about you looking into a dead database and trying to decide what to work on–it is about serving you the lead most likely to close at that point in time.

If Amazon wanted to be like big box retailers, they could present goods on shelves in groups for you to browse. This is the same as a dead contact database–it simply groups names together for you with no action attached.

But Amazon goes one step further–every time you enter Amazon.com, the first thing you see is your personal recommendations from Amazon. You shop, you click, you buy, you trust technology to make the decision.

Why wouldn’t you expect the same from your contact manager? Managing leads is a job for technology, not for you. You are a sales person. Just like Amazon–you’re not a librarian, you want the book, not the map of how to get to the book. Expect the same from your contact manager.

If not, then what is the technology application good for? Holding your leads? (Psst–Excel can do that) Find a better solution that makes your technology work FOR you. Need another hint? It’s icoSales by Kaleidico.

contact me: keith burwell

my company: Kaleidico

Filed Under: Contact Management Tagged With: Contact Management, Lead Management, sales technology

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