Most businesses seem to have two failures in common.  First, they are neglecting one of the most important aspects of their marketing program – to follow-up with their leads and customers – because it’s boring, time consuming and a general pain in the neck.

The second common failure is in handling lead management.  Company owners often have no idea what is happening to leads they distribute to their sales force.  They don’t know if anyone is calling them, or if the sales person is just “skimming the cream” or “cherry picking”—which by the way, you can’t blame them: they have a limited amount of time and get paid commissions to close sales, so they spend time with the hot leads, not the ones that are tough to get a hold of or the ones where the timing isn’t exactly right.  The problem here is that no one knows what is happening to the rest of the leads that come in the door.

This is where a Customer Relationship Management Program can help.  Not only in can it help your sales force use their time more effectively but it can also help managers do a better job.

A good CRM Program will have the following benefits:

1. Marketing Automation & Communication.  Automatically execute multi-step, multi-media marketing campaigns to prospects, partners, clients, past customers, friends, and anyone else you want; track responses to marketing campaigns and report the effectiveness of marketing pieces and campaigns

2. Sales tracking that allows sales people to manage prospects and customers through various stages of the sale; know exactly what to do with a lead and when to do it; automate the process.

3. Central Contact Management Database: Store prospect and customer data in a central system; manage tasks;     store documents electronically; keep customer’s communications logs; group contacts for organization and efficient communications; import & export data from virtually any source.

4. Management Tracking to assign leads to sales people and keep tabs on the progress of those leads; customize the sales pipeline to reflect the sales stages used in your company; identify bottlenecks in the sales process (bad leads, bad lead sources, bad sales people?)

Technorati Tags: contact management, crm, marketing automation, sales tracking