How Internet Marketing Can Increase Your Sales
Page 5
The Sales System
CRM Sales & Marketing System: Now once a prospect takes action and calls, clicks, or emails what happens to them? If you are like many sales organizations a sales rep or admission officer takes down the information, talks to them, and maybe sends out some materials. If they are really good they may even remember to follow up in 30 or maybe 50 days to see what they decided.
Next question where is this prospect’s contact information at? Did the person write it down on a sticky note? Copy it onto a ledger pad? What happens if that paper gets buried? What happens if that person is out sick and the prospect were to call back? Do your sales people know where to find this information? Or will they just ask the prospect for all the information again all the while repeatedly putting them on hold to try and track down this missing information? How do you think this looks to your prospect. If it were me I would be aggravated that you had not followed up with me and even more aggravated that you didn’t even know who I was when I called back.
As you can see from above getting a prospect to take action is hard enough, don’t let them get away because you are disorganized. You need to get information about the prospect and you need to get them put into a structured sales system that does three things…
- Delivers effective messages
- Is consistent
- Is measurable
Notice how these goals keep coming back. There is a software system out there that does this type of thing very well. It is part of an industry called CRM, which stands for Customer Relationship Management. This is about a 7 billion dollar a year industry with estimates putting it at about 15 billion by 2008.
CRM is a system that allows you to centralize all of the information about your prospects and customers. It gives you the tools that allow you to deliver effective messages on a consistent basis and is completely measurable.
What the system does in a nutshell is keep all the information about your prospects and customers in an easy to use database. It stores basic information like name, address, phone, email, etc. but it also stores much more like which of your offerings they are interested in. It can track how they came into the database, i.e. your web site, newspaper ad, direct mail, etc. If they are already a customer it can connect their academic record with their accounting records.
Over time you will start seeing patterns of information develop like ads that are run on Sunday in a certain section of the paper consistently draw more prospects then ads that run weekly. This information will become invaluable in determining how to allocate your marketing dollars and which messages seem to attract the most prospects.
© Copyright 2004 - 2007 by Michael Temple
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