April 14, 2010 by Kendra Von Achen.

Have you ever sat down to calculate what your annual salary equates to per hour?  I have!  Let’s say you have a salary of $50,000 a year.  That equates to $24.80/hour if you work an 8 hour day! (50,000/12 months/4.2 weeks/40 hours)

Now let’s say you are a sales manager and have 10 sales people under you.  You are looking to increase sales monthly but feel your team is maxed out in time spent during a typical day between sales calls, meetings, administrative items, travel time, and networking. 

All of a sudden, someone hands you a magic wand and gives you one hour of time a day PER SALES PERSON!!  So now, what does an hour mean to you?  In this scenario, it means 50 hours a week for your team to be devoting to additional sales activities.  It also equates to $1,240 of freed up resources in salary per week (if each sales person is making $50,000 per year).

Not to get too mathematical here, but continuing with this scenario, if your sales team averages 100 calls an hour (10 calls each), and can now make 100 additional calls a day, or 500 more a week, and your team averages a closing ratio of 5%, you now have 25 more sales in a week.  If each sale is worth $1,000 to your company, you just increased your monthly sales quota by $105,000!

You’re probably saying to yourself, “these are great numbers in theory, but I don’t have an extra hour of time in each of my team members to hit such numbers!”  And you’re right – if you don’t make any changes to the way you are currently doing business.  BUT, if you make some simple changes, you too can achieve such remarkable increases to your bottom line.  Below are four steps that will move you in the right direction.

Step #1:      If you are currently working as a team but managing information individually, consolidate!  Take all of your sales team’s lead/prospect information and manage it in one location with all team members having access to the list.

Step #2:      Hold your team accountable for properly tracking all pertinent lead/prospect information – notes, appointments, calls made, to-do’s, issues, products/services interested in, etc.  The more information that is tracked, the better chance of closing the sale and following up.  But if your team is not held accountable, they will most likely not begin to track this kind of information.

Step #3:      Report on all key sales statistics (# calls made per sales rep, # meetings set/completed, # days between follow-ups, etc.).  Share the gains/losses with your team so they feel like part of the process and accountable for the change.

Step #4:      Start counting up the number of additional sales opportunities your team discovers in the first month of applying these changes.  You should begin to see an upward trend in sales activities, which should then convert into an increase in closed business and revenue.

If you are not already taking such measures in your day-to-day sales efforts, I urge you to begin doing so.  What have you got to lose but time?  The benefit is a gain of time tenfold to the time it takes to set up a system within your team.

If you want to achieve maximum results, invest in a database system that can handle tracking all of this information, like a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

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Kendra Von Achen is President of DB Pros, a database & business consulting company based in NJ.  For more information on this and other CRM-related topics, contact her at kendra@dbprosconsulting.com or visit their website at www.dbprosconsulting.com.

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December 14, 2009 by Kendra Von Achen.

Not only is it difficult to get data out of Outlook for contacts, but it is equally as difficult to get your complete data back into Outlook contacts!  The import tool that is a part of Outlook software does not allow you to pull in all fields, such as File As!  I find this disturbing.  Luckily, so do others, which is why there are add-on tools out there that allow you to import all necessary fields back into Outlook.

The one I found to be most useful and cost-effective is ContactGenie DataPorter (www.contactgenie.com).  The company has a simpler tool called ContactGenie Importer but my computer was having issues with the process so I opted for the more complex program.

 I thank the folks at ContactGenie for helping me get through my client project and make the client happy by allowing fields like File As to be imported correctly back into Outlook.

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November 19, 2009 by Kendra Von Achen.

Last week at a networking event, someone asked me what MY favorite CRM system is.  My answer to him was “that depends”, and here’s why. CRM is not a “one size fits all” tool for all businesses.  There are solely operated businesses, small, medium, large, and multi-national conglomerates.  There’s companies in more industries than there are Jeopardy categories.  So how can you expect the software that will help you manage your day-to-day operations, your sales, marketing and customer support (and then some) be the same for everyone? To further clarify my answer to this man, I also told him that the system you choose can live in many different environments – installed software on your own servers and computers; SAAS (software as a service) that lives in cyberspace; or a combination of the two (and they’re now coming out with Software in the Cloud that is different than SAAS).   But that is just the tip of the iceberg. If the only factors to choosing a CRM system for your business were as simple as the size of your company, industry, and whether you wanted installed software or SAAS, then it would be a much easier decision for people to make.  Each system out there today that you can purchase either online, at your local office supply store, through the vendor’s sales rep, or through a reseller have very different characteristics, all that are important to your purchase decision. Click here to get 5 key fundamentals to selecting the right CRM system for your business.

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