Prospect Management is often called managing the Sales Cycle – the steps taken to convert an initial contact into a sale.
Sales Lead Management
As sales leads are coming into your business you need to manage the relationship between you and your customer in a professional manner. The single most important action is to contact your prospect as soon as you can – sales leads will cool off quickly. You might have spent £1000′s on lead generation campaigns and you can undo all of your hard work and investment by not following up quickly enough.
Ideally all the details of the sales enquiry will be logged in a centralised database with a diarised call back system. Customers will not always be available the first time you call, so you need to be able to generate call-back lists by time and date to ensure that you are on top of all your new potential business. The database should also be able to capture any information you require – such as the interest, details of the company and where the lead has come from.
This will mean you can report on how successful your individual marketing campaigns are and how effectively you are investing your budget.
The Sales Cycle
Every company has a different sales cycle – it may take hours, days, months or even years to close a sale. Redfoot Solutions are able to help you look at at your business and use CRM (customer relationship management) systems such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM or ACT! by Sage to track and manage your customers and prospects more effectively – improving your lead to sale ratio. As with any key area of your business, the sales cycle needs to measured and managed in order to optimise results. Find out more about sales management reporting.
Appointment Tracking
A key metric in measuring your sales cycle will always be conversion rates. Tracking sales leads to sales is often not enough. Often you will need to break the sales cycle down into components in order to measure how effective your team is. For example, in order to identify how effective your field sales force is at converting appointments to sales you may need to track appointments to sales ratios.
Sales Information Retention
If your sales team uses a CRM solution such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM or ACT! by Sage to record sales information gained at sales appointments, in the event that a sales person leaves your business, you retain any sales information gained – making it accessable to the rest of your team.
