Sales Tip - Handling Requests for Information

Almost every organisation receives requests for information, whether it be a brochure to be posted, material sent by email, or a web site enquiry. In all cases when you send information to a potential client, proper follow up can make the difference in closing the business.

When a potential client calls, you have the opportunity to gather important information; information which you will need later as the opportunity progresses. This may be simply address and contact details, but you will also have some questions, and gather information to qualify the opportunity. By storing all these details into your CRM system, it will be available at your fingertips for later follow up.

Also don't underestimate the cost of not properly following up on your leads. For every enquiry received you have already invested in the marketing to get that far - whether it be direct mail, telemarketing or advertising. Having a system in place to ensure timely follow up will maximise your marketing investment.

Brochures

In many cases you will want to send the prospect a brochure - and you will do a covering letter. You have already gathered the contact details, so your CRM system will quickly generate the letter using your familiar desktop application (typically Microsoft Word). You can have a library of templates, which can be used as is, or modified for the opportunity.

Your CRM system should also be able to enter a follow up as a reminder at some future date, say 1 weeks time. So when next week comes around, you get a to-do list pop up with all the follow ups that are due.

Of course at that point, a week down the track, you have forgotten what you wrote in the letter. No problem, the CRM system opens the original letter so you can see exactly what was said.

Email

For many organisations it is becoming far more common to email a brochure or information, rather than using regular post. So now your covering letter becomes the text of the email, and the attachment is a brochure in pdf or other electronic form.

Again the CRM system supports this process, with a number of email templates and a library of electronic brochures on file. At the time of sending the email you can set a follow up reminder.

Web Site Enquires

With increasing use of the Internet and search engines, enquiries from your  web site are probably a common source of leads. In this case, you have already done some of the work in gathering basic details because the client has typed the information into the form on the web site! Some careful web site programming can ensure this information is complete and makes sense - for example ensuring key data such as company name and phone number are entered.

Having received the information, this should be entered automatically into the CRM system (without having to re-type!). This can be achieved in various ways from simple mail Marcos to extract the data from an email, to more sophisticated integration between the web server and CRM system.

It is then just a matter of following your usual procedures to send the requested information and set up a time for a follow up call.

Commence RM: Australian Edition supports all of these processes and provides many other tools to help your sales professionals work efficiently. Commence has all the basic fields for gathering client information, and with the flexibility of Commence, it is easy to add additional fields and tables.

You can enter follow ups as you are adding notes, sending letters or creating emails. Then you will be prompted in your to-do list when the follow up falls due. And Commence can be integrated directly with your web site, so enquiries appear automatically in the database, and are flagged as a web enquiry.

Other sales tools provided include forecasts and management of opportunities through the sales cycle, which can be customised to suit the sales process in your organisation. Quotes are created quickly with drag and drop, and when the business closes the quote can be immediately converted to an invoice with the click of a button.

Finally, the information you have gathered, plus the invoice now sent, is automatically transferred to your accounting department using MYOB, with the AccountLink MYOB interface.