There's so much more customer management technology available then just the "big" CRM software suites. Here's an article by Alex Salkever, Turning Sales Into Science, that covers some of the most interesting new technologies:
Remember the bad old days of sales-oriented technology? Customer relationship management systems that cost a fortune to install and crashed easily. Downloadable lists of sales leads filled with old or bogus data. E-mail marketing tools that targeted the wrong consumers. And on and on.
Fortunately, software firms that target small companies with sales tools have been getting smarter and smarter. Following pioneers such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite, a new generation of companies is offering easy-to-use, cheap (indeed, often free) technology that can supercharge the performance of your sales force--with minimal training and virtually none of the heavy-duty installation associated with the CRM systems of the past.
With lead-generation and networking services, e-mail marketing products, relationship managing tools, and other bells and whistles, it's now possible to turn a sales operation into a gleaming high-tech machine. Here's a quick tutorial on some of the new tools and a nine-step guide to launching your sales force into the future.
1. Build a bigger Rolodex
The Products - Jigsaw, Ziggs, ZoomInfo, Spoke
How They Work - It's said that a salesperson is only as good as his or her Rolodex. Fortunately, it's now easy to have a much, much bigger Rolodex. There are a number of websites that invite businesspeople to upload and share their contacts with one another.
2. Network more efficiently
The Products - LinkedIn, Ryze, BranchIt, CompanyClick
How They Work - Unless you're selling something like video games or skateboarding gear, you're probably not going to have much luck marketing on MySpace. Fortunately, a number of social networking services geared toward small business have emerged. They promise to change the way we network forever. Palo Alto, California-based LinkedIn, for example, is often described as MySpace for businesspeople. You won't find videos, MP3s, or other flashy media on the site's bare-bones profile pages. What you will find are resumés, people's professional affiliations, special interests--and lots of them.
3. Find better sales leads
The Product - Spoke
How It Works - In years past, marketers approached lists of sales leads with extreme wariness. They'd take a deep breath and pray that the data was decent. Spoke removes at least some of the faith from the equation. The company takes existing list data and checks it against online information, even going so far as to send e-mails to individuals on lists asking them to validate their information. It then maps relationships between list leads and salespeople in a manner similar to what LinkedIn does, and allows users to search by such criteria as industry, location, and revenue. Checked against multiple sources of data, these new lists eliminate a lot of bad information.
4. Make the buyers come to you
The Products - Leads.com, Ingenio, eStara
How They Work - a number of start-ups targeting local advertisers are providing new vehicles for local online advertising. Leads.com, for example, converts a customer's online queries into e-mails that are sent directly to an advertiser's in box. Then there are pay-to-call services such as eStara and Ingenio, which convert online ads into phone calls by posting a toll-free number in a Web ad. Clients are charged a certain amount per call, and, unlike with typical phone calls, businesses can track the origins of each lead--and, as a result, the efficacy of the ad campaign.
5. Focus on your best prospects
The Products - Eloqua, ExactTarget, VerticalResponse
How They Work - All sales leads are not created equal. The challenge is identifying the promising ones and giving them top priority. In the past, this involved syncing sales data with often pricey demographic information, a service that was well beyond the reach of most small businesses. But in a Sales 2.0 world, that's no longer the case. Software from companies like Eloqua and ExactTarget lets marketers sift through data contained in, say, an online sweepstakes entry, to more easily identify likely buyers. The software ranks your leads, based on a complex analysis of e-mail addresses, the tenor of a response, and other factors. That makes it easier to focus subsequent campaigns on better targets.
6. Warm up your cold calls
The Product - Before the Call
How It Works - So you've got your target list. Now it's time to start selling. Think a minute before you pick up the receiver. Do you know anything about the people you'll be calling? Do you know anything other than their phone numbers and job titles? The imperfect remedy for this vacuum of information has been a Google search. No longer. Services such as Before the Call automatically scour the Internet, data from providers like Hoover's and Factiva, and their own proprietary database for news articles. Before the Call can be integrated with CRM systems from Salesforce.com and Oracle OnDemand, making it easy to keep databases up-to-date and full of new and timely information.
7. Get more out of your salespeople
The Products - Landslide, ShareMethods
How They Work - Managers have long sought to manage their salespeople. And salespeople, being an independent lot, have tended to dismiss such efforts as meddling. Indeed, that's been a huge problem with CRM systems, which require salespeople to spend too much time entering data into cumbersome and crash-prone systems. But new so-called guided selling is now adaptable enough to automate and provide a flexible script for the sales process while making the lives of salespeople easier. These guided selling programs incorporate elements of traditional CRM and contact management but also add some new tricks to make the sales process run more smoothly--giving sales staffers what they need, when they need it, to close a deal.
8. Hold your (potential) customer's hand
The Products - ExactTarget, Silverpop, Epsilon Interactive, Constant Contact
How They Work - E-mail marketing often has meant building as big a list as possible and hitting the Send button. However, smart marketers have realized that campaigns work better if you can customize an e-mail pitch to fit a particular customer's needs, rather than cramming a single sales pitch down everyone's throat. These systems also boast sophisticated tracking and analytic capabilities, which help marketers develop a better sense of which triggers will cause potential customers to hit the Buy button.
9. Turn new clients into repeat customers
The Products - Vontoo, VoiceShot
How They Work - If you've already won a client's trust, it ought to be relatively easy to sell him or her more stuff. Alas, in practice, the repeat sell can be tricky. How do you reapproach a client who already has written one big check? When is the best time to do so? While timely e-mails might work, a simple phone call is often more effective. Not that you can call all your customers, but now, for the first time, smaller businesses can afford to send automated phone messages to targeted clients. With these products (which cost about 10 cents a call), a salesperson or business owner calls a toll-free number and records a brief message with a sales pitch. The message is uploaded to the Internet and broadcast using a voice over Internet protocol system to anywhere from a dozen to thousands of customers.
For much more on these technologies, check out the complete source article. Also be sure to check out the
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