What Can Contact Management Do for Your Sales Force?

Improve Your Sales Team’s Performance
Effective, well-executed sales force operations are crucial to achieving and maintaining profitability and long-term growth. Yet at many companies, the sales force is bogged down with manual, cumbersome, disjointed, and inefficient contact management processes, which hinder productivity and take precious time away from those activities that really count – identifying, cultivating, and closing new business.

Contact management software solutions are designed to streamline, automate, and centralize these vital sales force processes. So, sales staff can dramatically enhance the way they manage important data about their existing and potential clients, and fully leverage that information to boost sales success and revenues.

A contact management software solution can benefit your sales force in the following ways:

Improved Information Consistency and Accuracy
Most sales force members today keep track of their important contact data by using Excel spreadsheets, Outlook address books, Access databases – or some combination of those three. This approach is not only manual and time-consuming, it is highly error-prone, and can cause mistakes and inconsistencies in the critical information a sales rep relies on to identify and close new business. A contact management solution centralizes and automates the way that data is entered, stored, updated, and managed. This, in turn, can dramatically increase its accuracy, integrity, and value.

Increased Efficiency
Manual, labor-intensive data entry and management tasks can drain sales force resources, and prohibit sales reps from focusing their attention on those activities that generate revenue, increase market share, and impact the bottom line. Contact management solutions boost productivity and minimize wasted time by eliminating the need for sales reps to create and maintain spreadsheets and other files.

Additionally, busy sales force members often find it challenging to juggle all their activities, and stay on top of their dynamic day-to-day schedules. But, each missed meeting equals a missed opportunity, and lack of well-structured contact management procedures could give competitors the edge they need. Contact management software helps sales reps better organize and manage their commitments, so they can work their deals in the most efficient and effective manner possible.

Advanced Sales Management Capabilities
Most contact management software solutions available today provide much more than just automated and centralized storage and access of vital customer and prospect data. They offer robust features and functionality that help enhance related activities and increase the chances for sales success. Some of these capabilities include account and opportunity management, forecasting, and reporting.

Enhanced Collaboration
In today’s world of complex, multi-faceted sales cycles and hard-to-please customers, sales force reps and pre-sales support professionals often find it far more effective to work together as a team. But, without a contact management system in place, information will likely be housed in “silos” across the business, compromising communication among team members. A contact management software package enables these employees to share account and opportunity-related information in a faster, easier fashion, facilitating the kind of rapid and open collaboration needed to successfully work accounts and close deals.