Lead Management, Managing Leads With GMail

If you are one of the many users today that use Google's GMail as your source for email you are in the drivers seat to start managing your sales leads.

Taking a closer look at a key feature that GMail has potentially touched on is it's versatility in creating custom management strategies or processing ques. This flexibility is what makes GMail an ideal platform to use as a personal contact management system or as a simple CRM.

GMail as a Contact Management?

Contact management is fundamentally a system that helps a sales person quickly identify new prospects, make contact, and manage follow-up.

Inherently you get the communications tool, email. Leveraging the power of Google's search, labeling, and filters you get the management of those communications. Chances are if you are using a personal CRM, such as ACT! or Goldmine you are using a lot of email-like features, but are still required to leave that application to use email also.

Time is money so you don't want to be wasting time bouncing between multiple applications. So, why not stay in your email application.

Importing and Managing Contacts

One of the fundamental roles of your CRM is to capture and manage your contacts. Your sales system needs to easily get your prospects and clients into the system, reference them quickly, and efficiently manage updates.

GMail does each of these tasks exceptionally well. Whether you are exporting contacts from Outlook, Apple Mail, or loading a spreadsheet of contacts GMail makes it easy. If you already have your contacts in a Web-based mail or social network system like Yahoo! Mail or LinkedIn it is even easier just login and click.

Creating a Sales Prospecting System

Now that you have all your contacts in GMail, Google's search becomes a powerful prospecting tool. Are you looking for a person in a particular company? Do you need all the SVP or higher marketing executives? Do you need everyone that is in the health care sector? All of these types of prospecting questions are easily answered and your database segmented using GMail.

What is most important, using GMail as a contact management system puts all of these prospects at your fingertips and ready to contact.

Managing Real-time Internet Lead Generation

GMail also has great features for managing real-time Internet lead generation. Combining the power of filters, labels, and actions you can immediately prioritize and queue leads as you see fit.

Filters allow you to create complex rule sets for specific types of emails. This can allow you to:

* Highlight (i.e., star) emails coming from lead sources
* Label different lead sources
* Filter them into specific groups for follow-up

You can take this contact management and prioritization system one step further by using GMail's latest multi-inboxes to create sales pipelines and queues.

Prioritizing with GMail's New Task List

Of course, no sales management system would be complete without a task list. GMail has a simple, but elegant task list. You can not only build your schedule of TODOs and you can turn emails and correspondence into task and follow-up reminders.

Google Calander is a great feature to track and schedule your appointments.

Integrating Social Media Tools

Finally, sales is about engagement with people. Few technology concepts have helped sales to so directly engage customers as social media.

Using Google's robust GoogleTalk, embedded in GMail you can bring in all of your social media streams as well as your email conversations. Again, turning all of this communication into a searchable prospecting database.

These key features that GMail possess is a lot more than an email application. GMail can be your personal Google contact management or CRM software.