Manage your Sales Leads in Outlook

The Need for Sales Leads

Sales leads are the life-blood of any sales based business. Getting more of them is one of the primary concerns of almost every business out there, and most sales and marketing professional are looking for the best ways to do it. What you do with them once you have them can often be more important than actually getting them. How can you get more Sales leads? How do you identify the valuable ones? How do you make the most of them once you have them? All of these are vital issues in business. So how can you address them?

The Hunt for Sales Leads

Bringing in Sales Leads for your company can be a daunting task. You can bring in Sales Leads through reactive means such as web advertising, search engines, phone directory ads, or direct mailings. You can bring in Sales Leads through proactive means such as cold calling, requesting referrals, tradeshows, and seminars. Just as with any activity in your business keep in mind the Return on Investment (ROI). Will the cost of that Sales Lead development activity be made up by the business it brings in?
For reactive activities such as maintaining a website it is typically a resounding yes. But this is not true of all reactive strategies. Advertising in periodicals can sometimes be quite costly, while the number of leads obtained may be low. It often comes down to the quality and timing of the advertisement.
Proactive strategies, such as cold calling, typically have a higher ROI. However, cold calling can be a problematic means for developing Sales Leads as most salespeople don’t like to make the calls and this can lead to wasted time and poor quality. With activities such as Tradeshows you may get a high number of Sales Leads, but the quality may again be low. The key to keeping a high ROI is to qualify your leads well.

Valuable Sales Leads

The key to making the most of your Sales Leads is to identify those that are the best candidates for making a sale. Sounds easy, but often isn’t. You need to develop a good process for Sales Leads Qualification, or simply…Qualifying. How do you go about creating a Qualification process? Got back to the End! No, not the Beginning, the End. Go back to the deals that represent your most successful sales and analyze them. What were the common traits that all those Prospects had? Did they come from a certain industry? Where they looking for certain benefits? Did they all have similar problems? Find the common ground and from that base build a series of Qualifying Questions to identify the Sales Leads that will have the best chance of closing.

Sales Leads that make the Most

So you’ve brought in the Sales Leads, you’ve qualified those that are worth pursuing, now you need to manage them. Software for managing Sales Leads can help you track your leads, maintain good follow-up with prospects, and if utilized well can help you shorten your Sales Cycle. Sales Force Automation software is designed to do exactly that. It helps you organize and manage your contacts and accounts, track and report on sales, and provides history and communication capabilities.
These programs let you enter information on your Sales Leads right from the start, so you can track all information from the first contact through to the close. As with any tool, to get the benefits it has to be used. Look for a program that is easy to use and provides the features you need.

About Avidian Technologies:
Avidian Technologies is a software company specializing in creating software solutions for users of Outlook and Exchange. Prophet, developed by Avidian Technologies on the .NET platform, is the leading contact management and sales CRM software built in Outlook. The company is headquartered in Redmond, Washington. For more information, please visit http://www.avidian.com or call 1-800-860-5534.