Acquiring Information on a Prospect Before the Sales Call
Contacting a sales prospect blindly is less productive, potentially uncomfortable, and potentially embarrassing. The good news is that, with the wide variety of resources available today, you should be able to find information about a prospect before you call. Read More »
Should You Visit a Company’s Offices Before Making a Sales Call?
While it’s not absolutely necessary to visit a company before you make a sales call, fact-finding missions can be an indispensable research tool. Sales techniques have come a long way, but nothing can replace the effectiveness of the good old-fashioned cold call. Read More »
Ten Rules for Great Customer Service
Think about the last time you had a negative buying experience. Did an e-commerce site fail to respond to your email query? Did a sales associate at your neighborhood computer store fail to know the difference between a floppy drive and a hard drive? Perhaps you were left on hold for an inordinate amount of time when you called a mail-order company’s toll-free line. Read More »
Online Customer Service Basics
In a traditional brick-and-mortar store, if a customer needs help, he or she can look around and find someone. In e-commerce, obviously, that’s not an option. So how can you provide customer service as a part of your online sales experience? It’s probably easier than you think. Read More »
Improve the Customer Experience on Your Web Site
Whether you’re launching a new Web site or enhancing your current one, consider how you can improve your site and make it easier to use. The customer experience is one aspect of Web development that often gets lost somewhere between the HTML and the FTP. Read More »
Sales Force Automation: Managing CRM and ERP Solutions
Sales Force Automation
Sales force automation (SFA) is used loosely throughout the industry and means different things to different people. Basically, SFA includes all of the technologies, techniques, and strategies on which successful sales are built. It’s an activity that brings you together with your customers and improves communications and productivity. Customer resource management (CRM) falls under this umbrella. Read More »
Is Customer Relationship Management Feasible for Small Businesses?
A few years ago, customer relationship management (CRM) was not feasible for small businesses. The CRM industry was dominated by large companies — Siebel, Oracle, SSA, and others — that primarily worked with other large companies to develop high-end CRM applications. Read More »
I’ve heard of hosted ERP and CRM solutions. What does ‘hosted’ mean, and how can hosted…
A hosted solution typically refers to one where the application — customer resource management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), in this case — and the hardware that it runs on are provided to you as a turnkey solution by a third-party application service provider. These solutions are helpful for small business owners who don’t have the time or the in-house expertise to set up the software or infrastructure themselves. Read More »
How to Build and Motivate a Sales Team
Companies can live and die by the quality of their salesforce. A dazzling sales team can generate tremendous sales for an average product or service, but a clumsy sales team might not be able to do much with even a first-rate offering. Read More »
Distinctions Between Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning
Customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) both offer ways to automate processes and run your business more efficiently, but the systems were originally designed to streamline different functions. Read More »
