Three Ways To Work Your Customer Database Like A Pro

Many sales professionals are forced into traditional contact management clouds like Salesforce.com

, Netsuite and Oracle, because they work in large corporations who have many levels of management and IT that each need to approve every system used by an employee. The upside is that these products provide executives and management with exactly what they are looking for: Statistics to report to their board of directors, analytics to manage their employees with, and a clear gauge of who is performing best and who is performing worst in the sales department.

The downside is that all of this focus on reporting creates a constant aggravation within the sales force about how much daily data input they have to perform that is not at all related to working a customer or opportunity from lead to close. Every world class sales professional has a different style, or different philosophy of how to work their accounts, but any successful sales pro knows one thing, they need to work fast, work hard and have the data at their fingertips that let them respond and close.

This article will give you three key features you need if you want to use anything from a business card file, your phone, local database like Bento and Filemaker, to a customer database cloud like Performance Desk to organize and track your interactive sales pipeline.

Tip One - Have a clear method to prioritize opportunities and customers every day. Sort your business cards or database files in a way in which you will clearly know the customers that need the most attention and what time of day they need to get it. If youre a nationwide rep that means working your customers east to west coast, but in most cases it will mean looking at which opportunities are closest to close on your pipeline and focusing your efforts appropriately.

Tip Two Have a clear methodology for every call and stick to it. Some products like Performance Desk even provide a categorized opportunity worksheet that will help guide your notes into a clear report and remind you to stay on track, to work smart and close faster. In the case of Performance Desk you can sort your notes into friendly info that help build rapport, understand customer needs, notate customer objections, probe for customer pain and most importantly close more sales and grow your business.

Tip Three Focus on sales, not reporting on your progress. If you are in a small company or work for yourself in San Jose or Seattle, the last thing you need is to pay a fortune for software that's main purpose is to report your progress and projections to the head office in New York. Most of the suppliers of online CRM and sales management products have placed all of their effort into satisfying the needs of enterprise size customers because that is their bread and butter.

The complexity and features that deliver complex analytics to help a vice president of sales decide who performs the best, have nothing to do with the features that each salesperson needs to track and close an opportunity. Often sales professionals are forced to work their sales on pad and paper then spend valuable time transferring that data into the complex system after the fact, rather than focusing on the next opportunity to get those dollars in the door and grow your company.

by: Brent Silveria

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