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You decide what geographical area you want to market in, and what
types of customers you are trying to attract, and then make sure you
have all the available data on every one of them. From there, the data
has to be heavily manipulated in order to allow you to extract the most
pertinent information at just the right time. Again, a hard follow-up
calendar date and complete data for each record are keys to your sales
and marketing success.
The contact management system is not just for sales. It includes
sections with employees and your friends if you want, along with
sections for vendors and competitors, amongst any other data you
choose to add.
Importantly, these programs easily allow any group, individual record
or part of a record to be made private by its creator.
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For one source of data, you can get electronic versions of the yellow
pages and similar directories covering your target markets, and then
upload any select zip codes and industries that you want to work in.
You can then see what information is available on the Internet about
each company, and you can purchase filtered lists, cleaned of
extraneous data, to merge in with all your original data. The web social
network LinkedIn is a fantastic source for potential sales prospects and
related information. Also keep an eye out for Lure.com.
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Often, Chambers of Commerce and government commerce agencies
also have extensive lists of business information available
electronically. You need to get all of the data you can from all relevant
sources and filter through the information repeatedly.
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Ultimately, you will be able to personalize large volumes of email,
faxes, form mail, and phone calls, all while efficiently scheduling,
documenting and sharing large amounts of data. You will be able to
communicate a multitude of tailored messages better, faster and easier
than your competitors will.
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The bottom line is that if you do not optimize your contact
management, you will be in the same marginal class as all the folks
who are not at the top of their respective business categories. Effective
contact management cannot be overlooked since this process leads to
large profits.
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One good example of the power of contact management relates to
keeping track of your competitors. If you maintain a field in your
contact manager program called “current service provider” (denoting
the competitor who your prospect is currently giving their money to),
and  you have been updating this field across thousands of sales
prospects for years, you can target your competitors for extinction one
at a time as they expose their own shortcomings.
You can instantly identify all of the potential customers in your
database who work with any given competitor, as long as you have
marked them over time in the ordinary course of business and in the
correct field.
If you know of a particular weakness of a competitor at any set time,
you can exploit it by instantly identifying and contacting his customers
with a targeted sales promotion, which may allow you to take away
those customers.
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The most important—and time-consuming—part of contact
management is cleaning out the raw data files. Right from the start,
you should focus on filling in the field that lists the proper person who
will be in the position to purchase your product, and that is within your
predetermined market niche or geography, even if that is the whole
world. So to the extent you lack this information, you or an associate
needs to call each of your target businesses, email them, “Google”
them, or go visit them in an attempt to uncover the data.
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In addition, you should search each organization’s web site to collect
further information. You should be able to copy and paste the most
relevant information off the web sites to the notes field in the contact
manager. On the web, you can find articles that include information on
your prospects too. In Google, for example, you would enter +”Acme
Corporation” +president +email to uncover the email address and
name of the president of your target prospect from a press release, a
conference he attended, or even his own web site or blog.
Alternatively, you can try to find the common syntax used at their
company with other employees by discovering their domain and
typing into Google “@acmecorporation.com.” This might find the
record for Mary Jones to be , and Tom
Williams to be , so then if you know
the president is John Smith you can assume he utilizes the same syntax
in his email and try to contact him at If
that does not work, do not give up: try ,
, , and so on.
Call the secretary and pretend you know something and ask for him or

his email address. In any event, persistence truly pays.
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Bingo–you just bypassed a bunch of bureaucracy and got to the boss.
Even though you may ultimately be ignored or rejected, it is another
notch on your belt and having it over with means you will be one-step
closer to the ones who will not ignore you.
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As you continuously collect additional information on your prospects,
you will find that you are able to understand them better. As a result,
you will be capable of offering solutions that are tailored to their
specific needs while relating to them in multiple ways that you could
not have predicted without ample research.
Moreover, you can easily share leads, information and notes with your
own team and your business partners if you have a reliable CRM with
trained users and tight security policies.
Most notably, you will realize that you have common associates from
the business community who can potentially provide you with a
pyramid of referrals, thereby hastening opening and closing deals.
Understanding the targets will help you focus your service offerings
and sales approach to increase the percentage of deals you close. In
turn, this will save you time and make you more money—yet again.
Whatever you can do to reach an ever-expanding number of prospects
will provide you with exponential financial benefit.
Keep in mind that you cannot waste time on prospects if there is a low
likelihood of closing. You need to get as many relevant prospects as
possible in your contact management system and sort through them by
natural selection. That means you will be left with a bunch of
unqualified records—a low percentage of the total but a large number

nonetheless—which can be kept in the database and calendar with a
callback or review date far in the future. These records should not
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represent any problems; instead, they will only represent potential
opportunity as the best prospects can rise to the top of the calendar.

As you sift through and re-sort large numbers of prospects, you will be
left with many unsuccessful attempts in order to get to the successful
closes. The goal is to constantly expand your closing percentage and
simultaneously increase the number of new prospects being reviewed.
The review itself should be as automated as possible and delegated to
lower level co-workers when possible; this saves you precious deal-
closing time for good quality prospects
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Build a Winning Sales Team

You can teach someone selling techniques but not the natural ability it
takes to sell, so always hire the most capable people. Like your other
employees, your sales force should be, at minimum, well-organized,
great communicators, and self-disciplined. Your sales team is your
face to the outside world, so make sure you hire the cream of the crop.
Preferably, each employee reports to one boss, and one chief oversees
the whole department. Selling is largely an independent activity. Do
not delegate the same tasks or territories to multiple people. It is more
important for each individual sales executive to develop a unique
relationship with his or her client base.

When training your sales team, make sure they understand that people
are buying the benefits of the product, not its features. For example, do
not tell your sales prospects about the bells and whistles that are