Few areas of a business affect the bottom line as much as the performance of the sales team. As a result, it's critical that systems are provided that allow the sales team to be as effective as possible.
In order to make the system as effective as possible, it's important to have the system as simple as possible for the end users. CRM Online recommends a process for driving sales that combines ease of use with effective processes for flagging leads and and opportunities that need to be followed up.
Refer to the figure below.
Figure 1: Overview of Processes for Driving Lead Followups
This process for driving lead followups is as follows:
- A required field is added to the leads and opportunities module that specifies the next followup date. This means that a lead can't be created within the system without the sales person specifying when it should be followed up
- A dashlet is provided on each user's home page that indicates the leads and opportunities that are due to be followed up.
- Sales people are given the ability to update the next followup date via the logging of calls, meetings, notes and tasks. This results in forcing sales people to log activity as it becomes the most efficient way to push the next followup date along
- Management is provided with a report that shows lead and opportunity followups that are overdue by more than a defined number of days. Since the next followup date is a pro-active field set by the sales person, management can be quite pro-active in making sure it's enforced.
Although the above process is quite simple, it provides a lot of value in helping to improve conversion rates of enquiries into sales.
