Sales Management prospecting

Effective prospecting is a critical component of sales success. It means analyzing the market, finding and identifying prospective customers and clients who may be in need of the product that you can suggest them. As it’s a fundamental moment for a successful sale, it should be carefully organized; otherwise company may face many problems.

Non-organized database of the prospects

While prospecting you should take into account all aspects concerning a potential client, such as company size, annual revenue, etc. for the companies; age, family status, profession, etc. for individuals. So, it is very important to organize the database of prospects who you may offer collaboration. If such database is not debugged or is not kept at all, there may be problems with tracking the list of prospects and defining proper approach to each of them. If you offer a large consignment of a certain product to a small company, undoubtedly you will waste the time.

Without clear list of potential clients and any available information about them, you may also waste time on duplicating the prospects, lose information about some company or individual who may become your partner, forget about certain useful client, etc.

Such mistakes may be avoided only by keeping all prospects and their data into the carefully organized database.

Lack of prospects’ contact history

It’s extremely important to store and analyze the history of contacts with the potential clients. There may be many useful details that can help salesperson to find appropriate approach to each particular client and make him/her advantageous offer that he or she can’t help accepting. If not storing the offers and answers between the salesperson and the prospect, the company may lose many profitable deals.

Here is the simplest example of neglecting to track contact history. You sent five business offers to one of the prospect via e-mail and didn’t receive any answer. If you stop sending him/her the same e-mail and track the history of your actions against this particular client, you will try to address him or her via mail, phone or other appropriate way.

So, contact history can help you to save time and earn money.

Lack of clear plan

A salesperson must have a To Do List for each day. It should include tasks to make calls to the prospects, send business offers, analyze certain client refusal and so on. Without well-organized To Do List sales manager can easily forget to meet some important client or answer other prospect’s e-mail. By keeping everything in the memory, he or she will start feeling tired and overwhelmed and may become disorganized and less productive.

Problem-solving

All these problems can be easily prevented with the help of sales prospecting tool. Such tool is VIP Task Manager. It is a perfect sales software that allows to create a database of all prospects, keep any required information about them, track them and the history of the contacts with them. Salesperson can create To Do List with the tasks on each day, week or month and avoid keeping everything in his/her memory.

In VIP Task Manager you can create your own field and store any required information about the prospects in it, also group, filter or sort the prospects by any field and add any details into the notes section. By filtering prospect database by client name you will refrain from the duplicating of the prospects.

Moreover, you can record what actions were undertaken against each client and track their history in the future.

In VIP Task Manager you can create daily, weekly or monthly To Do Lists for all employees where they can keep the tasks that should be done to lay a foundation for successful sales. There is a possibility to set task status, priority, reminder that will help you not to forget what must be done. All resources that are interested in a certain task state can receive notifications of any changes of this task.

So, VIP Task Manager will help you to turn all your skills to create a reliable list of potential clients and establish good groundwork for future successful sales and partnerships.

How to use VIP Task Manager for prospecting

• Start VIP Task Manager
• Create a new task group “Sales”
• Create a sub-group, for example “Prospects”
• Create a new custom fields, for example phone, address, e-mail, etc
• Create a new task, for example “Prospect 1”
• Enter task custom fields values
• Enter any required information in task Notes section
• Create a sub-group, for example “To Do List”
• Create new tasks, e.g. “Send e-mail to prospect 1”, etc
• Set priority, status, due date, etc, to the tasks
• In order that you won’t forget about the task, you can set a reminder for it
• If the task is repeated frequently, make it recurrent
• Set required filters to the tasks and make reports by printing them out or exporting to Excel

Go to the next stage of Sales Management Process - Pre-approach

Groupware application

• VIP Task Manager is synchronous groupware for task management. This client/server software allows planning, scheduling, sharing, tracking and reporting tasks, appointments, projects, and any company activities. Authorized users can simultaneously access the common database through Local Network (LAN) to see, add, edit and delete their team or personal tasks, if they are granted appropriate permissions.