Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) - LongJump Blog

When you are initially starting your business, sales teams can be relied on to keep their customers’ contact and account information in their own way with little interaction with the rest of the business. It’s not uncommon to maintain your customer list in Excel and use Outlook to drive business activities. Or a worst case scenario is to keep customer information in your head.

But salespeople are becoming more mobile, customer relationships are becoming more complex, and staffing is more volatile.

What do you do when a member of your team leaves or is out of the office? How do you maintain the connections to those customers? Do you know what the status of their deals are? What is your revenue outlook for the next month?

Businesses today have to convey much more information to manage their activities than just set up a meeting here or there. In short, selling and managing a customer relationship go hand-in-hand.

To maintain measurable success, you need to be able to:

• Centrally access and manage your customer information
• Share that same information with your team members securely and with necessary territorial controls
• Reduce the time and complexity it takes to report individual sales activities
• Automate common practices and processes
• Monitor and measure individual and team success
• Effectively target prospects for new business and existing customers for repeat business
• Provide multiple ways to communicate to those customers
• Build on customer data with information relating to opportunities, products/services/projects, customer feedback, referrals, accounting, etc.

Contact managers put too much sales information on an island, making collaboration and the management of customer information difficult. It also significantly increases the risk that you lose that data. A hard drive crash or stolen computer can debilitate you for weeks.

These are all factors to keep in mind as you evolve your operations into a sales force automation or CRM solution. An SFA or CRM will allow you to put your sales and customer activities together for a greater, more holistic approach to developing an ongoing relationship with that customer and hence, your business.