Recently, there was a news report on how a lot of families are dealing with the (possible) recession by growing their own fruits and vegetables. Makes perfect sense. It cuts down on expensive gas, its self-replenishing, and you can grow what you need. It also is tasty and satisifying. What’s the point?

There is a term in sales called “low-hanging fruit,” identifying prospects and customers that you can capture and sell to quickly without a lot of background work or negotiation. In sales, being able to identify which businesses are due for some type of re-marketing or outreach, can reduce the chances of existing easy revenue slipping through the cracks. Its easier to sell repeat business than it is to start from scratch.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you’re a restaurateur and you keep contact with your frequent patrons that come to your restaurant. CRM Solutions like LongJump’s Sales Force Automation suite would enable you to pull data from your cash registers and let you analyze across both data sets when one of your regulars hasn’t paid a visit in a few weeks.

How can you use this valuable customer information? Add an email marketing campaign with LongJump Campaign Manager to repeat each week for all your missing regulars with a “we miss you” type message, a coupon for something unique like a free bottle of house wine with dinner for two, and a tantalizing list of new menu items.

If they come, again push that register data back into LongJump, and send that customer a thank you, with the same offer that they can pass along to one of their friends.

You’ve now created a low-cost, self-replenishing, referral-driven campaign.

Before CRMs, contact managers were the norm. They sat like an unattached rolodex on the sales rep’s computer, usually built as a part of their email client. But contact managers put too much sales information on an island, making sharing and management of customer information difficult. They also significantly put your data at risk. A hard drive crash or stolen computer can debilitate you for weeks.

If you’re a team of 10 or more, relying on contact management software to run your business is a lot like dialing up each member of your team individually and asking “how’s it going” and trying to condense that into actionable intelligence.

Part of what makes real CRMs so powerful is establishing a sales portal for all necessary information regarding accounts. This involves pooling data from various internal business systems and often requires a commitment to help from IT departments. LongJump can provide all the necessary integration points, enabling internal organizations to establish the necessary project requirements within their teams to get the data.

Data integration is critically important to getting sales teams to actively use the tool because of the time-savings they achieve by gaining a 360º view of a customer in single screen, including their orders, customer issues, credit status, finance notes, contract detail, credit limits, contacts, etc.

This complete view of the customers is what enables people to break away from emails, spreadsheets, physical file folders and sticky notes as the convenience choice. And it allows the business itself to maintain a record of account activities and contacts for seamless hand-off to other Reps or teams when assignments change. LongJump provides that view of all the customer data you need.

LongJump is designed to integrate with existing enterprise data using a variety of methods (including REST-based Web Services). And once that data comes into the platform, a series of actionable processes can be put into place, automatically triggering workflows, emails, tasks, SOAP messages, changes in the data, or even internal scripts to further automate business processes. And LongJump’s reporting engine enables even the most basic user to design reports based on mashed up data.

In short, there is no comparison to LongJump with your run-of-the-mill contact management software.

Vator.tv’s Bambi Francisco had a followup interview with CEO Pankaj Malviya and how LongJump was able to reach a point of self-sufficiency and profitability without backing from any venture capital firms.

Pankaj states that when you are bootstrapping on your own, the key is working every customer relationship to its full potential so you can build revenue as well as an enduring customer.

Email marketing campaigns can be one of the most cost-effective campaigns you can employ to both drive new business, as well as keep you top-of-mind with your customers. That’s because while educating your customers takes more effort than simple branding, an educated customer is also more likely to spend more and spend it with the person who is educating them.

Email marketing campaigns deliver a lot of information while also providing measureable results in both how many people see your message (opens) and how many actively wanted more information (clicks). You also capture information about prospects that don’t want to be bothered (unsubscribes).

In the past, CRM users had to employ a separate email delivery service to send whitelisted bulk emails to your constituents. This limited your ability to track the results of your campaigns as they related to new sales opportunities. You either had to pay for an additional service, pay for integration between two services, or manually reconcile campaign results with existing CRM data.

By combining CRM sales force automation and email campaigning in one application as LongJump does, you can specify your lead, prospect, and account targets, embedded personal information into each email, and measure results across your sales cycle.

Here are some terms you should be familiar with when using email marketing:

• Whitelisting - Known spammers are often blacklisted by networking agencies and email filters. A whitelisted delivery service is one that has commited resources and efforts to maintaining a good standing with these filters and ensure greater delivery of emails.
• HTML - Emails that are formatted in HTML are similar to web pages with links, images and table layouts. You’ll want to remember to not use Flash, animated graphics, and frames most email readers do not support them.
• List Management - Rather than importing names from wherever you get leads into your other CRM data (which can lead to duplication, bad data, and a lot of cold leads), it is often better to manage multiple lists individually. This allows you to send a specific group a certain set of information.
• Personalization - Like a mail-merge letter, including information about that particular person in your email adds a level of personalization which also improves the chance that your message will be heard. This can be done by embedding variables into the email template that call out fields like ‘first name,’ or ‘company name.’
• Callbacks - Callbacks are tasks or emails that are automatically triggered when the receiver of your email takes some action (open, click, open and click). This provides a proactive way to follow-up on a customer.

One other thing to keep in mind is content. As stated earlier, education is a very powerful tool in the sales process. That’s why newsletters make excellent campaigns. They provide the reader with information that will help them improve their situation in an unobtrusive way. Meanwhile, it positions you as a reputable source of useful information. The better your content is, the better your chance that they will forward the newsletter to colleagues and peers or look forward to the next email from you.

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.

Salespeople hate CRMs. Ok, maybe hate is too strong, but ask any of them how they feel about CRMs and you will either watch their eyes glaze over or see fury in their response. To them it is a necessary evil. But why? Could it be:

• Perceived busywork - Sales reps have to enter information about their activities, log opportunity information, update customer contacts, and don’t always get any value from it.
• Big brother - CRMs can make sales reps feel as if their every task is being micromanaged.
• Can’t find information - Many sales tracking tools tend to focus on forcing sales teams to adhere to reporting, but few help the individual rep sell more.
• Doesn’t drive new business - Most CRM activities involve what you’re doing, not what you’re doing next. They often don’t provide a way to continue to market to your leads and existing customers.
• Inflexibility - Many CRMs force you to adhere to their conventions and when you want to change it to fit your business, they charge you for it.

So how do you change their minds?

Make Entering Data Easier

Besides prospect, account, and contact data, the most important information is going to be driven by sales activities. That includes customer calls, emails, task status, etc. If it takes a lot of effort for a rep to enter data, it won’t happen. Let’s say they call a customer, but the customer’s not interested right now. Are they going to take the time to record that information, or will they move on to the next prospect? If their performance is based on sales and not data entry, they will almost certainly skip logging that activity, even though you know that that’s still a good prospect at some point. If you give them one place to go and log everything from customer information updates, opportunities, and next steps, you’re going to get better information about activities.

Give Them Valuable Information to Do Their Jobs

The best way for a rep to sell is by understanding the profile of who his customers are and how to strategically go after them. This means having good information about each customer and creating daily tasks that focus on those customers. Whether it’s by ZIP code or last date of purchase, they need to be able to slice and dice their customer data to find the best approach.

Identify Ways They Can Measure Their Own Progress

We’re all a competitive in the business world — especially salespeople. That’s the point of quotas and commissions. When reps see how their doing against their quota, or even against other reps, that’s encouragement to do better.

Enable Them to Re-Market to Their Contacts

Campaigning has traditionally been used as a marketing tool, but in many ways, it’s most valuable as a sales tool. Personalized email campaigns let an individual rep cover a lot of territory but still maintain a certain level of 1-to-1 selling. With a few targeted messages, automated follow-ups when the reader clicks or opens an email, and the ability to customize emails to fit the call to action, sales teams can drive a lot more opportunities more efficiently.

Design and Automate Best Practices

All efficient people have a lazy streak. They want to accomplish as much as they can with as little work as possible. That gives them time to deal with the more complex issues or to try new things, which can advances them even further. For salespeople, the more automated you can make a CRM, the more intelligent it can become and, ultimately, the more productive they can be. Creating data policies is a great way to do that. For example, if a new prospect is introduced and there is data indicating their interest in “Trucks,” a completely differ selling process can start for that prospect.

Salespeople don’t really hate CRMs. They hate that they don’t work like they do. The more a CRM can work in concert with their activities, the more successful your CRM implementation will go. And once you win them over, they won’t be able to live without it.