Effective contact management for sales and marketing

Whether when starting a business, or scaling, or even when launching a new line of products or services in an established business, the first people who are likely to give you patronage are your contacts. They have an existing relationship with an implicit trust in you and your brand – if not familiarity at least. Your sales and marketing teams can leverage these relationships to bring in more sales.

Customers are the foundation of any business. Even in B2B businesses, where customers are entities, it essentially boils down to people in those entities who are deciding on behalf of those entities to give patronage to your business. Thus, only by reaching out to your contacts first can you grow your business.

Contact management is the backbone of a CRM that aids both facets of – Sales and marketing. As an added bonus, it assists the customer service team in increasing customer engagement.

How Contact Management software improves workflow?

Contact management software is deployed to fulfill three main purposes – store, track, and manage the contact information for every contact and customer. Let’s look at the workflow of this software for each department of an organization in the sections that follow:

For salespeople / sales teams

A company’s front-facing crew is its sales team. First step of a sales pipeline is contact capture, after which they qualify the contact based on their interaction. They are then assigned to different teams or team members based on their qualification as a sales qualified lead (SQL) or a marketing qualified lead (MQL). Once assigned to a team, the process of follow-up begins, and leads are converted into opportunities. The next step is to quote the price and close the deal.

Contact management acts as a catalyst for this entire workflow, allowing salespeople to complete their tasks in a more organized and timely manner. It also allows sales teams to automate tasks like sending triggers (pre-set events) to potential customers, sending emails, scheduling follow-ups, and so on. Henceforth, keeping their focus drilled down towards the selling aspect of the product or service rather than tracking the data entry.

For Sales manager

Checking out daily tasks, pulling out sales reports without dwindling between multiple sheets, automated meeting scheduling, target achievement details everything under one umbrella called Contact management software. One software that serves as a monitoring system for the entire team. As a result, managers have more time for other activities such as developing their sales model or imparting knowledge to their team.

For Marketers

The hours spent on contact capture, and segmentation can be minimized to a large extent with the help of Contact management. A marketer can hit the bull’s eye whether they are running a campaign, nurturing a lead, or converting a lead into an opportunity by deploying this software. It does not stop there; it also assists with pricing and promotion of a product or service. All of these activities, when aided by contact management software, save significant time, allowing the marketing team to focus on other tasks.

Why is Effective contact management for sales and marketing necessary?

Sending the appropriate information to contacts at the appropriate moment is essential for effective communication. Sales teams can be overwhelmed with activities for updating each contact like marking tasks, follow-ups, meetings, and other information. To ensure that the diligent update is easy, all tasks marked, and no meeting is missed, many businesses prefer to use specialized contact management systems to centralize all contacts. This enables transparency by granting access to multiple departments or individuals who work with those contacts, and might also aid in automating some aspects of sales and marketing. Furthermore, there are several advantages to incorporating contact management software into a business.

Why businesses miss out managing contacts effectively?

When it comes to managing contact, no matter how big or small the company, the challenges are the same. A few pointers to help you navigate these challenges are provided below:

1. Sales is challenging

To stay competitive, businesses must develop new products and expand into new geographies. However, managing this could be difficult if there isn’t a centralized method for classifying, evaluating, and ranking sales leads. Once this prioritization is completed, the sales team will be able to focus on it and work accordingly.

2. Building customer profile is laborious

When it comes to creating the ideal customer profile, businesses are left guessing if they can’t find all of the customer data points. Furthermore, businesses will have no visibility into their sales team’s activities. Companies will be required to hold more status meetings in order to obtain this information, which will divert salespeople away from customers and cause them to go around in circles.

3. Insufficient customer info

Incomplete and misleading data is a major concern for businesses throughout the globe. Good contact management software intelligently removes duplicates and automatically flows second- and third-party account and contact information into the system, filling in missing information that salespeople left out.

4. Reporting and forecasting difficulty

Misleading reports result in poor planning and forecasting. When salespeople are asked to manage the contacts their focus shifts from sales to administration, which wastes time. Thus, reducing the revenue generation on the whole.

5. Account contacts cannot be identified

Contact management software can help businesses keep track of contacts and allow sales and marketing teams to tailor interactions. As a result, if a contact’s profile changes, such as moving to a new job, all teams within an organization will be kept up to date.

Wrapping up!

If forgetting to follow-up, calling or sending emails to potential customers is a recurring blunder in your business. It’s time to go with contact management for effective contact management. When the founding pillars of a business, sales and marketing, are not optimized to make the most of their time, the loss is reflected in revenue generation. Begin your free trial today to easily manage your contacts.