The strong economy can’t last forever! Some economist say a mild recession is a good thing – in the way evolution thins the herd. If you plan to be one of the survivors, you better have CRM and the discipline to use it!
CRM is designed to help you with the things that are more important than ever during tough times:
- Analyzing the efforts and effectiveness of your marketing and sales
- Targeting audiences with relevant messages
- Tracking and accessing information · Servicing customers
- Working effectively as a team · Communicating internally and externally
- Automating functions for greater productivity
In a weaker economy, the time frame in your sales cycles can extend, making persistence and follow-up an even greater success factor. It is said that, “sales is a contact sport.” And, in a soft economy you need to make more contacts. The tools available in GoldMine give marketing and sales what they need to reach out and stay in touch with prospects and customers. Otherwise time consuming tasks like literature fulfillment, letter and email merging, etc, can all be automated for greater productivity, volume and consistency.
Working harder isn’t enough…you also have to work smarter! With the analysis and reporting tools built into GoldMine you can do both.
Even with sales automation technology, some sales people just aren’t going to make it. This doesn’t have to be a negative thing. Some businesses make a practice of “quartiling” their sales reps. Quartiling is simply splitting your sales force up into four groups by volume. When times get tough some organizations let go of the lowest performers (the bottom 25%), either to make way for new reps or to simply cut expenses. It also allows the organization to devote more resources to their the agents with a greater likelihood of success. Either way, GoldMine’s territory realignment tool makes it easy to re-distribute leads, accounts, and transfer scheduled activities from one rep to another.
When the going gets tough, hopefully you already have CRM and you’re leveraging its benefits. If you already have CRM but you’re not using it like you could, follow the advice of business guru and best-selling author Michael Gerber and take some time to “work on your business, rather than in it.” If you don’t even have CRM, get it, before the economy gets you!
