Sales are the 'bread and butter' of most businesses, and therefore managing sales leads is a vital task, however salespeople and sales managers often have limited time available for reviewing processes and the administrative tasks involved in lead tracking. Basic management of sales leads involves holding all the contact information that has been provided and any activity such as when attempts to contact them have been made. Good sales management tools, such as web-based CRM, can go much further and help you maximize the conversation of leads into actual sales.

When you implement a sales management tool, it can additionally help keep hold of all your order processing information, so that all important sales information is held in one place and vital documents can be accessed by everyone. Management tools for sales leads can hold reminder information, so the sales team know exactly when and with what information they should follow up with potential customers. It may also contain information about what stage of the sales pipeline these leads are at, from initial contact to loyal, repeat customer. This is vital to enable you to instantly see what marketing campaigns these leads should receive and what contact they are due from your company. Individual conversations with customers can be recorded enabling you to provide a more personal service and to encourage customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Good management tools ensure that this customer data is easy to review, helping to make the process more efficient. For instance, if you want to run a marketing campaign to a particular customer segment, such as IT decision makers within small and medium-sized businesses, you can extract the relevant segment of contacts from your database, without any fuss. Any results from this campaign can be fed straight back into the system during and after the campaign.

More importantly, using updated sales lead information, the company can estimate income based on the quality of leads they have and how far through the pipeline they are. This can inform company profit projections and cash flow, as well as acting as a guide for staffing levels. The tool can hold all the templates that the sales and customer service teams need to reduce the amount of time they need to spend on administrative tasks and maximize the time they can spend servicing your customers.

These tools also allow you to see any issues with your sales pipeline, where customers may be 'leaking' and prospects lost. In this way, you change the sales perspective from focusing on short-term sales goals to long-term company prospects and optimizing the full pipeline process.

Many businesses have a whole team of salespeople, and so implementing a sales management tool can help you track their individual progress and include any necessary training. Any sales bonuses and commission are much easier to work out too.

Sales management tools are an excellent way to streamline your sales processes and for holding all the relevant information in one place. Your customer service can become more personal and sales teams have all the customer information at their fingertips. It is also a great way of reviewing and developing your sales pipeline to maximize results.

This article was written by Workbooks, leading supplier of web-based CRM software.