Inside Sales – Lead Management, CRM, and Knowing Something About “Something”

Sales Today Seth Godin stated that one of the revolutions of human economy was when man first discovered that knowing something about “something” was just as valuable, if not more valuable than the “something” itself.

Consider:

How much more valuable is a library when it has a card catalog, digital or otherwise?

Without the card catalog, the usefulness and utility of the library itself decreases by a factor of 50, 100, 1000 or more. How hard would it be to find something in even an average-sized municipal library without an efficient, easy-to-follow system of organization?

Now think about the Library of Congress.

So what does this mean for sales and marketing?

It’s simple:

How much more valuable does your sales team become when you have a “card catalog” of what they do?

How they manage their leads. How many times they “touch” a lead before it converts. Highest converting verticals / industries. Which lead sources qualify the best. Which reps qualify the best lead sources the most often. How many dials per day each rep makes.

Just like a card catalog (digital or otherwise) exponentially increases the value of a library, gathering real information about the sales process—contact data, call data, call effectiveness, sales cycle, lead management—increases the effectiveness of sales and marketing.

CRM is no longer just a “dead horse” buzzword, it’s dead, buried, and growing petunias. But it continues to be bandied about in sales industry circles because it continues to answer a real need, which is that it provides real, actionable data that makes sales, marketing, and customer service better.

Knowing something about “something”—like knowing how the sales process works, or having a card catalog—inherently increases the value of every interaction with that entity. Sales process data increases the total value of every element of your sales team with every interaction, win or lose.

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