Today, sales executives understand that CRM is more than a tool for marketers. Savvy sales people know that CRM plays an important role in generating qualified leads and enables them to differentiate prospects and customers by value. Because CRM provides detailed snapshots of customer preferences, it offers critical insights about purchasing habits.

The salesperson that goes out and sees lots of different customers and talks about a lot of different products doesn't need to know the eating habits of all of his prospects and doesn't track the status of sales cycles.

What he needs to know in order to start a meaningful sales conversation and identify sales opportunities is what the customer bought last time, what they didn't buy and why, and whether there are any changes in spending.

To your salesperson, a good sales intelligence solution should become as essential as a mobile telephone or a diary. This sales intelligence comes from your CRM software and enables sales people to analyze customers' buying patterns and develop strategic promotional campaigns.

Creating Converts
Our world is full of many books and "experts" who can teach you the steps to successful selling. Some are good and there is probably a little information that can be gleaned from each resource. You may have to experiment with some different techniques to find one that works best for you to convert your prospects to customers, but here is a proven process used in our industry.

When a sign company is ready to make contact with the right type of prospect, three face-to-face steps are used toward making the sale. Each step requires particular selling skills that are necessary to close the sale. A successful sale is like building a pyramid; each step depends upon the success of the previous ones, and no step can be omitted without creating disaster.

1. Exploring
   The exploring step of sales gives you the chance to get deeply involved with your prospects to determine exactly how your product or service can help them. It's where the partnering process begins. The purpose of exploring is to get additional information from the client to enable you to recommend appropriate options.

2. Collaborating
   After you've worked with your prospects to identify needs and concerns, the next step is to determine whether or not your product or service will solve a problem or seize an opportunity for them.

   Usually there are several different ways you can put your product or service together to meet the needs of your prospects. The collaborative selling way is much less adversarial and much easier. You actually involve your prospects in deciding which one of your options makes the most sense for them.

3. Confirming
   If you've done your job properly to this point, your customer should be asking to buy from you. The commitment becomes a how and a when, and not an "if". Signing the agreement is merely a formality. However, before confirming the sale, you'll want to be sure your prospect has all the information they need to justify their perceived value of your product or service.

Managing existing prospects and customers
Many businesses complain that they need more leads before they can covert prospects to customers. For most businesses, that is not a solution, but an excuse. According to a report by the Aberdeen Group over 80% of generated leads are never followed up on, dropped, or mishandled.

Many sign companies are particularly adept at neglecting the leads and business opportunities that they already have in-house just waiting to be called. In fact, they could see improved results just by better handling and nurturing the leads they already have.

If you're looking to generate maximum response from your lead generation campaigns, and maximum revenue for your investment, don't ignore your current clients. This valuable treasure that you keep in your CRM database is worth marketing to for two reasons:

First, a current or former customer, assuming they're relatively satisfied with your services, is an order-of-magnitude more likely to respond favorably to your lead generation campaigns than are non-customers.

Second, your competitors want to get to your customers (and they're trying), and other companies are vying for their attention. If your clients are not focusing on your messages and value, they're focusing on someone else's.

Future Converts
Looking further, we must assess the impact of not only the offer we present to the prospect, but the outcome of repeated contacts that result in no sale. Are we blindly attacking a particular segment of the sign industry without regard to the impact on our existing prospects? Are we building interest or conditioning these prospects to ignore and reject our offers? Are we learning anything about how to market to these prospects differently or just trying to wear them down?

The beauty of CRM is that it gives you the answers to these questions at your fingertips and affords you the opportunity to make selling decisions based on your prospect/customer profile.

If your company is going to be a leader in your segment of the sign industry, you are going to have to really practice things like "customer intimacy", "customer interaction", "customer loyalty" and perhaps more important - "customer partnership". Many CRM products on the market today can help you with managing all of these.

In our final segment of this Customer Relationship Management series, (Part IV), we will offer strategies and proven techniques for selling, closing the sale, creating customer loyalty through CRM, and various aspects of CRM products.