Track and Trace Your Sales and Customers with Technology

Keeping track of leads, sales and customers has always been important to the longevity of a business. How would you know the who, what, where, when, and whys of your leads and customers if you didn’t keep track of them? This tracking could be as simple as sticky notes with leads written on them, a whiteboard, or a ledger with customer names and addresses. However, these are messy tracking systems, and if you haven’t already – you need to implement the use of technology.

Technology allows us to store lead and customer information in a database that can be easily accessed by multiple sales people. It allows you to store as much or as little information about your customers as you would like. At a minimum, you should be using a standalone database product like Microsoft Access to store your customer information. As far as I’m concerned though, that’s not enough. If you care about the sales process at all you should be using a full fledged Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software package.

If you haven’t heard about CRM before, you can read more about it on the Wikipedia entry. Basically it’s the process of tracking the entire sales process from lead generation all the way to continued communication with customers. CRM software can help in the tracking process and perform automation of some marketing processes like generating and emailing marketing campaigns. John Jantsch even suggests that in the world of small business, CRM should be called Marketing Automation. He argues that CRM targeted for small business should focus on saving small business owners time.

Full CRM software packages and marketing automation can be expensive though. For example, the product that Jantsch uses costs about $5,000 to set up and $300 per month to use. That’s not cheap, but Infusionsoft argues that it’s worth every penny. At Pursue, we use an open source product called SugarCRM. Open source means that it is freely downloadable and the code can be edited as we see fit.

The SugarCRM product gives great flexibility at zero cost. It can handle everything from Email marketing and forms to quotes and forecasting to knowledgebase and customer support. It integrates with Microsoft Outlook for managing contacts. It can help you manage teams and projects. It also has great reporting features that let you see things like your “sales funnel” at a glance. The open source community for SugarCRM has built add-ons like timesheets for tracking time in the system. The whole thing is web based so it can be accessed from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.

Installation and setup of SugarCRM is not for the faint of heart however. If you are not knowledgeable in adding software to a web server, then it would be best for you to hire someone to do it for you or help you through the process. It’s not overly difficult, but it could end up being a frustration for you. If you don’t want to handle any of it yourself, SugarCRM actually has a commercial version that you pay a low monthly fee to use. Even still, there are many other software packages out there that you can pay for or pay to use. Do a little research to find what you need. But please, for the love of all, at least track your leads and customers somewhere!

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