Lead Contact Management, More Than An Address Book

Okay, so you are a sales guy or gal. I guarantee I can guess where all of your best leads are...in your Outlook contacts--right?

This is a natural way to organize phone numbers and email addresses, but there are a bunch of reasons that approach to managing your leads is hurting your sales. These address books are simple, electronic representations of the classic rolodex. However, in the old days we used sales sheets as an extension of that static database of contacts. Unfortunately, most software neglects supporting that part of the process--and your sales numbers are suffering because of it.

Why Rolodexes Don't Close Deals

The hallmark of any great sales person is the size of his or her rolodex. The bigger the better. These painstakingly cultivated databases of business cards, phone numbers on cocktail napkins, emails, and referrals can be rich customer fields to be cultivated.

Unfortunately, most forget that a huge database of customers yield nothing without a process to cultivate that database. Rolodexes and address books don't close deals--they are simply opportunities.

Activating Your Contact Database

To turn your contact database into clients you need a system to deep into those opportunities. You need a way to generate sales sheets or activate that database. This is where lead management software does the trick.

Your lead management system can automate the segmentation, marketing, and follow-up on the opportunities in your contact database. It will activate your contacts and discipline you in touching base, providing additional information, and calling these relationships to action from time-to-time.

Turning Address Book into Lead Generator

If you activate your address book by integrating it with a good lead management software you can turn those hoards of contacts into real leads. Your lead management should take in those contacts in a simple way and help you to segment, market, and regularly contact each and every contact in your database.

Using a lead management system with your address book will not only increase your sales numbers--because you are more actively engaging your contacts--it will also make your contacts feel you are more concerned and tuned into their needs.