Cleaning Up By Managing Leads Customer relationship management tools allow you to do just that — manage customer relationships. Here’s a prescription for business failure: Don’t worry about following-up on business leads. To optimize sales effectiveness, businesses need tools that capture interactions with pros-pects and customers. In some instances, companies ignore or dis-card 80 percent of their leads simply because they have no mechanism in place for capturing and using them for marketing purposes. Companies that fail to put into place processes for following-up on leads that come from market-ing activities will always be struggling to stay in business and, in most cases, will eventually fail altogether. We started a small cleaning business back in the 1980s and based our marketing upon flyers and word of mouth. It was a struggle because we never analyzed where our marketing leads came from. Back then, we might have used a shoebox and eventually graduated to one of the primitive data-base-management programs that were becoming available for desktop computers. However, revolutionary technology is now pro-viding sophisticated and effective tracking and management systems. By: Mitchell Hardin, Jr. H Mitchell Hardin, Jr. is the pres-ident of Hi-Lite Enterprises Inc. Hi-Lite Enterprises is a corporation that created www.CleanBizOp.com, www. WindowCleaningTraining. com, www.FinalCleanup.com and the BlindMaid, an on-site mobile mini blind cleaning sys-tem. Hardin is a former Small Business Development Centers (SBDC) business planning trainer and business consul-tant that helped create www. GlobalNXLevelStrategies.com, a business planning and coach-ing site for start-ups and exist-ing businesses online and in the San Francisco Bay area. Organizing Information With CRM We are using customer relationship management (CRM) tools that put at our fingertips useful data such as business contacts, personal information and previous mailings — tailoring the ongoing flow of information according to each contact’s sale for more info Visit www.cmmonline.com and type in search keyword: Management . For more information on related products, visit www.cmmonline.com , select SUPPLIER SEARCH from the main navigation bar, and enter keyword: Leads . Keeping a personal log of client interactions can help in determining when is a good time to follow-up on potential leads. 22 CM/Cleaning & Maintenance Management ® • April 2011
CMM – Archives Apr 2011: 22
