IMD

How to sell your way to Freedom

By: Peter Carruthers   www.petesweekly.com

Many years ago I employed a wonderful sales fellow. His job was to visit clients and prospects, see what they needed, and come back with the orders.

"Cape Town is a tough market," he kept telling me. I discovered why one morning when I happened to stop on the Milnerton beachfront late one morning, only to see a very familiar face out on his surfboard!
 
It wasn't just a coastal problem. His Johannesburg peer spent far too much of his free time (that I was paying for) frequenting sales courses involving poles and women clad in string.
 
That's when I first started messing with CRM software. (Customer Relationship Management, which is just a big way of saying that you never lose a client!)
 
I was in the game so early I had to write my own version.
 
From that point onwards I knew exactly what my sales team was up to - countrywide. And I knew exactly the status of each project. (It took a mainframe to run this stuff, but we were IBM agents!)
 
More importantly, I was able to automate portions of my sales process. This saved a lot of time, and ensured that we never dropped anybody by mistake.
 
As PCs have grown faster, and more fun, so has the CRM software world grown. Now there are dozens of products which share one major feature: They're expensive. That's a problem for us smaller businesses.
 
That pricing meant that it was still out of our reach. (One system I looked at was around R10,000/user. And needed licence fees each year, only used 97 octane petrol, and a bunch of other foibles.)
 
And each time the desktop operating system changed, it was time to invest in a new version.
 
A survey we did amongst the Warriors a while back showed that only about 10% of us - 1 in 10 - were using any software at all to keep our biggest asset - our clients - safe. 
 
One of the keys to any success I may have had online has been my CRM system. I have been using a whole range of them since 1988, but five years ago settled on the best I could find. It still is in my opinion.

And it's free. The problem is that it very easy to install and use. If you know how. But, because it's free, that support is a tad lacking unless you're prepared to pay a wad of dollars.
 
That's a pity because this software runs on your PC or laptop, and can handle almost any number of clients. In my case more than 10,000.
 
Not only that, but once on your PC, you can access it from anywhere on earth, if you want to. This means that your sales team, or the folk chasing money, or the engineers/techies, can each log in to update what's happening with any client. You get an overview of exactly what happening whenever you want to.
 
And if you grow really, really big, you can move this same system, for the same price (gratis) to your web server for 500 employees to use at the same time.
 
And when you want to sell your firm, having that base of client gold secured for the new owner makes the sale that much easier and profitable for you.
 
So why don't we all use it, I hear you ask. I don't know. I can only imagine that we don't have the time to investigate the potential.
 
That's why I will be hosting a webinar at 7pm on Wednesday 11 November to show you exactly what your business can do with a CRM. (That includes being able to automate the work of at least one employee - and if that's you, you can start taking that lunch break you've always dreamed of!)
 
Click on the link at the right - and read all about it. The first 50 seat confirmations save 33% of the webinar fee, not that it is expensive.
 
And on November 12th you will be firing on 12 cylinders, with your new (gratis) CRM system guaranteeing that nothing gets lost. It's that easy.