Every inbound and outbound phone call is an opportunity to ask your prospect or customer a couple of questions that will ultimately help them and at the same time enhance your marketing database to increase sales.

Whether a call is coming in to your company or you put together an outbound telemarketing campaign, the practice of gathering information can help your company improve its sales.

If senior management can clearly identify the sales process, the buying process and what key pieces of information that is important to have about your target markets company profile the more money you will save on employee's time cost and the more you will increase sales and customer satisfaction.

One Database
Every company uses some form of a sales and or marketing CRM software for database marketing practices. It could be ACT or Outlook on a server or it could be an Enterprise CRM or Salesforce, etc. Whichever your company uses, hopefully it is one database to which everyone has access.

Having one database reduces entering information more than once, reduces errors, eliminates syncing and multiple people getting involved.

Ideally, sales, marketing, accounting, order fulfillment, service etc all have access to the one database.

Even if your organization has multiple systems and software, one important suggestion I can make is to gather the information that is important to you as senior management.

The Practice of Gathering the Right Information
Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) are those things that you want to be able to report on that are of value to you (coincidentally they are usually what is important to your prospects and customers too). To clarify, it's not only "sales" but all the pieces of data that form the solution or product "sale".

From a sales and marketing perspective it may be:

* Target market segmentation
* Company
* Technical Decision Makers contact info
* Business Decision Makers contact info
* The type of applications they perform
* The equipment they use
* What is important to them
* Why they need a solution or product
* etc.

The information your business (employees) collects is unique to your sales process but the important thing is to take the time to outline what information everyone in your organization is to collect in their daily interactions. It takes some time to outline the buy sell process and make a simple yet effective list of data to collect but in the long run there is tremendous ROI.

For example, gathering this information allows for marketing campaigns, a faster sales cycle and ultimately improved relationships and customer satisfaction as you are providing more value to your customers in a more efficient manner.

Ultimately you want to have a clear identification of your target market and be able to profile every record, run data driven campaigns and to be able to report on those KPI's. If you ever have any questions, please feel free to contact me and I would be glad to help.

Written by John R Crowley Jr, President, Salesforce Consultant, Salesforce CRM & Marketing Services. For more information, contact Salesforce Consultant at 800-488-4852, john@salesforceconsultant.com www.SalesforceConsultant.com