We’re heading into the busiest time of year for industry trade shows, and you probably know how vital proper preparation is. Did you know that following up properly with trade show leads is just as important?

You’ll want to contact all leads as soon as possible after the show ends. New contacts will need to be entered into your database, customers and prospects will need to be sent any information you’ve promised them and personalized email campaigns should be sent or phone calls made.

Feeling a little overwhelmed? We’ve got solutions that can help you import lists of trade show contacts into Act! so that you don’t have to retype your entire list or risk duplicating contacts. And Act! Emarketing is a great tool for sending personalized email campaigns. 
 
Contact us to learn more.

Are you meticulous about your sales pipeline? Are you using ACT! to help manage your prospects and projects? Because if you already have ACT!, you could be using the opportunities feature to manage and track sales opportunities as they go through the sales process, and even better—you can then analyze your past opportunities to gain insight into your strengths and weaknesses as a salesperson.

To successfully leverage your opportunities in ACT!, you can start by adding prospects you meet to your database and then creating opportunities for the potential services or products that interest them. Then as you move through the sales process, you can update the opportunity to reflect where you are at. If the default list of stages in a process does not mirror your own, the stages are editable. This means that ACT! can be customized to match your business needs, giving you the ability to be nimble. ACT! will keep up with you.

Once you’ve started creating opportunities for prospects and potential projects, you can then fully manage your pipeline through ACT!. You can easily pull up your opportunities by opening the opportunities tab on the left navigation panel, and then filter which opportunities you would like to see. You can then get a feel for what business may be coming in in the next few weeks, months, or years (for those longer sales cycles). And because each stage in a process has a probability for closing, you can calculate the probability of what your business can expect to bring in.

You can also pull up opportunities from the past—in particular those marked lost. What part of the sales cycle were you in when the opportunity was lost? Do you see any patterns? By examining your lost opportunities, you can better understand what you may want to work on to get better results in the future. If you pull up your won opportunities, you can similarly review what made deals go well to assure you continue with those practices.

With these features geared toward selling, ACT! helps set you up for success. By providing you with tools that support an effective sales process, ACT! can help you fast-track your business.

Would you like training on using ACT! for sales success? Contact us at 847-520-0860, or email us at info@kristismith.com

Looking to expand your business in 2011? Sage recently released a white paper that explores how companies can increase their list of highly qualified leads using their Business Info Services for ACT! tool. If you are struggling to find good quality leads, or simply want another source for locating quality leads, you'll want this white paper! I have provided an excerpt below (along with a link to download the full white paper).
Feeding Sales: Find targeted leads with Sage Business Info Service for ACT!
by Sage

The challenge: Find relevant, yet cost-effective sales leads

Your business needs a steady supply of new sales leads so it can grow and acquire more customers. Over time, it can really become a struggle to find sources of good quality leads. Lists often cost too much, focus on the wrong industry for your products, or contain outdated contact information. Soon, you’re spending as much time looking for leads as you are making sales calls—and that’s not a productive way to sell.

New leads can be obtained from a variety of sources, including word-of-mouth from your current customers, rented lists, purchased lists, or doing your own research on individual companies using internet searches and newspapers or magazines. Unfortunately, these methods can result in wildly variable lead quality, and are also time consuming and costly.

What your business needs is a deep source of leads on-demand, with consistent quality, at a reasonable cost. That’s what Sage has introduced with Sage Business Info Services for ACT!, powered by Hoover’s™, a new cloud-based service that provides a rich source of new sales leads and research...

Click here to read more and download the complete white paper.