Recently I had a consulting gig with a small business not unlike many others found in the marketplace today. They had a phenomenal source of generating leads for their modest sales team of 8 people. The company was doing reasonably well, but the owner was looking to take things to the next level. Which for them meant breaking 5 million in revenue.

The Problem

After just several minutes of observing the sales team, one of their biggest problems became obvious to me. Each salesman had their own system for "dealing with" a potential customer. Leads came in via email that were then distributed one by one by an overwhelmed manager. Each salesman would then use an assortment of email tasks, outlook calender events, excel spreadsheets, and lotus notes to keep track of their contact with a potential customer.

The problem was that the manager and the owner of the business had no easy way of answering common questions like:

• - What is each salesman's conversion rate?
• - How many customers are in the "procurement" stage of the sales process?
• - What is my average cost per lead?
• - How many bogus leads did I get today and how can I quickly identify them so I can get reimbursed?
• - Which of my salesmen had too many leads and which ones don't have enough?

The Solution

What did I recommend after just minutes of observation? They needed a customer relationship management tool. I was a little surprised that they had reached the level of success they had without a CRM solution. But I was encouraged they could see much better results should they implement one.

I chose a hosted solution because of its simplicity. I chose a relatively 'lite' or feature-less solution for much the same reason.

Jake Sorbo is a small business consultant that specializes in helping small sales teams of 15 or less achieve dramatic results. For a list of small business CRM software options check out http://www.appdirectory.com