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ChapterTitleEducation

Sell with the Are you still soliciting with obsolete tools?

right tools Like most sales agents, we started soliciting with a pen and

of other options but came with significant shortcomings.
By Tom Waters and Ben Abel paper. The process was effective enough in the absence
Notes would disappear, to later resurface crumpled,
Bank Associates Merchant Services
between the couch cushions. The necessity of physically
here are about 251 working days in a year. If you transporting documents everywhere we went and the
were able to have one extra conversation a day, fragility of paper forced us to search for better alternatives.
251 more conversations annually, could you close Luckily, technology had advanced significantly and we
T more deals? Efficiency is the key to separating were eventually able to put that horse to pasture.
yourself from the competition. Sales agents across the Paving the road
globe have become more efficient, organized and produc-
tive by utilizing modern technological advancements. We each had mentors at the time who advised us to keep
track of all leads and accounts through spreadsheets.
If technology were harnessed properly, even the most The adage states that "old habits die hard" and, like most
mediocre agent of today's era could outperform some of people, we were pretty stuck in our ways so we had to
the best agents of yesteryear. take a hard look at this new form of lead management.
The concept of writing on digital paper was foreign to
You don't see anyone cold calling through the telegram us, but we had to ask the fundamental question: Will this
nowadays. It's been quite some time since folks took bring us more deals? The answer was a resounding yes.
a horse and carriage to meet a prospect. Airplanes,
emails, and conference calls are fast and efficient, buying Armed with new devices, we jumped light-years ahead.
salespeople more time for productive activities. Notepads We no longer had to frantically search for the lost phone
and day planners are the telegraphs of yesterday. Today's numbers of warm leads. Tools like "conditional formatting"
customer relationship management (CRM) tools have and "sorting" helped the lead management process move
done for day planners what email has done for telegrams. much more efficiently.

Updating spreadsheets on our PalmPilots was great.
We could copy and paste leads right into our calendars
to ensure we never missed a follow-up. The process of
note-taking took much less time and allowed us to focus
on moving deals forward. Basic digital entry was a big
step up, but we would soon learn an escalator was right
around the corner.
Shifting gears

As spreadsheets and smartphones became mainstream
tools, they became more automated and feature rich,
shifting the sales cycle into overdrive. These products
became extensions of a deeper technology that tied
all of the devices together. The coordination of lead
management finally had a hub. The sales based CRM was
the new brainchild of efficiency. Where we once had to
drive, we now could fly.

A quick Google search will provide a host of options – both
free, such as Insightly or FreeCRM, or pay-based, such as
SalesForce. We first researched all the features available
to us in order to discover which option created efficiency
but was also applicable to our industry and sales cycle.
Technology is only an asset when wielded correctly.

Finding a good fit
So how did we research CRM? We needed a tool that
would enable us to better organize our leads, keep track
of important dates and organize documents for quick
reference. In our office, agents often collaborate on certain

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