An important part of helping sales reps, agents, or enrollment counselors be as productive as they can is reducing clutter. The most helpful sales managers or small business owners simplify the steps his reps have to take to get selling. Conversely, managers and owners who bog down their reps with busy work do so at the expense of their teams performance and ultimately the company’s bottom line.

Every job has administrative tedium associated with it. Sales is no exception. Leads cost money to generate or buy, and reps have to account for how they are working with this resource. It is necessary step to keep reps honest and enforce company policies. One challenge however is how to deal with the fact that this type of work increases proportionately with the amount of leads a sales rep is charged with working.

Technology has made it easier to move ever greater numbers of leads through a sales reps funnel. This has been a boon for many companies. But the higher number of leads has resulted in ever greater amounts of administrative work for sales reps. At a certain point a tipping point is reached where even the most effective sales reps begin to be slowed by the administrative burden.

There’s a great quote that the true test of a person’s calling is the love of its drudgery. No one loves drudgery, but in the service of doing work that a person really loves, it can be borne, even enjoyed. It’s a nice idea, and it may even be true, but it was uttered in a time before lead management software.  The simple fact is that lead management software eliminates a majority of the administrative drudgery that must be tackled by a sales rep.

Here’s a brief and incomplete list of administrative tasks that are mitigated by lead management software.

• Logging activity on a lead – Emails, phone calls, reminders, notes of any kind are logged automatically. They are accessible from within the lead form and in reports
• Deciding which lead to contact next – Lead prioritization based on proven best practices puts the lead most in need of contact at the top of your list
• Always looking for new leads – When a new lead becomes available, an intelligent dialer rings the phones of all available agents, so a new leads get a guaranteed, immediate phone response
• Sending Follow-up emails after a message is left or a contact is made – Automatic email campaigns trigger emails based on where a lead is in the sales cycle
• Keying phone numbers into the phone – An integrated lead dialer makes it possible to connect with leads on the phone with the click of a button
• Lead source ROI reporting – Simple reports display real time data on the return are you getting from each of your marketing campaigns

This is an incomplete list, but it is intended to get you thinking about how your sales team could function if they could focus purely on sales. That is the express mission of lead management software, to remove barriers between reps and leads; to help them connect more quickly and stay in contact until a deal closes. When reps don’t have to waste time on administrative work, they are able to focus on sales. And more time spent selling means more sales.

Tags: Lead Management