Taking a closer look at a key feature that GMail has potentially touched on is it's versatility in creating custom management strategies or processing ques. This flexibility is what makes GMail an ideal platform to use as a personal contact management system or as a simple CRM.
GMail as a Contact Management?
Contact management is fundamentally a system that helps a sales person quickly identify new prospects, make contact, and manage follow-up.
Inherently you get the communications tool, email. Leveraging the power of Google's search, labeling, and filters you get the management of those communications. There is a good chance that you are using a CRM , such as ACT! or Goldmine you are using a lot of email-like features, but are still required to leave that application to use email also.
Time is money so you don't want to be wasting time bouncing between multiple applications. So, why not stay in your email application.
Importing and Managing Contacts
One of the fundamental roles of your CRM is to capture and manage your contacts. Your sales system needs to easily get your prospects and clients into the system, reference them quickly, and efficiently manage updates.
GMail does each of these tasks exceptionally well. Whether you are exporting contacts from Outlook, Apple Mail, or loading a spreadsheet of contacts GMail makes it easy. If you already have your contacts in a Web-based mail or social network system like Yahoo! Mail or LinkedIn it is even easier just login and click.
Creating a Sales Prospecting System
Now that you have all your contacts in GMail, Google's search becomes a powerful prospecting tool. Are you looking for a person in a particular company? Do you need all the SVP or higher marketing executives? Do you need everyone that is in the health care sector? All of these types of prospecting questions are easily answered and your database segmented using GMail.
What is most important, using GMail as a contact management system puts all of these prospects at your fingertips and ready to contact.
Managing Real-time Internet Lead Generation
GMail also has great features for managing real-time Internet lead generation. Combining the power of filters, labels, and actions you can immediately prioritize and queue leads as you see fit.
Filters allow you to create complex rule sets for specific types of emails. This can allow you to:
* Highlight (i.e., star) emails coming from lead sources
* Label different lead sources
* Filter them into specific groups for follow-up
You can take this contact management and prioritization system one step further by using GMail's latest multi-inboxes to create sales pipelines and queues.
Prioritizing with GMail's New Task List
Of course, no sales management system would be complete without a task list. GMail has a simple, but elegant task list. You can not only build your schedule of TODOs and you can turn emails and correspondence into task and follow-up reminders.
Google Calander is a great feature to track and schedule your appointments.
Integrating Social Media Tools
Finally, sales is about engagement with people. Few technology concepts have helped sales to so directly engage customers as social media.
Using Google's robust GoogleTalk, embedded in GMail you can bring in all of your social media streams as well as your email conversations. Again, turning all of this communication into a searchable prospecting database.
There is no question that what GMail features to use as users is far more than an email application. GMail can be your personal Google contact management or CRM software.
Free Lead Management Software
One thing that lead management does is formulate and monitor the process that first brings in hopeful buyers or investors. Basically it's the process of converting the interested inquirer into a paying customer. It involves first the generation of the lead to bring the hopeful customer in, which is done by various advertising techniques, whether it is a billboard on a freeway or a banner ad on our favorite blog for example.
Lead acquisition is probably the most important part of the lead management campaign. This is where the most money on advertising is spent, just to lure people and companies to investigate in what the company does. Knowing the target of whom and what you are marketing to is in direct relationship to the money spent advertising. For instance, shot-gunning a message into cyberspace is much more expensive that picking and choosing sites that are in the same realm as your service and setting up affiliate links for their advertising banner pages.
Getting interested parties is relatively easy given the money poured into advertising. However, the bulk of those who are looking into the goods or service are those who are "kicking tires," people who may or may not care too much about what is being sold. The hardest part is finding those who are in more need of what you sell. That is where market analyzing software comes in handy.
Tracking a Mortgage Lead Management Marketing Process
For the most part lead management software is essential for a market like the mortgage industry. In this instance the brief will look at how a mortgage business can manage leads with online management software.
A business that is using an online lead management software can store, sort and send emails and reminders to keep salespeople on the ball converting interested parties into paying customers. Mortgage salespeople can use the software about potential buyers that stores important information like their spending loan amount, what geographic location they are looking for, when they are available to be contacted.
For instance, with mortgage lead management software, when the lead closes the salesperson can easily convert the data to loan origination software or other software to store and further develop the customer relationship.
The basic thrust of this lead management is to take the leads, distribute them to the sales force appropriately, track those leads, analyze the effectiveness of the sales, and ultimately convert the prospect to a full paid customer.
Both Bill Rice & Art Gib are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Bill Rice has sinced written about articles on various topics from Asset Management, Internet Marketing and Multi Level Marketing. Increase your Conversion Rates on sales leads with Lead ManagementSoftware. Learn the keys to managing sales leads with. Bill Rice's top article generates over 5400 views. Bookmark Bill Rice to your Favourites.
Art Gib has sinced written about articles on various topics from Supplements, Teachers and self improvement and motivation. Art Gib writes for Leads360 (http://www.leads360.com) who provides a web-based lead tracking software for businesses. The mortgage industry has specifically found Leads360 u. Art Gib's top article generates over 1830000 views. Bookmark Art Gib to your Favourites.
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