How effective are you in managing your time in your sales prospecting and sales effectiveness?

Do you sometimes struggle to remember to follow up with important prospects and existing customers and clients because you just get too over whelmed?

It’s natural. We all do it no matter how well planned out our time is.

The reality is we all let sales and marketing activities go through the cracks because we are too busy, get distracted or just plain forget. There was research done (artributed to many organisations) in the 90′s,  that showed  most people will buy after 7 ‘touches’. More recent research has indicated that with the proliferation of marketing messages and marketing channels available today, that could be more like 12-20 touches.

An effective way to keep ahead of the pack and on top of your game is to leverage technology to work smarter and not harder. One of the best ways of doing this is by using what is referred to as ‘drip marketing’ software.

Using a drip marketing software like pinpoint tools will give you the edge to systemise your sales and marketing with your potential clients and customers.

An overview of Pinpoint Drip Marketing Software:

Manage your drip marketing here

You can develop as many presaved marketing and sales plans as you require. They can incorporate any number of future activities such as telephone calls, emails, letters or project tasks.

One of the most creative ways of utilising this software is to leverage the future dates option. This allows you to choose a future date when an activity will happen. This can be a final decision on a project, a visit to a client premises, a seminar – well, there are no limits.

Once you set that future date, you work backwards from that date to plan a series of activities that will be automatically scheduled at the click of  a button.

If you struggle to keep on top  of your sales and marketing activities then definately check out what this software can do for you. Have a look at pinpoints site – Here If you are going to buy the software, which is great value at $149 use the following code PO477 for a 20% discount.

Let me know how you get on.

From personal recent experience I would say the Post Office can urgently do with some sales training .

The papers and TV news have been filled recently with the subject of post office closures and how this will kill off many local communities. I can understand this and can only sympathise with people who rely on the post office for essential services.

What I can’t help is my feeling that largely the post office have brought this upon themselves with untrained and quite frankly appalling customer service / sales staff . I know that many of the post office counters operate as mini franchises but they should insist on some element of sales training or sales management training .

I recently went into my local branch to send a parcel to the USA. The man at the counter huffed and puffed his way through my request and looked at me like I had asked him if I could kiss his mother.

After a few minutes of huffing and puffing he came back with the words:

” We can do it but it’s going to be expensive and we will have to fill out a whole stack of paperwork”

Being difficult to put off I said OK.

After about 10 minutes of him reading through a few simple sheets of documentation I gave up and went to DHL Within 3 minutes I had completed the transaction with a nice customer friendly sales person and was on my way.

If I was giving training to the local branch of the Post Office to increase their sale s I would start with:

• Sales Attitude – people are busy and they want to be treated with respect and be made to feel that their business is valuable

• Sales Words – It doesn’t take much retail sales training to change the emphasis of the words the sales representative had used to something like:

“You would like it sent to the USA sir – absolutely. Consider it done. Based on the weight and your delivery requirement of 4 days, I’m delighted to tell you it will be there on time and probably early and it will only be £42.00.

There are a few forms to complete and I know them like the back of my hand so all we need to do is get you to sign here and here and I can fill in the rest for you.

Is there anything else I can help you with?”

If all post office staff received customer service training so that they could think like that then I am certain their sales would not be in decline.