When to Beef Up on Sales Technology

When a small business starts out, often the owner or the co-owner is the whole package: marketing, sales, customer service and even accounting. However, as your business starts to grow and you make more hires, eventually you may be coordinating with a sales team, rather than just yourself.

At first the number of sales leads you have may be easy enough to coordinate without any advanced technology. However, as those leads hopefully begin to multiply, you may want to consider adding some technology to your sales team repertoire.

Questions to Consider:

Where are your leads from?

If most of your leads are recommendations from current clients or people you have been networking with, you probably do not need to invest in sales technology yet. However, if you have started expanding your marketing outreach to online forums, some technology may help you.

For example, lead management with Inside Sales, would automatically create a lead out of the information a potential client provides through a web form. This would save the business time and money, as the sales team would not have to keep track and categorize that information on their own.

How many sales calls do you make?

If sales calls are still a part time gig, you probably don’t need some kind of dialer technology. However, if you are now generating enough leads to last a team well past traditional working hours, some forms of dialer technology can significantly increase your sales productivity and help make sure the most important calls are made first.

New technology also allows the sales team to input criteria for which leads to follow-up on first. The technology can also automatically put new leads coming in at the top of the call queue, so promising leads are followed up on immediately.

To save a little more time, the sales team may consider creating pre-recorded messages to have the system leave, so they can move onto the next call while the technology takes care of leaving the message for them.

Are your sales as high as you’d like?

If your numbers are where you want them, great! However, if you have been getting after your sales team lately to pick up on its productivity; it may be time to start investing in some technology.

Of course, technology can never replace a salesperson that makes persuasive sales pitches, but if you are satisfied with your personnel, they may just be drowning in the number of leads they are trying to coordinate. In addition, the team may not be accessing the most viable leads that are coming in because they don’t have the time or resources to sort through the leads and contact the best potential customers.

Christina Sanders writes for several blogs nationwide. For more information about sales technology please visit here.