Business Growth Blog

To accurately work and measure your sales pipeline, you need to know where your prospects are in the sales process. The following infographic outlines three CRM fields that give a clear picture of which contacts and companies have the highest potential of closing and are actively being pursued by sellers.

There’s one thing that often holds companies back from effective selling and marketing, but it’s not talked about very much: their contact database.

Your contact database is your most precious asset because it contains (or should contain!) the people you’re currently doing business with or with whom you would like to do business with. But unfortunately, it often gets neglected. It requires time, effort and dedication to keep your database clean and organized, or else it will quickly become a mess. Here are a few common database problems and how they can be negatively impacting your business.

If any of these issues sound familiar, it’s time to take a deep dive into defining the strategies and processes that will transform your database from just random "contacts" into people you want to do business with.

One of the age old questions companies ask people is "how did you hear about us?"

That is one of the most important pieces of information you can gather. Unfortunately, many companies I talk to don't have a clear process for how to collect or leverage that data to drive important business decisions.

By effectively tracking lead source, you can fully evaluate where you get your best customers and how that impacts your business growth. Here's an example of how it can work:

We're ultra busy, and taking extra time to input contact data is...annoying to say the least. Most of us just put the minimum amount of information into our contact database as fast as we can and go on our merry way.

That's all fine and dandy – until we want to send a message to a specific group of people, and we have no way to segment out contacts based on certain criteria. Or, we think we have a list of 3000 people, only to find out that only 200 of them have email addresses. Bummer!

The most important part of sales and marketing is to understand who is on our contact list (and who we want to be on the list). My team has spent a lot of time working with our clients to clean up their contacts and implement processes to collect and report on the data.

When we validate contact data, the 4 most important things we look for are:

The people "in your world" are the backbone of all your marketing and sales efforts. When developing any kind of business growth strategy, the first thing you want to hammer out is: who do you want to be your customer?

The ultimate goal of sales and marketing is to find these target prospects and get them into your contact database so you can continue communicating with them.

Unfortunately, most of us don't spend enough time "taking care" of our contacts. We throw them into our database willy-nilly with no strategic thought into who they really are, what we need to know about them, or how to organize them. They become just another meaningless contact in our database.

One of the first questions I ask my prospects is, "How many contacts do you have?" Interestingly, most of them don't really know. And if they can throw a number at me, they can't tell me much about the people on the list.

Don't let this happen to you! Below are the 2 most important types of contact reports you should be able to run. If your contacts aren't organized in a fashion that lets you run these reports, it's better to fix it now than to wait until you have an even bigger mess!

The main way to generate leads online is to put forms on your website. It goes beyond the "contact" form. Anytime you have a valuable content offer to share with your target audience, you can ask for information in order to download it.

The data you collect on the forms can be used to guide prospects through the buyer journey. You can use it to properly qualify leads to either send them to the appropriate sales rep or put them back in the bucket for more lead nurturing.

If you collect the right information about your prospects in the right way, you can use it to create targeted messaging that will keep the sales momentum going. However, I frequently see mistakes on website forms that make the data collected very difficult or impossible to use.