eLink Advantage - eLink Solutions - Sales & Marketing Management

Sales and Marketing Solution

The Sales and Marketing Solution includes everything that the sales and marketing function demands, it embraces marketing campaigns, mailshots and emailshots; telemarketing; Sales Force Automation; Sales Lead Qualification; Sales Opportunity Management; Sales Pipeline control; integration with Outlook for emails and for synchronizing diary, tasks and contacts, all into one integrated solution for the whole team. It can be used in the office, at branch offices, at home or on the move and it even includes travel and other expenses control and visit reports.

The Sales and Marketing Solution begins in the marketing department because with some organisations the process starts with a mailshot or emailshot to a selected target market, and then by the creation of telemarketing actions to follow up each one.

Marketing Mailshots and Telemarketing

Within the company database eLink Advantage sales leads qualification system has a data table especially for marketing. In its standard form the database design allows for the following information to be held:

• Organisation turnover

• Organisation number of employees

• Industry sector

• IT Spend

• Notes

• Date the data was most recently cleaned

• Town

• Post Code

• Telephone numbers

• Products previously purchased

Similarly in the ‘contact database’ we have a data table for personal contact information:

• Use of first name in e/mailshots

• Opt-in list, Yes or No

• Source of lead

• Do NOT Email

• Preferred contact method: email, fax, letter

• Preferred Language

• Importance

• 3 telephone phone numbers

• 3 email addresses

• Job Title / job function

• Relationship with company

• Relationships with other contacts

Data can be electronically brought in from MS Outlook folders or any ‘comma delimited (CSV) file’ eg MS EXCEL or MS ACCESS.

Select the target contacts based on this information or collect the data with ‘opt-in’ control and contact them either an emailshot or mailshot or by telemarketing direct. In this case actions will have been set up for each phone call, so that the company has a record of the contact being made. The record contains a table of qualification questions.

Other leads, enquiries and referrals are all added into the system at this stage.

The Sales and Marketing Solution stands on its own as your sales management solution or it can be used as a starting point for a more comprehensive business management solution.

Sales Lead Qualification

Sales lead qualification section has four stages in qualifying a prospect:

• Segmentation: relevance of type of business, turnover, no. of staff, no. of homeworkers etc

• Validation: Do they really want to etc

• Qualification: do they agree to, preferred supplier list, decision-making process

• Evaluation: timeframe, recognised need, budget, can we work together

Each stage has a set of eight questions, each with a score. When that total score exceeds "X" the person progresses from ‘Suspect’, ‘Qualified suspect’, to ‘Prospect’ and finally becomes a 'qualified prospect'.

During this process it may be necessary to send further brochures or emails, and this can be done automatically.

Sales Opportunity Management section, starts when a prospect has been judged to be a qualified prospect, when the twenty eight questions have been satisfactorily answered. Each prospect contact and company is allocated to a sales executive and is set up with target sales and gross margin values, target close dates etc.

Sales Opportunity Management

The management skill is in supporting and tracking each sales opportunity through six successive activities necessary to closing a sale. Each activity has eight statements describing the relationship achieved with the prospect and each of these statements has a score.

Contacts: status of relationship, acceptance of our proposal

Timescales: how secure are dates and the basis for them

Budget: discussed and confirmed, we can work with them

Buying process: criteria, who’s involved, through to agreement of implementation plan

Solution: relevance, amendments agreed, proposal agreed

Competition: differentiation, unique proposition, strategy,

This total score of the sales opportunity calculation automatically defines how far into the sequence the sales executive has brought the prospective customer. In time a co-relationship between score and the probability of a successful sale becomes obvious.

The Sales and Marketing Solution holds details of all the contacts and their relationships, details of partners and of competitors so that the whole picture can be seen. It integrates the shared calendars and shared to do list to give comprehensive task and time management.

The Sales and Marketing Solution provides direct integration with MS Word for preparing letters, meeting confirmations, quotes, proposals and sales invoices.