Developing Your Sales Pipeline: Selecting the Software

Last Tuesday Tech Tip we reviewed the Sales Process from Wikipedia listed as:

1.  Prospecting / initial contact
2. Preapproach - planning the sale
3. Approach
4. Need assessment
5. Presentation
6. Meeting objections
7. Gaining commitment
8. Follow-up

We discussed the techniques of the preapproach and I figured this is a good time to review some of the software out there that can handle the information that you are working so hard to generate and collect.

Most of us are using Outlook, and this is a great tool to store a lot of the information we are collecting during Prospecting and Preapproach phases of the sales process.  However, this software tends to be designed for the single end user to use in place of a rolodex.  When we are talking about Contact Relationship Management, we want to look at the company and all of the contacts.  We want to store information about a company and collect all of the correspondence we are having with every single member of that company. 

In this regard, there are many robust CRM tools to take a closer look at, but these are some of the highest rated in the industry based on the “Software Advice” website:

1. Salesforce
2. ACT!
3. InfusionSoft
4. Saleslog!x
5. Salestrakr

These will keep track of most of the sales cycle and go beyond just the information collection stages.

I also like:

1. ZOHO
2. SugarCRM
3. SageCRM
4. Microsoft Dyamics (folds into the Outlook)
5. Podio