Prospecting, Calling And Research

The program enables sales professionals to execute outbound calling campaigns. The Calls & Research tab provides the ability to make calls and do the additional background research that makes cold calls warmer and more effective. While each sales professional or sales team has their own strategy for prospecting, this program supports some common prospecting activities.

Micro-target the right group of contacts

You can use selection techniques to target groups of contacts from within a large list of contacts. See the section on advanced techniques for selecting contacts in Managing Contacts to learn how. It may be helpful to cut-and-paste your targeted groups into a separate pipeline file while you are working on them.

Hint: Use Progress to track how many attempts to have made to reach a prospect

When calling, if you make several tries to reach a prospect, you might choose to use the contact's Progress property to track your where you are in your prospecting process. For example, if your prospecting process is to make three attempts to call a prospect:

• First Call: Set Progress = 30%
• Second Call: Set Progress = 65%
• Third/Final Call: Set Progress = 100%.

Using Sales Office Administrator, a campaign can make this easy and fast by adding a 3 call results:

• Call Result First Call: Automtically sets Progress = 30%, creates a "first call" journal entry, then advances to the next call
• Call Result Second Call: Automtically sets Progress = 65%, creates a "2nd call" journal entry, then advances to the next call
• Call Result Final Call: Automtically sets Progress = 100%, creates a "3rd try unsuccessful" journal entry, then advances to the next call

Calling a list of contacts

One of the most powerful areas of this program is the ability to call a one or a list of contacts. The contacts in the Contact tab serve as the "call list". You can use the powerful selection techniques in the Contact list to micro-target a group of contacts. The Call & Research tab's Contact List area allows you to work your way through the targeted contacts. See Calling lists of contacts in this

Moving through your list of contacts

The Contact List area buttons allow you to walk through the contacts listed in the Contact tab: First, back, forward, last. You can also enter a contact's position in the list - ie jump to the 6th item in a list of 10 contacts.

Switching Between Calling and Research

On the Call & Research tab is the switch that changes between modes.

Get more information about a contact

You can draw upon the information of the Internet to get deeper information about a contact. See Contact research in this section to learn more.

Clicking the Research button

Adding a Contact or Colleague

Add a new Contact by pressing the New button in the Contact area of the toolbar.

To add a person with the same address and company as the current contact, choose the New drop down arrow. A new Contact is created with the same address and company as the current contact. The new "nameless" contact is displayed....add the name, phone number, etc.

Saving your changes

Any of the information you change about a contact - name, company, address, email address, phone number, journals, rating, progress - must be saved by pressing the Save button.

Campaign Call Results created using Sales Office Administrator can be programed to automatically save or delete changes to a contact.