Closing the deal: Do your sales people have the tools they need to follow-up on leads?

As marketers, we spend a great deal of time positioning our products and services and getting consumers in the virtual or physical door.  However, consumers who already have a tendency to “shop around” when making considered purchases are increasingly empowered by the wealth of information at their fingertips, making the sales persons’ job even more difficult. So what happens when that customer walks away before your sales force can seal the deal?

Ideally, our sales people follow up with all perspective consumers, especially if the sales person is compensated based on performance.  But perhaps your brand, like so many of our clients, has thousands of salespeople all over the world.  How do you make sure they are all making the most of potential leads, ensuring that the follow-up process is executed timely and appropriately?

Before an organization can expect widespread consistency amongst their global sales force, they must establish an accessible follow-up campaign management system that encourages user adoption.  Automation technology is one way to help your sales force create consumer-focused, customized dealer-driven or automatically deployed follow-up campaign materials like call scripts to postcards and emails.

Automating the procedure encourages your sales force to follow up with prospective customers by eliminating the guesswork and simplifying the process, which in turn, increases the rate at which leads turn into actual sales.  The long-term benefits of collecting sales force and consumer data are immense, as you can constantly update and improve the system and test new ideas.

Does your company have a system for follow-up campaign management?  How do you make the most of your local sales force and maintain brand integrity?  For more information on how we work to resolve these issues, click here.

User Adoption Trends in Local Marketing: Movin' On Up!

The holiday season is approaching, and Pica9 is revving its engines in preparation for the next quarter.  As we continue building and maintaining local marketing automation systems for our clients, the issue of user adoption remains of keen interest.  This goes, of course, to the usability of our systems, but also speaks to issues of seasonality and the freshness of creative.  To investigate these issues, we aggregated data across a broad cross section of our user communities.

Document generation figures point to trends in user adoption.  We looked at document generation data overlaid with total number of users from 2009 and compared it to 2010 statistics.  Our analysis reveals a slow but steady recovery in advertising on the local level.  There is also evidence of increased activity in the spring.  The overall number of users steadily increased over the past year, and the ratio of documents generated per user has also increased.  These are classic signs that local marketing is mirroring marketing trends on a brand level.  This also indicates local marketers increasingly find that Pica9’s local marketing automation systems are valuable and accessible tools.

Is your brand monitoring the efforts of its local marketers?  Have you found any interesting trends?  How can we all stay ahead of the curve on these trends, utilizing the patterns to better position our brands? We would love to hear what you think!