Marketing

Converting Emails to Sales Leads with Cloud-based CRM

The first important step in the Sales Cycle is Prospecting or Leads Generation. And the easiest and most preferred means by potential customers to communicate is through email. No wonder most sales organizations pepper nooks and cranny of the internet with their contact points, and these come in many forms – however, each message would eventually end up in a company mailbox somewhere!  Although this attracts more than just legitimate customers (spammers), many of the big sales leads still come via email, whether initiated through contact forms, blog and forum notifications, or offline short messages that automatically get forwarded to emails. To a startup or a mid-sized growth-oriented company, every single lead is precious. And your organization must capture, filter, and qualify each and every message as a lead or not!

This would have been a tedious exercise, but thanks to Sales & Customer Relations Management Software, this can be as simple as drag and drop.  One of the great features of CRM systems – email integration – can do this for you. 

How does it work?

Now before getting to the CRM bit, you need to know that the prerequisite is for you to have a single email address that becomes a common collection point of all your sales leads. You should then advertise the same email address in your websites, social media site, blogs, forum discussions, web chat notifications, on your business cards, etc.  Note: make sure your email provider has anti-spam software, otherwise your mailbox (and CRM) will be inundated with spam!

The CRM software, once properly configured with your email account credentials, checks your mailbox regularly.  It then downloads your emails into the CRM database and automatically files each email as a new prospect on your CRM dashboard. Once an email lead gets into your CRM dashboard, things will be as simple as clicking, dragging, and dropping.

Here are some example scenarios:
– An internet visitor to your site fills a contact form, which should be configured to go to your sales mailbox
– Somebody reading an internet blog or forum finds your sales email and sends you an inquiry
– A Facebook user visits your Facebook page and submits an inquiry, which then goes to your sales mailbox
– You get an email from a friend who has a friend who needs some of your products
– Somebody initiates a web chat on your mailbox during off-office hours and leaves a message – this then gets forwarded into your sales mailbox
 

All of the above leads getting into your sales mailbox will then be automatically added to your CRM dashboard.  Never miss a sales lead again.  Remember, your next big sale could be that innocent email from somebody you didn’t even meet yet.

The good news is, that you can actually do this for your business right now.  

Cloud ERP includes a Sales and CRM system and your first gigabyte of database usage is free forever! You only get billed very small incremental amounts when you go beyond 1 gigabyte – don’t pay for what you don’t use.