While you may use mainly email to communicate with leads, it’s not an ideal tool to manage those leads. With the average worker receiving over 120 emails a day, it’s clear that there’s a lot going on in your inbox.
With so many emails being sent, it’s easy to lose track of things and if you lose track of deals, you’re losing out on money for your business. If you’re still using your inbox to manage your deals instead of a dedicated tool for managing deals, you’re likely a victim of one or more of the following outlined 5 issues.
Check out these 5 problems and what you can do instead to make sure you’re not leaving money on the table.
Losing Sight of Leads
Leads will pass your small business by if you’re not on top of them. Email, for all its uses is asynchronous, and therefore isn’t as proactively oriented with lead management in mind. A lead can get buried in your inbox easily while dealing with every other message. If you’re relying on email to manage deals, there’s nothing in your inbox jumping out and reminding you when to touch base with them.
What to do Instead: Use a lead management tool or CRM, like Daylite, where you can keep a list of all your leads and have reminders set to nudge you when you should follow up.
No Way to Prioritize Deals
Prioritizing deals is essential to make sure you’re focusing on the right deals at the right time. With email, you can flag things as important, or even categorize them in different folders, but there’s no way to sort and prioritize them. By using your inbox to manage leads, you’re constantly working off of the most recent of emails, rather than prioritizing deals by value or timeliness.
What to do Instead: Use a lead management tool or CRM, like Daylite, that allows you to organize and prioritize your deals.
Daylite workflow tip: Check out this tutorial to learn how to prioritize your deals by value.
Losing Sight of the Details
Sometimes it’s the tiniest detail that can make or break closing a deal. If you’re managing your deals just in your inbox, all the details and importance pieces of communication, files, etc get lost in the email thread.
What to do Instead: Use a CRM, like Daylite, that allows you to highlight important details so they’re front and centre instead of lost in the shuffle. This helps you avoid things slipping through the cracks.
Daylite workflow tip: If you have important details and specifications for a deal, include those in the details field of the Opportunity so they’re easily visible and always top of mind. For more tips managing deals with Daylite, check out this tutorial to learn how to keep track of all the moving pieces and details.
Forgetting Where You Left Off
For many small businesses selling their services, it can take weeks, months, or even a year to close a deal. You may have an interested lead that contacts you and isn’t ready to make a decision until months later. If you’re using just your inbox to manage these deals, you’ll not only lose sight of them and forget to follow-up and nurture them, but you’re also likely to forget where you left off. This creates wasted time as you try to piece together and recap what you originally spoke about.
What to do instead: Use a CRM, like Daylite, that allows you to store all your communication and details about a deal in one place that can easily be searched and pulled up so you can pick up where you left off.
Daylite workflow tip: Make sure you’re organizing all email, phone, and in-person communication for each deal in an Opportunity so it can be easily found. Check out this tutorial on how to organize all the moving pieces and communication for each deal.
Botched Handoffs
Often times when managing a deal, there’s things that need to be handed off to team members. Sure you can cc a colleague on an email or forward it to them and specify the action you need them to take to push the deal forward. But the problem with using your inbox to manage that is there’s nothing telling you whether or not they’ve completed that work. You’re relying on them to get back to you, but it’s too easy for those things to slip through the cracks.
What to do instead: Use a CRM, like Daylite, that allows you to delegate action items to a team member and notify you when that action is done. This way you can have peace of mind that whatever is being handed off is taken care of.
Daylite workflow tip: From an Opportunity in Daylite or from an email, you can create a task linked to the Opportunity, delegate it to someone on your team, and check off that you’d like to be notified. You can also create a list of tasks you’ve delegated so you can review them and ensure those things get done. Check out this tutorial how to delegate tasks.
Conclusion
By letting a small business CRM pick up from the follies of email, you can save, stay more organized, and increase your odds of closing more deals.
About the author:
Xander Cavalier is a former radio broadcaster and community organizer with grass-roots experience in Northern Ontario. He is currently based in the GTA. You may reach out to him on LinkedIn.