Contact management is vital. This much is easily established without the need for an argument in the business world. But not all contacts are created equal. Contacts cover a wide variety of people for a business, from its own employees, to business partners, to customers, and, last but not the least, to leads.Now, sales has since long been considered the primary department that a CRM package is supposed to assist, and although nowadays CRMs do much more than just manage sales, it still remains a major focus of a CRM’s capabilities. Under the umbrella of sales management, one task is sales contact management.Sales contacts, or leads, are one of the most important contacts for a business. They represent the future of the business. These are the people that can help your business scale new heights, provided you can nurture them and recruit them into your list of most valuable customers i.e. regular customers. But before you can even begin to nurture them, you must have a way of managing these contacts, which is why sales contact management is a crucial step of the ever-important sales function.
Leads are stored with basic contact information like every other contact, of course, but then there is additional information assigned to them as well. One piece of such additional information is the “lead status.” A lead is “cold” if it is not interested in purchasing the product anymore, “warm” if it can be nurtured to convince them to purchase the product, and “hot” if it is ready to purchase the product. Scoring leads this way is essential for figuring out a successful sales strategy depending on the lead status. Other than lead status, sales contacts also need to be easily appendable, with, for example, the latest meeting or call notes, so that the whole team is updated with the progress on a lead. This way, nobody makes a blunder by putting off a potential customer, an error that is far too common in sales teams with systems that don’t have real-time collaborative features.Lastly, as progress is made with a lead and a deal is discussed, the lead’s status is finalized as “won” or “lost.” A lead goes cold if it is lost. If it is won, it is added to the list of company’s customer contacts and if it represents a bigger party, like a company, then the bigger party is added to the “clients” or “accounts” section of the company’s database.Therefore, sales contact management is a process with its own nomenclature and methodology that is distinct from generic contact management. For a company where sales is an important department, as is the case with most companies, looking for these specialized sales management capabilities in a software is important so that the CRM software properly assists the sales team.