A Quick Evaluation Of 9 CRM Tools

A small business I’m involved in did an evaluation of some CRM software (Customer Relationship Management) tools. I like to share such learnings to save you or your pals time if you’re in the same boat.

Just to be clear, it was just two of us who spent about 10 hours total looking at demos online and trying trial versions where possible. And we excluded Salesforce.com — the market leader — because we had used it before and while it worked great, we wanted to try some new CRMs. Here’s the quick list: …

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How to Create A Sales Pipeline

I’ve been teaching someone on our team recently about how a sales pipeline works — and so I thought I’d summarize my sales approach here for you (I’ve used this for straight up sales as well as for partner sales).

Note: I’m going to refer to the party I’m selling to as a “customer” but it could easily be a partner in the case of partnership sales.

There are any number of sales pipeline stages you can use: I’m going to use Leads, 10% Opportunities, 50% Opportunities, 90% Opportunities and Closed Won/Lost. I first adopted this methodology when I began using Salesforce.com which mapped well to how my mind works. …

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