Worksheet for Assignment 26: Sales and marketing controls

Describe your records for monitoring sales activities.
Draw up a customer record card for your business, or show your existing one.
What other marketing records do you plan to keep, eg for advertising costs and results?
Explain the relationship between any sales activity and the results expected. For example ‘We expect to open one new account for every ten we cold-call; or for every 10,000 cold e-mails sent out.

Low-cost CRM software

Each provider has their own twist on how the information is presented, but in general CRM software lets you record everything about customers and contacts, create milestones, pipelines and tasks for projects, get automatic e-mail reminders, track all e-mail correspondence, include any files associated with a project and view task and event reports. All these data are retained in an easily accessible form that can be manipulated to generate reports in a near infinite number of ways.

CRM providers make their data available for people on the move using tablets, smartphones or laptops. All offer free trials of one sort and some even offer their software free to very small users. Insightly for example give anyone with less than 2,500 records free software and you don’t even need a credit card to install and use it. They even give free online support to users on a free trial. Zoho limits their free offer to three users and 5,000 records.

Costs, where applicable, range from US $7 (£4.50) a month to $55 (£34.50) a month, but for that you can put on an unlimited number of users and contacts, a valuable proposition if you want to have more than a handful of people on the system.

Low-cost CRM software

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