William Griffith is a sales manager
with Kom Lamb, Inc.

We sell factory automation controls, systems that control production equipment at manufacturing facilities. I have 20 salespeople, and we cover upstate New York, northwestern Pennsylvania, and western New England.

CRM is probably the biggest pure technology tool we use. We also use cell phone, BlackBerry, and other communication devices, but these have become standard fare these days.

CRM is huge. It helps salespeople with a database of their contacts and keeps them up on activities in their territories. It helps them to focus on trends and keeps them informed so they can ferret out specific customer activities. They can see where the opportunities are and where these may have been hanging too long and need a nudge.

We use salesforce.com for CRM. It is very helpful and offers a lot more than we take advantage of. It is also very customizable, so we can adjust it for categories that are pertinent to our business. Our first customer database was Outlook, but now we use Outlook mostly for email. Salesforce.com is what we use for contact management.

Eric Gehnrich is director of sales for
business gifts at 1-800-flowers.com.

We sell not just flowers but provide many other gifts, such as gift baskets, gourmet foods, chocolate, baked goods, and wine. My division supports our corporate partnerships, the business-to-business market and the business-to-employee market, which are the employees of our corporate partners.

Three kinds of technology are absolutely essential to our proactive sales efforts. First, we use ACT contact management to capture partner data, manage our pipeline, create marketing programs, and do reports. ACT stores the data, tracks progress with our partners and the sales cycle, and keeps the personal data that we need to build relationships with our partners. If we need to move an account internally or reallocate accounts, all the data is there, so we do not experience downtime in serving our partners’ needs. Using contact management requires some time, especially for new hires, but we have embraced it.

Second, when a Fortune 500 corporation wants to join our corporate gift program, they want to deal with us through their technologies, such as Ariba and Oracle. So we must be able to integrate with and support that.

The third piece is electronic data interface, or EDI, which allows for the immediate transfer of approved funds.

In terms of communications, we have what I call a low-tech, high-touch model. The phone is our biggest asset. We are still in a world where we need to reach out and build relationships over the telephone. Then, we back that up with emails of documentation and other materials. Face-to face-meetings are scheduled when agendas are approved and business needs require them.

We also use emails to help our corporate partners offer our products as soft benefits to their employees. We don’t want to send meaningless emails, so we cooperate with our partners to email employees three times a year, in November/December for the holidays, for Valentine’s Day in February, and for Mother’s Day in May.

Paul Carbone is a district sales
manager with Save-A-Tree.

Our company does about $50 or $60 million in business in locations in the northeast. We sell tree-care services to both residential and commercial clients. We protect trees, landscape, and lawns with, for example, insect control and disease control. We have 53 salespeople who we call arborists, and I have 18 in my district.

Sure we use technology. We have just embarked on contact management. We set the software up here, and we do mailings and track the arborists’ closing rates. Unfortunately, about half of them are still locked into a paper mode, so we are pushing them to change, telling them they have no choice. Some of our arborists say they want laptops, so the owner says he will be happy to give them laptops, but first they have to use the contact management software.

This system helps me a lot when I ride with them on sales calls about three days a week. I can call up data on closing ratios and on each sales call.

Every one of our arborists has a cell phone and a computer at his desk. The cell phones let them stay in contact with their crews in the field directly, and these phones also link them to the other arborists. They have different types of degrees. Some have PhDs in forestry, for example, so when they have a particular problem they can consult among themselves.

We have just introduced some laptops and are starting to see people use them. We had a contest, and people who won the contest got the first laptops. This gives them the ability to do sales follow-up from their homes. Over the long term, we will probably have laptops for everyone. The next step after that will be giving them printers, so they can do presentations and contracts in their vehicles.

I don’t put my radio on in the car during my ride days. I just listen to Selling Power tapes and CDs, and that keeps me plugged in to what is going on in sales outside my industry.

Peter Green is vice president, business
development at Wallace-Training Cost
Recovery Company.

We work with training grants and tax credits. Companies in our target market do a lot of training, and we find out whether there are grants and credits available in their states for what they are doing. We qualify them and do the whole process and get them the money. We did this for about seven years in Georgia and for the last three years we have been doing it across all 50 states.

I used to use Goldmine for contact management, but now I use Prophet by Avidian Technology because it mates seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook, and we have everyone in the company using Outlook. When you enter something into Prophet, it automatically goes into Outlook for tasks, call backs, and reminders.

I have to handle a fairly high volume of contacts. We get our leads mostly from trade shows, and we get 20 to 100 leads from each show. I probably have 2,000 contacts, and I am currently working with leads from the last four shows, maybe 100 prospects.

Prophet has a section that gives you charts, graphs, and opportunity lists. You can customize all the fields pretty well. So every month I print those out. I use Outlook for emails, reminders, and for lists of tasks to do each day.

Email is my preferred method of communication, but I am not afraid of the phone. We don’t have to do cold calls because we get our leads from trade shows, and the initial contact is by email. Then we stay on email unless we do not get a response, then I get on the phone.

My cell phone is listed on my card and my voice mails. I am always available on the cell phone, but I prefer not to use it for important calls because you never know what is going to get dropped.

For my personal to-do list I am addicted to the Planner Pad hardcopy daily organizer. I can carry it around and take it home. And of course I have a big pile of them on my desk. I just stack them in order.

I do not use a BlackBerry or Treo because I am still in the mode in which I want to switch things off when I go home. When I travel, I have my laptop. But I do not want to be at my kid’s soccer game on Saturday morning and feel I have to respond to an email. But it’s a losing battle against that.

Jeff Goldberg was director of sales
and training at DEI Management and is now
president of Jeff Goldberg Associates.

We train salespeople on how to get more appointments, how to shorten the sales cycle, and how to close more business in both business-to-consumer and business-to-business markets.

For my own selling, I use ACT for contact management and a Treo personal digital assistant. The Treo has my entire customer database on it, so no matter where I go I have all my information.

I like ACT very much. It is very reasonably priced, very functional. It is easy to use and it gives me everything I need.

I also use Beyond Contact on my Treo. When I bought my Treo, ACT did not provide support for PDAs. Now it does, but I don’t want to buy the newer version of ACT, and Beyond Contact works just fine.

I have to play a little to integrate ACT with the Treo. I download the data from ACT to Outlook and then to Beyond Contact in my Treo. It is easy to do, just a quick export, so it does not take much time. I have an alert set up so that I will synchronize everything once a week.

By the way, I love Selling Power. I just mentioned it to a VP of sales this week.

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