Managers’ Forum: How does technology help you sell or manage sales?

Paul Sciaraffa is advertising sales manager with The Valley Breeze.

We are in the newspaper business. We have four free weekly community newspapers and we sell advertising, which is almost our only income.

I have six salespeople on the road, and technology is vital for us. I can contact them with emails, or send mass emails to customers. For example, I can send the salespeople procedures and tell them what is going on and send them tidbits on sales, or pass along sales tidbits I have received.

It is also very important to us to keep a database on our customers, so that we can send them mass emails. For example, if someone is selling home and garden materials, we might target them with a mass email. Technology sure makes life easier for us.

We all are up on iMacs. We have them on our desks. Our reps do have cell phones but nothing else special to get emails. We tried laptops for a while, and we may get back on that.

Our customer database is kept in an address book, like contact-management software. We have the customer’s name, work phone, fax, and email addresses. I can tell what type of business they are in, and when the last time I contacted that person was.

We do use the Internet. For example, if we are dealing with a hardware store and they sell a certain brand of equipment, we can look the company up and see if they have a cooperative marketing program so that they pay a certain amount of the advertising bill. We also use the Internet for advertising art work. If we need a certain picture for an ad, we can get one right there.

We just bought two newspapers and we are killing the daily newspapers on advertising around here.

Terry Ciszewski is a sales manager with Vulcanium Corporation.

For us, technology is very helpful. We are an engineering firm that manufactures titanium and aluminum for metal-finishing applications. Technology and creative design are kind of what we live on.

We have auto-CAD (computer assisted design), and everything we do, we do with auto-CAD. It really allows us to show our customers what we are doing, and we can be very specific and professional in our drawings. It also helps to show that we are up-to-date and not behind the times.

In communicating with our customers we constantly use email. I would say that 80 to 90 percent of the time, we use email. We also do some faxing. So it is mostly either email or Winfax.

The Internet helps us in terms of finding out more about our customers and getting general information before we make a call. We have a Website, and, yes, we get leads from it, but it does not really drive our business. We use the Internet more for getting information on our customers.

We have a Goldmine database that we are using right now. We probably do not use it as well as we should but we have all that sort of technology here.

Lisa Kitchener is general sales manager with Clear Channel Punta Gorda.

We are in the radio business. We sell radio advertising to businesses.

My immediate response is that, sure, technology does help, but I think the key to selling is still the basics. No matter how advanced we become, you still need relationships, meeting the customers’ needs, and exceeding their expectations. Technology is good, but unless we go to pure transaction selling, which I don’t think we ever will, it is not the most important thing.

We do use technology now more than before. We use faxes and emails and we have become a little more savvy with our PowerPoint presentations. You don’t just shoot the customer a piece of paper anymore. It is definitely more impressive and it forces you to be more professional to work with technology.

Also, the Blackberry is a phenomenal and wonderful tool because it allows you to be out there more. Some of our salespeople wonder, if they lose their Blackberry, what are they going to do to be successful?

And we also use an inventory management system. In the last few years, this has become very important to us. It shows us what spots we have open and available, so we can sell a higher percentage. If it is going to spoil anyway, we can sell it at reduced rates. We draw the analogy to the airline business. If you only sell 10 seats on a flight, it takes the same amount of fuel to fly the plane, so you might as well fill it up at $99.

For our salespeople, we can track what they sell on a month-to-month and a year-to-year basis. But we expect them to manage themselves. If they are suffering and we need to micromanage and have them fill out forms and send us emails, then we do that.

But for the most part, that kind of micromanagement can be very disabling. When you get to that point, you are really spending more of your time and effort in managing what they are doing, and you could be putting the time into people who get it. You can system and form yourself to death and still not get performance.

So you have to focus on the relationship. Selling is not dazzling the customer with how sharp you are with technology. They really don’t care what goes on in your company internally.

We were hit by the hurricane last year, and our entire building was wiped out. If we had depended heavily on technology, we would have been up the creek without a paddle. Because our people sustained their relationships, they did not miss a beat. And we were talking to people just like us. They had lost so much, yet they still had to pay their bills and send their kids to college.

Becky Sigler is account executive for the southeast for American Trucker magazine.

We definitely use technology in sales. We sell advertising for a nationwide magazine to big companies like Volvo, and we have 21 salespeople in our sales force. We all have Blackberry and a cell phone. Without those, we would pretty much be out of touch and we would miss some sales for sure.

We communicate with whoever sends us an email. As soon as we get an email alert on our Blackberry we can relay a response. Everybody has a deadline for responding in each of our regions. So we can get out a quick email to our production manager that this ad is coming in or not. Rather than calling we can send an instant message or email to let him know what is up.

Our sales associates take digital photos of the advertiser’s equipment and download them on their hard drives and then can send the digital photos as attachments via email. We can download them on our Blackberry as well.

We also use ACT for account management. We put in all the customer comments and notes and anything that happens that day to a particular customer. Each sales associate is responsible for updating ACT, and then we synchronize on a monthly basis.

I don’t know what we would do without technology. Of course, the cell phone is the number one tool. Even for personal uses. I am the mother of a two-year-old and will have another child in two months. I do not know what I would do without my cell phone.

Michael Ripellino is VP, sales with AB Electronics and Control.

I own two companies, one does electronics and one does home remodeling.

I don’t think I have been without a cell phone for 20 years. It becomes part of your radar.

I use a Blackberry, so I can have my emails on hand all of the time.

I use wireless connect on my ear so I can drive with the freedom to keep two hands on the wheel. That is extremely important. Bluetooth technology helped to get us to that point.

I use a Microsoft contact database, which is intermingled with the Blackberry so I can have all my contacts at my fingertips always.

I used to subscribe to Selling Power cassettes, but there is only so much stuff you can have in the car. I am on the move all of the day. I have to stay in touch with the people who buy our products, the guys who install it, the person who pays for it, everybody. You name it, I have to stay in touch with him from start to finish.

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