What the Personal Computer Can Do for Your Sales!

I believe the predominant reason that salespeople don’t use a personal computer (PC) as part of their overall sales strategy is that they don’t understand its advantages.

Once a salesperson does understand the PC’s capabilities for improving sales, he or she can have the biggest sales edge available today. The PC offers the following benefit categories:

* Improved Sales Skills and Performance

* Increased Sales Productivity and Organization

* Improved Sales Image

* Improved Sales Discipline and Creativity

* Increased Product Knowledge

* Better Customer Service

In this article, we will review some computer basics. Once you understand these, it’s easier to understand how the PC could help in YOUR sales territory. Then you can make up your own benefit list.

Computer Basics

There are three generic characteristics common to all computers. They operate at incredibly fast internal speeds, they can maintain a large amount of information in a very small space and they consistently operate the same way.

Without a computer program to take advantage of these features, however, computers are useless. A computer program is set of instructions written by a person, called a programmer, that tells a computer to perform certain functions.

The relationship of a computer program to the computer is similar to the relationship of a 33 rpm record to a phonograph. The program gives the computer its specific function, just as a record can contain different styles of music.

One computer program required by all computers is a sort program. A sort program does nothing more than place information into different sequences. Another program is a print program. Sorting doesn’t do you much good unless you can get the information out of the computer and onto paper.

Playing Card Sort Example

Let’s consider an example using playing cards. Playing cards can be sorted into many different sequences.

* By Suit: diamonds, clubs, hearts, spades

* By Color: red or black

* High to low

* Low to high, and so on

* Using only a partial deck

* Aces

* Red aces

* The ace of diamonds

The sort program alone isn’t really impressive. Any accountant, well most of them anyway, can sort of a deck of cards. What is impressive is when we add the power of the computer’s three characteristics.

My personal computer can sort a deck of cards in any order in less than five seconds. It can hold the informational equivalent of 86,538 decks of cards. And, if I told it to sort all 86,538 decks from high to low, by suit, it would sort every deck exactly the same way, and hopefully correctly.

I said computers were consistent – not accurate. It’s the program that makes a computer accurate.

Consider this to be your first warning about selecting computer programs. Make sure the program performs accurately before you buy it.

Sales Examples

Let’s take two examples and apply them to what we learned about the computer’s three characteristics.

If you’re in sales, you probably have a prospect list. My PC could search through a list of 1,000 prospects to find one specific name in less than 15 seconds. It can sort a thousand prospects into alphabetical order in about 8 minutes.

By the way, to my PC, 1,000 prospects is not a big number. It can handle a lot more information.

Since computers are consistent, with an accurate sales program my prospects are maintained by the PC in a very organized fashion. This means I don’t have to waste time with call slips and filing. If I get a new prospect, I just type it into the PC, and the next time I sort my prospect file, the PC will put it into the correct order for me.

Here is a big PC benefit. The PC uses a systematic approach to organize your basic sales information for you.

Now what can I do with all of those prospects in my PC? Sort them, of course. The term data processing really does mean something. By processing facts (i.e. data) into certain sequences, conclusions can be inferred. The data becomes information.

One report sorted into a different sequence can give you a different view of your information. Here are some examples of how the PC can sort and print your prospect file:

* Alphabetically by company name

* Alphabetically by contact name

* By zipcode

* By prospect code

* By potential sales volume

* By date of last activity

* By date of next requested callback

As in our playing card example, we don’t have to use all of the prospects.

How is this for sorting? You’re going on a sales call to visit a customer in Chicago. Why not have the PC sort and print all the prospects in the area? Or sort and print those prospects who are over a certain dollar potential? Or choose prospects who requested a call back in the month of February.

Print a list of prospects who have not been contacted by a salesperson in the last six months.

The point is that you can sort and select prospects by any of your own “best” criteria; by prospect size, proximity to decision time frame, industry, competitive activity or whatever makes sense to you today.

Forecast Example

Here is one final example of a sales task I used to hate – manually writing sales forecasts. Every month I would relist my prospects; some would drop off the list, some new prospects appeared, and product mix and probability would change somewhat, but basically it seemed like redundant information.

I discovered a big PC advantage was that once information was correctly entered, it could be used over and over again. Consequently, if only the order closing probability change, that was all I revised in the PC. Everything else could be reused.