Better sales and marketing

Do you sometimes forget to follow-up on a promise to a client or prospective customer? When different employees deal with clients, does the left hand sometimes forget what the right hand has done?

Would you like to spend more time following up a mail shot than you do putting it together? SBS 2003 has lots of tools that simplify and co-ordinate sales and marketing. 

Shared information helps teamwork
At the most basic level, you can use a shared file, like a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, to keep track of your customers and their orders. Storing this file on the server means that everybody has access to the same data and information is only entered once. It can also be accessed by remote users, which is great for letting people update it while on the road.

Share contacts, diaries and tasks
Using Outlook you can keep all your critical business information – diary, email, tasks and contacts – in one place, synchronise with mobile devices like Pocket PCs and access it securely over the Internet from home or on the road.

If you work in sales and marketing with colleagues, you can use Outlook in combination with Microsoft Exchange Server, which is the email ‘post office’ built into SBS 2003, to share customer contact information, diaries and tasks. For example, you can put information about current and prospective clients into a shared Exchange folder that is accessible to your colleagues. Whenever any of them make a change or add a new contact, everyone else has access to the new information. You can do the same thing for tasks. For example, you can use shared tasks to track orders or a shared diary to schedule follow-ups.

Microsoft Business Contact Manager
Business Contact Manager (BCM) is an add-on to Outlook 2003 that adds a suite of customer relationship management functions within the same familiar interface as Outlook. BCM comes with Office 2003 Small Business Edition.

BCM tracks prospects, customers and sales opportunities. Each time you send an email, post a letter or make a phone call to a customer, it gets logged in the database for future reference so you can build up a complete picture of what’s going on. This lets you focus your attention on the most promising prospects and your best customers helping ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.

Microsoft BCM generates reports that help you keep track of your sales pipeline, account history, neglected contacts, opportunities and most valuable customers. These results will help you direct your efforts towards the best prospects. The results can also be saved to Excel or Word for more detailed analysis.

Sales and marketing campaigns 
Because SBS 2003 can send faxes, emails and share printers, it’s very easy to run sales and marketing campaigns using different forms of communication. You can fax targeted customers with a special offer, send a mail-merged introductory letter to new prospects and follow-up on existing opportunities with an email campaign. Using shared contacts in Outlook or information stored in Business Contact Manager, you can easily create personalised and targeted communications.