Most of the companies that we have come across in our business do not have an effective lead management system in place to identify the outcome of each lead. Many well meaning managers have the receptionist or the sales person putting tick marks on a sheet to identify the lead source. The question that must linger in their minds is the accuracy of the count. Imagine if just one or two calls in ten go unrecorded.

The challenge with this system is in the people. Your team wants to do a good job. They want to get the prospect to someone who can help or in the sales persons case they want to turn a prospect into a sale. In many cases the speed at which the calls are comming in dictate the quality of the tracking. Additonal pressure comes with the end of the month close cycle and the overall work load in the office. Ultimately, the owner or sales manager has little idea of the true volume of traffic derived from a lead source and if this is true no idea of the value of the business that was lost.

At www.capturethecall.com we have incorporated a contact management program into our call tracking system. With this system our software will automatically capture all calls from all advertising sources that ring into your office from ads that have our tracking numbers in them. You will have 100% knowledge of every lead that responds to any ad.

Once in our software the lead can be tracked in real time. The contact manager will show you the date of the first call, the time, how many times we have talked to this prospect and the notes of each call. The system will capture important data on the caller such as their name, address and phone number. Better yet you can export all of this data to another contact management program such as ACT, Goldmine or Outlook with the touch of a button. With our export tool you can eliminate the need to have the sales team load their own caller data.

Now that we have a technology that will show us who all the callers are we need a tool that will let us know what happened to each call. Enter the Answer Center. Our advanced software will take sales tracking to the next level. This program actually closes the sales cycle in real time. Sales managers and owners can see lead progress in immediately. The system will even identify opportunities that have been lost as they occur, it will notify the sales manager responsible the the lead is going badly and visually highlight that lead on our call report in bright red. By making the lead jump out all management has to do is glance at the call report to see the status of the lead program. Obviously, the faster you know about lost opportunities that more effectively you can mount an approach to go back after that prospect before they have a chance to make their purchase from another source.

At the end of the day our program will allow you to know every caller, who they talked to, how many times, the vale of the opportunity and if we ended up making the sale. All of this information can then be exported to an Excell Spread sheet to place a total dollar value on the opportunities your ad program generated and the true results of what was sold. By taking the total sales minus the cost of the advertising that you are doing you will finally be able to establish a true return on investment number. You will know, for sure, who in your staff can sell and what ad programs pay for themselves. By eliminating bad ad programs and poor sales people you can maximize every dollar.