Call Sales Leads Fast

This is a quick story about who closes more sales.

I made two calls about my rotator cuff injury. It took the first chiropractor I called 24 hours to return my call. They called right as I arrived for my appointment with the second chiropractor I called. Companies spend a lot of money on lead generation.  Sales leads will go to waste if the inside team doesn’t respond quickly. This applies to all industries for B2C and B2B: IT, staffing, manufacturing, automotive repair, personal care – get it together and have a policy for a prompt response. Put yourself in your prospects very busy and stressful shoes. Don’t think that Director of IT, Purchasing Manager or Executive Assistant to the CEO has a report due for work today, attending college on the weekends, kids in soccer and a spouse that needs meds from the pharmacy after work? When they call looking for information, the first responder has a really good chance at that sale.

 

Stop Leaving Money on the Table

Have you ever not bothered to bill someone due to the hassle? Left money on the table that you *know* you should have billed, but didn’t? Ever knew that some work was done but later noticed that it didn’t get invoiced for some reason?

Our old work order management software didn’t convert work orders to invoices and wasn’t web accessible by customers. Too much was still being done on paper and over the phone. Customers would call and ask for service so there was often no record. Billable work sometimes didn’t make it’s way back to our controller at all. We decided we needed to revise this process and improve the supporting technology.
The software we deployed is AyaNova (www.ayanova.com) and they have a module that allows our clients to open tickets themselves through a web portal that is linked to our website. We are a small firm with a high-touch model, but this one step allowed us to let the customer enter information directly.

I cannot emphasize enough how important a solid vendor partner is when rolling out a ticketing system application. The hosted application route saved us from dealing with the server setup and costs. For a reasonable fee HaveAByte.com handles all this for me, and had me up and running with the core system in less than a day. They also have various add-ons that give me one-click access to backups and other features that save me huge chunks of time.

This system improved our entire process. Customers now enter tickets to request service. We approve the work and schedule it to a tech with AyaNova. The techs can access their work order list for the day, even via BlackBerry. They enter in labor as soon as it’s done and fill in the details of the work. The work orders get converted to QuickBooks invoices instantly. Everything that is billable is billed, without exception. No paper, no post-it notes, no forgotten work, and NO money left on the table. It also feels good creating less paper waste on top of it all.

We went from NET 90 to NET 30 with the new system. I looked at a lot of solutions and AyaNova was a powerful and inexpensive choice. The addition of the HaveAByte.com as a hosted solution provider made it a no brainer. I looked at BlueService, which initially seems like a better deal but ultimately would have cost me a lot more in the long run.

The AyaNova folks were kind enough to share a coupon code for my blog visitors. Go to HaveAByte.com/AyaNova_Licenses.htm and use use coupon code JULIEFOGGBLOG10 and get 10% off until July 31st.