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Sales Best Practices: Maintain a good filing system, with all the useful information readily available.

Written by: Dave Kahle

Article Overview: Not being organized is a crippling excuse to being successful in sales. Renowned sales trainer Dave Kahle discusses how to improve your organizational skills in this best sales practices article.

Sales Best Practices: Maintain a good filing system, with all the useful information readily available.

“I’m just not a very organized person.”

“You’ll never be as successful as you could be until you overcome that,” I said in response.

If you are not organized, fix it.

Highly successful salespeople, the top guns, are highly organized. They maintain a good filing system which allows them to collect, store and use useful information.

The average field salesperson spends only about 25 – 30 percent of the workweek actually talking to customers. Imagine what would happen if we could dramatically increase that number. One of the things we waste time doing is fishing for information. A good filing system dramatically reduces that wasted time, and provides us with good information that helps us improve the quality of our sales calls.

This is the information age. Information is an asset to a company, and particularly to a salesperson. Collect good information about your customers, and you are able to more closely connect with them, more sharply focus your selling time, and more finely hone your proposals. Maintain a system that allows you to access product information and you’ll rarely keep customers waiting, you’ll rarely look unprofessional, and you’ll be able to quickly access things you need to know.

In today’s world, there is no excuse for not having a good filing system and using it to collect and store useful information.

At this writing (2009) you probably need to have duplicate systems, one hard copy and one electronic. As your company moves towards a paperless system, you’ll eventually do away with the hard copy system.

The system should consist of hard copy and electronic files for each of your A & B customers and prospects, in which you maintain account profiles, logs of everything you talked about, copies of old quotes, etc.

The system should also provide you, either/or electronically or hard copy, access to all the important sales and marketing literature for all the products and services you sell.

You should have at your fingertips a complete listing of each of your internal people, with phone numbers, extensions, and a description of what each does as it relates to your job.

You should have files for “learning” or personal development. These files (electronic and/or hardcopy) contain the things that you need to read about your industry including industry trends and reports, as well as the new products or services with which you need to become conversant.

All of this should be well organized, maintained, and readily available. Refer to the appropriate files before every sales call.

You can see what an advantage this provides to the serious professional salesperson. That’s why this is a best practice of the best. If you want to be one of the best, do what the best do.

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Article Tags: access product, account profiles, company moves, electronic files, excuse, filing system, fingertips, fishing, information age, logs, marketing literature, paperless system, proposals, prospects, sales and marketing, salespeople, salesperson, top guns, waste time, workweek



Related Forum Posts
Organization Tips - HI Guys, I thrive in a well organized space. At our office we use coloured files and folders for specific topics. Yellow for client, Blue for Internal, Green for Financial and Red for Sales Information. Its a great way to find stuff fast and easy. The other thing I did a few years ago was hire a professional organizer. She spent a week at our office learning about the 'flow' of work and then helped us develop systems for managing paper and information. For example, I am a visual person which means I need to see things. All active client projects are kept in a standing file on my desk. It may not work for everyone but it works for us. Backing up your computer data is an absolute must. We run tape back-ups every night and even though it costs more, it has come in very handy on a few occassions. We also archive and store all client files once a project is complete so we always have a historic capture of everything we've done. If you want, take organization a step further and reorganize your filing system on your computer. Under each client main folder they have sub folders for correspondance, plans, status reports, financials etc. I borrowed it from my lawyer friends office. I loved that each piece of paper seemed to have a legend at the bottom of where exactly it was filed. That way, anyone can come into my office and figure out our system simply which cuts down on the amount of training. It also helps that I can shout out, bring me the network key information and everyone knows where it is. ;0) I have a great friend who is a professional organizer if anyone needs real help. She also does basements and garages!
Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing
Re: From Sales to Marketing - Good luck to you! With a sales background and all the marketing information readily available online you will do great.
Re: Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - [quote="ltrahan":31w9r2iz]Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing[/quote:31w9r2iz] I second the request...
How to file on computers - The advice to back up your computers on a regular basis - even daily - is a sound one... but you should also check your backup system on a regular basis and make sure you can actually retrieve the data! Just because you run the backup application and get a beep at the end of it telling you it's been done... doesn't necessarily mean that it has been done. You're backup media may be corrupted - especially if its tape, I would think! The thing about keeping everything on your computer is that you then have to use your computer as a filing cabinet - and is everyone assiduous about saving their documents into the appropriate files? I'm afraid I'm not, and the time I've had to waste searching for documents hidden in the depths of my hard drive, when if I'd just filed them away properly to begin with, baffles the mind. And yet every time I lose a doc and spend hours looking for it (I also don't use a standardized system of naming which is very silly!), I swear to myself that I'll be more careful in future... but to date I never am!


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