However, if you have exhausted all practical means of research or simply have run out of time, you will have to collect the information that you need from your prospect during the call. This will leave you less time to do what you should do in a sales call: explain the benefits of your product or service, answer objections, gain agreement, or negotiate terms. Depending on your presentation skills, it’s a trade-off that the prospect may or may not notice.

Once inside the office, an observant salesperson should also be able to identify the veteran employees and the all-important person in charge. You don’t have to make contact with your prospect during your initial visit. In fact, it’s probably best not to. Busy people do not appreciate unscheduled visits, and dropping by out of the blue could result in a canceled appointment.

Negative buying experiences are almost always linked to shoddy customer service. Even though most businesses claim that they put people first, it’s rare to find good customer support.

But customer service isn’t extinct. In fact, after consumer groups and the media took potshots last year at e-commerce sites for leaving customers in the lurch, many businesses began to focus more attention on their service.

Strong customer service is a business essential. Providing it isn’t as difficult if you and your employees achieve these 10 basic rules:

1. Commit to quality service. Everyone in the company needs to be devoted to creating a positive experience for the customer. Always try to go above and beyond customer expectations.
2. Know your products. Convey an articulate and in-depth knowledge of products and services to win customer trust and confidence. Know your company’s products, services, and return policies inside and out. Try to anticipate the types of questions that customers will ask. Update and amend your FAQ page frequently.
3. Know your customers. Try to learn everything you can about your customers in order to tailor your service approach to their needs and buying habits. Talk to customers about their experience with your company, and listen to their complaints. In this way, you can get to the root of customer dissatisfaction.
4. Treat people with courtesy and respect. Remember that every time that you, your employees, and your colleagues make contact with a customer — whether it’s by email, phone, written correspondence, or a face-to-face meeting — the interaction leaves an impression with that customer. Use conciliatory phrases — “Sorry to keep you waiting,” “Thanks for your order,” “You’re welcome,” and “It’s been a pleasure helping you” — to demonstrate not only your commitment to customer satisfaction but your dedication to courtesy.
5. Never argue with a customer. You know very well that the customer isn’t always right. However, it is important that you do not focus on the missteps of a particular situation; instead, concentrate on how to fix it. Research shows that 7 out of 10 customers will do business with a company again if that business resolves a complaint in their favor.
6. Don’t leave customers in limbo. Repairs, callbacks, and emails need to be handled with a sense of urgency. Customers want immediate resolution, and if you can give it to them, you will probably win their repeat business. Research shows that the instance of repeat business goes up to 95 percent when complaints are resolved on the spot.
7. Always provide what you promise. Fail to do this and you’ll lose both credibility and customers. If you guarantee a quote within 24 hours, get the quote out in a day or less. If and when you neglect to make good on your promise, apologize to the customer and offer some type of compensation, such as a discount or free delivery. Overall, only make promises that you are confident that you and your business can keep.
8. Assume that your customers tell the truth. Even though it may appear that customers lie to manipulate a situation to their advantage, it is to your advantage to give them the benefit of the doubt. The majority of customers don’t like to complain; in fact, they’ll go out of their way — perhaps all the way to a competitor — to avoid it. If you hear unhappy rumblings from your customers, take their complaints to heart and do your best to appease their dissatisfaction.
9. Focus on making customers — not on sales. Salespeople, especially those who get paid on commission, sometimes focus on the volume instead of on the quality of the sale. Remember that to keep a customer’s business is more important than to close a sale. Research shows that it costs six times more to attract a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. Moreover, happy customers are the best and most effective way to find new customers. To ensure that you accurately track your customers, your business might want to invest in CRM software. Read our overview, How Is CRM Different from ERP?, to get a handle on that type of program.
10. Make it easy to buy. The buying experience in your store, on your Web site, or through your catalog should be as easy as possible. Eliminate unnecessary paperwork and forms, help people to find what they need, explain how products work, and do whatever else you can to facilitate transactions.

Of course, additional parameters apply depending on the medium in which you deliver your customer support. Strong online customer support may require a support ticket system or some basic ground rules for live chat. Read our coverage of Online Customer Service Basics to review the special concerns for Web services.

There are several ways to provide high-quality customer service with a minimum amount of work.

Live chat
Live chat is probably the best option for most start-up e-businesses. It gives you the option of providing real-time help to more than one customer at a time. The downside is that you or your employees have to staff the chat utility. Make sure that your site clearly states when representatives are available to help. Once you have set your live chat hours, do your best to stick to them.

Using a live chat utility is much like instant messaging. After you install the utility on your site, customers can simply click on a link to contact you immediately. Normally, a small browser window will open, and you can communicate with your customer in real time.

Order tracking
Many of the inquiries that you’ll receive from customers will be about the status of their orders. Automating the order-tracking process can free up time to manage the more pressing aspects of your business.

Many shopping cart programs offer integrated order tracking, which can dramatically reduce the amount of email you receive from customers who are looking for their merchandise.

Once you ship an order, you will mark it as shipped and enter the appropriate tracking information into your shopping cart application. Most shopping carts will even generate an automated email message to provide the customer with the appropriate tracking information. If your cart supports notifications, you can set your cart to notify the customer automatically when the status of their order changes — from pending to shipped, or from shipped to deliver — which will reduce the amount of work that you have to do.

Just because your customer receives the order does not mean that your work is done. Invariably, some percentage of merchandise will be damaged in shipping, or a customer may need to exchange a product or have some other concern. Implementing a support-ticket process can further streamline the support process.

Support ticket applications are fairly simple: Customers visit your site, click a support link, and are prompted to submit their order information. The support program will send you the information, and you can craft your response. This system works very well if you have a lot of customers. When your customer logs back in to the support area, he or she will receive your response, along with the appropriate return or exchange instructions.

Phone support
If all else fails, there’s always the telephone. It can be expensive and time-consuming to provide phone support, but sometimes it’s the best way to communicate with your clients. You may be able to hash out in two or three minutes on the phone what it would take 10 emails to achieve.

Customers also appreciate live phone support, and it can add a personal touch to your e-business. Most companies can’t afford to provide 24-hour phone support, so don’t forget to prominently post your phone hours. Reiterate these hours on your voice mail system or answering machine.

Customer support for online businesses isn’t really that different from traditional business support. As long as you take care of your customers, they will keep coming back.

Make sure to read Top 10 Customer Service Mistakes and Ten Rules for Great Customer Service for more helpful information.

Ignore the customer experience and you’ll pay the price. In its report, “Why Web Sites Fail,” analyst group Forester Research said that every customer who has a bad experience on a Web site tells 10 other people about it. And according to consulting firm Creative Good, you can kiss frustrated customers goodbye. In one of its e-commerce
surveys, Creative Good found that 62 percent of online shoppers have given up at least once while looking for products on a Web site. And 42 percent of those shoppers actually abandoned the Internet and made their purchases through traditional retail channels.

The more you improve the overall customer experience on your Web site, the more you’ll improve your order-conversion rate, the metric used to describe the rate at which Web-store visitors become paying customers.
There are several things you can do to make your Web site more customer-friendly:

Post Your Contact Information

Your customer service contact information (or a link to it) should appear on every page of your site. If visitors are confused or need additional information, they should be able to find your phone number and email address quickly and easily.

Along with your company’s address, phone number, fax number, and email address, list your hours and days of operation.

The Web gives people 24/7 access to your business, but that doesn’t mean you can answer their questions and ship their orders around the clock. It’s also a good idea to give customers a timeframe for processing their orders or email requests. Don’t leave people hanging. Fast response time is an important feature of any Web site.

Hone Navigation and Search Functionality

If you expect your customers to make purchases and decisions, they should be able to find what they want on your Web site without difficulty. Make your site’s hierarchy logical; base it on your customers’ wants and needs, not on your company’s organizational structure. Make it easy for consumers to find prices, information about products, payment methods, and return and exchange policies.

To get ideas on how a good Web site is structured, go to the site of a big e-commerce company, such as Amazon.com, and a catalog site, like L.L.Bean.

 Both of these companies have clean, uncomplicated designs that make it easy to locate products. You can also read our article for tips on strong Web site navigation and overall design.

And don’t forget to tune up your search engine. Studies show that many Internet users don’t bother to click through a site; they go directly to the search engine and type in what it is they want.

Improve Checkout

Creative Good concludes that nearly half of all e-customers abandon their virtual shopping carts without making purchases. In fact, the research firm identifies checkout as the No. 1 obstacle on Web sites. Why? The reasons are myriad, but it usually comes down to frustration: Customers get aggravated and abort their transactions.

To close more sales on your site, determine these points of frustration and fix them.

Security remains a primary concern for many Web shoppers, so post your security and privacy policies. Moreover, consumers don’t like surprises when they shop online. They want to learn about products before they buy them and see the total taxes and shipping and handling charges before they complete the transaction.

To systematically test the functionality of your site and find out where your visitors tend to drop off, you might try out some Web analytics software.

 Our Buyer’s Guide to Web Site Traffic Analysis Tools explains the benefits of this kind of analysis and points you to the features that you might want to consider.

Set Up a FAQ Page

The goal of a frequently-asked-questions page is two-fold: It gives people on your site an immediate answer to some of their more straightforward questions, and it cuts down on the number of support requests you’ll get. Cover the basics and base your FAQs on questions your customers have asked in the past. If you don’t have customers yet, enlist friends to peruse your site and record questions they have about your company, its products, etc.

Sales force automation (SFA) is used loosely throughout the industry and means different things to different people. Basically, SFA includes all of the technologies, techniques, and strategies on which successful sales are built. It’s an activity that brings you together with your customers and improves communications and productivity. Customer resource management (CRM) falls under this umbrella.

The goal of SFA is to streamline the entire sales process in order to make businesses more efficient, to improve customer interactions, to increase overall customer satisfaction, to and save time and money.

Customer Relationship Management

Managing sales data and processes can be simplified using today’s software solutions. These products automate nearly all of the tasks that salespeople and their support staffs once performed manually. As a category, these products are generally referred to as customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

CRM applications started as simple contact-management software that salespeople ran on their PCs. Then vendors began to develop products that automated a larger number of processes and tied together all of the sales data across the organization into one comprehensive source.

Though the features of a CRM solution can vary from product to product, there are a few industry-standard functions:

• Contact manager. A CRM solution must have a powerful yet easy-to-use contact manager to track sales leads; it should give you instant access to relevant information about your clients.
• Marketing encyclopedia. This feature includes base of information about different vertical industries, competitors, and products. It’s a valuable tool that diminishess research time and informs you of your clients’ needs.
• Forecasting module. The forcasting module lets you analyze where and when leads are generated. This information helps you to determine how to spend advertising and marketing budgets in the future.

When looking for a CRM solution, these features aren’t necessarily standard, but you may find them helpful:

Localization support. This is an excellent feature if you have international customers. A CRM product with localization will automatically convert data, such as currency information, to its foreign equivalent. Add a rate-of-exchange feed, and you can get automatic and up-to-date exchange rates for world currencies.
Support for mobile devices. Not all CRM software includes support for personal digital assistants, but if your salesforce uses Palm organizers or Windows CE devices and needs access to CRM modules, look for software that offers connectivity options for popular handhelds.
A Web-centric approach. Like many other applications, CRM solutions are becoming Web-based. This means that they are built entirely on Web technologies, and you can access them through a Web browser. These applications are generally more affordable, easier to implement, and simpler to maintain than their client-server counterparts.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) vs. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

CRM and ERP both offer ways to automate processes and run your business more efficiently. However, the systems were originally designed to streamline different functions.

CRM solutions are used to manage contacts, accounts, opportunities, activities, marketing, customer support, and many other sales and service-related processes. CRM calls for knowledge of business needs and customer demands.

ERP is a system of managing operations and business functions, which
include product planning, purchasing, inventory, customer service, order tracking, and other back-end business processes. ERP requires knowledge of financial and manufacturing processes.

The lines between CRM and ERP are beginning to blur as ERP vendors incorporate CRM functions into their software and CRM vendors add ERP capabilities to their offerings. Both industries are working to develop all-in-one applications to streamline internal operations and customer activities.

Web-Enabled vs. Web-Based CRM Solutions

Although Web-enabled and Web-based customer relationship management (CRM) applications are similar, there are some fundamental differences.

Web-Enabled Solutions. In the rush to develop products that deliver sales force automation features through a simple browser interface, quite a few CRM vendors have added browser front ends to their products in order to make their software “Web-enabled.” Many have integrated e-mail management features, call center support, and e-commerce applications into their software; however, their products are based on client-server technology not Web technology.

Web-Based Solutions. Other vendors are building true Web-based applications that utilize the Web as part of their platforms. With these solutions, you don’t need to distribute software to all of your employees because the application runs over the Internet. Generally, Web-based applications are cheaper and easier to manage than their client-server-based counterparts.

Today CRM applications are available for even the smallest business. Microsoft Outlook and Symantec ACT are popular contact managers that offer contact databases, calendars, and schedules. There are also competing Web-based sales-management tools that offer collaboration, lead-capturing, and management tools.

No matter what the vendor tells you, a CRM solution won’t be of any use if you don’t use it. But a well-implemented CRM solution will pay off immediately and improve productivity throughout your organization. Before you invest in a product, get to know all of your organization’s processes and talk to your employees in order to assess their needs.

Two popular hosted products are Netsuite Small Business and Salesforce.com. NetSuite offers both ERP and CRM products as part of its suite. Salesforce.com serves up a popular CRM solution and partners with companies to extend its product to include ERP functions, among other things.

Larger companies such as Siebel and SAP also offer hosted solutions. Make sure they are geared toward a business your size, however, before entering into relationships with the major players. Sometimes companies will offer a scaled-down version of its product that hasn’t been optimized for small businesses.

There are also a couple of free hosted CRM solutions available. FreeCRM can be accessed by more than one person at the same time. Salesforce.com also has a free CRM application, which they call their Personal Edition. Its drawback is that only one person can access it at a time, which can be inconvenient if you have a sales team trying to access data. If you find that the Personal Edition is too narrow for your needs, the Team Edition can be used by five people at a time and is relatively inexpensive. Both will sync up with Outlook or your PDA, so you can stay current.

Hire in-house salespeople. You might be tempted to hire outside agents who represent products from different vendors. But an in-house salesforce offers you direct control over your team, and lets you take an active role in planning and executing a sales strategy. In addition, in-house salespeople work for you and only you — their primary goal is to sell your company’s goods or services. Outside agents, by contrast, sell many products from various vendors, and have weaker ties to your firm.

Remember that you’ll have to pay 100 percent of the expenses associated with an in-house salesforce, so make sure your company’s offerings will sell well enough to support those costs.

Hire carefully. A lot of people think they can sell ice cubes to Eskimos — but truly great salespeople are few and far between. To find the creme de la creme, look for salespeople with these characteristics:

Highly motivated by money
Eager to learn
Self-confident
Appreciative of a challenge
Persistent
Competitive
Able to cope with rejection
Great listening skills
Physically and mentally energetic.

Spell out your expectations. Be sure to discuss sales goals. It might help to draft a contract that lists what your company will do for the salesperson, and vice versa.

Train, train, train. The more you train your salespeople, the better they’ll be at answering customers’ questions and making sales. Your sales professionals should possess detailed knowledge of your products, the competitors’ products, and the market in which those products are sold. They’ll also need the training it takes to understand their customers’ needs, practices, and concerns. Hold regular training sessions, and encourage your team to attend outside training classes, as well as sales and industry-related seminars.

Motivate your team with a strong compensation system.
Design your company’s compensation plan before you hire anyone. A commission-based approach usually works best, but it should include a base salary. That way, a salesperson is guaranteed a minimum income — which can help morale during slow times. You can find compensation standards by contacting your industry’s trade association. Be sure to read Compensating Your Salesforce for a good overview of this topic.

Make the most of nonfinancial motivators. Employees like to be recognized for good work, and to feel that their supervisors listen to and act to solve problems. It’s also important to make your employees feel as though they’re part of a team. And don’t forget the power of benefits — paid holidays, or a good maternity leave package, or medical and dental benefits — can go a long way toward retaining the best people.

For more advice on how to develop your salesforce into a winning team, be sure to read Managing and Motivating Salespeople.

CRM solutions are used to manage contacts, accounts, opportunities, activities, marketing, customer support, and many other sales and service-related processes. CRM calls for knowledge of business needs and customer demands.

ERP is a system of managing operations and business functions, including product planning, purchasing, inventory, customer service, order tracking, and other back-end business processes. ERP requires knowledge of financial and manufacturing processes.

However, the lines between CRM and ERP are beginning to blur as ERP vendors incorporate CRM functions into their software and CRM vendors add ERP capabilities to their offerings. Both industries are working to develop all-in-one applications to streamline internal operations and customer activities.