It doesn't have to be hard to manage your lead funnel.  Don't know what that is?  It's simple… as you conduct your business you generated leads.  These leads then need to be qualifies and priortized so you know which ones to focus on and which ones to simply set aside.

Delmarva Group is in a high growth stage.  We have lots of leads… but few are making it past the qualifying rounds.  Here's a take on our early process.

Essentially, our process has 4 key areas each with several steps.

1. New Lead - here the lead arrives from any number of sources… the internet, a business contact or warm referral.
2. Lead Qualification and Data Collection - Here the lead is qualified.
3. In Process - DMVG is actively in the process of selling to this lead.
4. Close - We're signing contracts!
5. Delivery - We're delivering and supporting this account.

This is a lot to manage in a spreadsheet or something like that… so DMVG has opted to leverage SugarCRM Community Edition.  The Community Edition is a fancy way of saying "open source" for them.  But this is an excellent, inexpensive tool to use to manage your lead funnel.  Here is an example of how a company will flow through our SugarCRM system:

I meet a business leader at a business function and obtain his business card.  The data from this card, then flows into SugarCRM and blammo… he's now categorized as a new lead.

In Step 2, we do a lot to learn about a company.  We look the contact up on LinkedIn to determine how we're connected to them.  This is especially valuable with what we call "association leads" but that's another article.  We also analyze their website and public computing environment to fill out our checklist to determine how good of a client they can be.

Here's a great post on what small businesses can learn from Sandy.  Hopefully, you and yours made it through without issue.  Either way, these are some good pointers.  -Ed. 

Gerri Stansky knew Superstorm Sandy was going to be bad. She evacuated her home in Breezy Point Queens, NY to nearby Rockaway, where her in-laws and business, Strands hair salon, were located. But that wasn’t far enough. During the worst of the storm, she watched eight feet of water surge outside, carrying pieces of boardwalk and railings with it. When the water receded, it left her home uninhabitable and her salon ruined. “My 11-year-old son still has nightmares about it,” she says.

After Superstorm Sandy hit the eastern seaboard on October 29, it left devastation and billions of dollars of damage in its wake. And while the attention given to the storm’s aftermath begins to fade from the headlines, many business owners like Stansky are still trying to pick up the pieces and keep their businesses going. Here are lessons that three hard-hit businesses have learned.

Here's a great take on the new dawn for metrics about your website.  Gone are the days of page views, etc… it's time to find something actionable to measure and act upon.  Engagement, for example.  -Ed.

Every day feels the same. A fledgling startup tries to appear like the up-and-coming market leader while the market incumbent aims to protect its dominance. It has become exhausting to keep up with how fast everyone seems to grow: 100,000 new users per week here, 20 billion monthly pageviews there, and let’s not pass up a watershed moment like 3 million members total. These are the industry’s most praised metrics.

Sadly, we haven’t moved forward over the past decade despite our whole industry becoming smarter about how it measures and analyzes data. Companies still pitch investors with a cumulative user sign up graph, sell advertisers on how many pageviews they get, and bamboozle reporters with the biggest numbers they can find regardless of whether they correlate to success. We can do better as an industry. We should do better because collectively we’re not benefiting–we’re all just fooling each other.

While this article speaks of people "sorting, filing, flagging and tagging", we are left to wonder, what about proper training for these people in the use of their email clients?  There are rules that will dramatically help with these things.

Personally, I recently went through an unplanned email migration.  I now have rules for everything.  So my inbox is primarily filled with real business communications, while the rest of my email filters down to one of my many other folders to be viewed and browsed later.  The truth is, only a small presentation of our email requires immediate attention.  So, we should deal with it that way.  -Ed.

Surging numbers of emails cause workers to spend countless hours sorting, filing, flagging and tagging instead of focusing on action items, according to a survey of nearly 100 organizations by data governance software provider Varonis.

The study, which questioned employees about their digital habits and vices, found that nearly a quarter receive between 100 and 1,000 emails. One in 10 workers now faces more than 10,000 emails in their inbox. The problem has grown so bad that 43 percent of those surveyed said they routinely abandon their inboxes altogether in favor of a virtual coffee break.