If you are using your Drupal website to generate leads for your business, then implementing a simple Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is an important step to efficiently track and organize those leads. Since we love Open Source here at LevelTen, let's see how we might implement a system to automagically transfer a lead from your "Contact Us" form on your website, to the powerful and open source CRM system, SugarCRM.

I'm approaching my 6th anniversary as a LevelTen employee and during that time I've had the opportunity to be part of some really great projects. We've landed business with some of the biggest names in business and a few you've probably never even heard of, both locally and nationally. Being part of the sales team, I've learned 5 basic tips for winning in sales that I like to follow.

When do you usually make your sales calls? Is it first thing in the morning, around 9am? Or maybe you subscribe to the theory that the best time to make a sales call is around lunch time. Either way, you'd be wrong. According to a recent study by MIT, the best time to make sales calls from website leads is the 4-6pm block.

In these tough economic times it's getting harder and harder to earn new business as the marketplace for work grows increasingly competitive. No matter what your industry; most likely your starting to feel the pennies, and probably whole dollars, that everyone is pinching.

Here is an interesting concept that was brought up at one of the company meeting's. What makes people respond to a email invitation, a call, a interactive campaign or any other kind of tool that companies use to generate new interest in a marketplace

The core to anyone's response is respect. Respect of intelligence, respect of the other person's time and the fact that we are all exposed to the same media asking us to spend money in one form of media or another, so your target audience is just as savvy as you think you are about these things.

When I first stated my career in sales, I prided myself on relationship building. My father, who is a consultant in the oil and gas industry would tell me all the time growing up that the most important part of selling is who you know. I use to ask him, "what if you don't know anyone that wants to buy what you have to sell?" He would look at me and smile and say," Well you better go make some friends, because its all about who you know, not what you know".

One of the absolute first things that I learned in building long term customer relationships is that keeping existing clients is far easier and more beneficial then having to find new ones. However, here comes the tricky part. Keeping them and keeping them happy is not always as easy as we would like for it to be. One of the key factors in keeping clients is to have a planned approach to provide excellent customer service, consistent communication, clear and concise goals that are addressed and thoughtfulness, showing them that you appreciate there business.

The Sales Cycle has changed considerably over the years.The Fuller Brush Company started out in 1906, and salesman walked miles each day going Door-to-Door to meet and great the lady of the house and share with them beauty, household and day to day products that would revolutionize the way they look, feel and manage their households and by using Alfred C. Fullers famous words, "...the best products of their kind in the world." Fuller's philosophy was simple:

From the beginning Fuller established three basic rules:

Make it work
Make it last
Guarantee it no matter what.

Prospecting, cold-calling, pounding-the-pavement, call it what you want but traditionally sales has been referred to as a numbers game, the more people you talk to the better your odds of making a sale. Really, so if I visit every auto dealer in the DFW area eventually I'm going find someone to purchase one of my companies commercial kitchens? Based on the numbers mentality that's the broad assumption being made; okay, so maybe I'm being slightly facetious there but the truth of the matter is that the old-school, door-to-door mentality just doesn't cut it in today's information age.