Chris Curtin

Since Bankers Advocate has Virtual Offices with teams members in Orlando, South Florida and the Philippines (Jessie and Rachael, our wonderful Virtual Assistance), we thought you would be interested in the tools we use to be in the “Cloud” and communicate with each other effectively:

• Google Hosted Email- At $50 per user/year, we switched to a hosted cloud email via Google Apps. It is very smart phone friendly, spam has been reduced and it syncs well with our CRM (see the next product).

• Capsule CRM- Our Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) is Capsule CRM. We picked Capsule for it’s low cost ($12/month per user), ability to link with individual twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, Email centric, and it’s seamless integration with Google Hosted email. For instance, every email we receive will show at the bottom whether that individual is already in our CRM and if not a new record can be created with a button click.

• Virtual Assistance from 123Employee- We have used Virtual Assistance from 123Employee for almost a year now and it has allowed our business to become much more efficient by adding or enhancing telemarketing, database entree, basic research, seminar follow-up, etc.

• Websites based on WordPress- We have switched all our web sites to WordPress. The pluses of a site based on WordPress include the ease of which non programmers (most Business Owners) can upload/change everything from blogs,events,videos and link their site to Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook.

• Dropbox- Dropbox is a wonderful tool to share files and folders to individuals and team members. You are notified immediately on your desktop when a new file or folder is added. Also 3gb is free and you get more space as your clients or friends share the tool.

This has been a brief introduction to some of the tools we use to keep in touch and freely communicate with our far flung team members. Please contact Chris Curtin at 561-882-1331 or chris@bankersadvocate.com for more information.

“This is a great article from sales consultant, Dave Rothfeld”

Why do political incumbents get re-elected over 90% of the time? Because once you have the position, it is hard to get unseated. The same thing is true about the relationship between your prospect and their current vendors/providers. It is hard to unseat them. Too often we get used in a selling process by providing free consulting to these already spoken-for prospects (think price comparison offers and market scan reports). Avoid this by identifying earlier on if a prospect is the real deal.

What to do?

Ask these questions to a prospect when you know that the current provider has survived at least one challenge or more to unseat them in the past:

1) What has changed since the last time you considered replacing your current provider that makes it more likely you will change now?

2) What performance threshold would need to be met for you to realistically trade out your current provider?

If there isn’t a clear reason for change or an established threshold, they are not likely to be a prospect from which you can profit. Avoid this by identifying if a prospect is the real deal early on.

“Reprinted with permission from “Creative Sales + Management, Inc.”