info@hand provides integrated management of corporate information on customer accounts and contacts, sales leads and opportunities, plus activities including calls, meetings, emails, notes and assigned tasks. Automatic email notifications may optionally be sent to advise users of new contacts, cases, or tasks assigned to them.

The process of selling goods and services to your customers comes down to a series of steps that look something like this:

• Acquiring and tracking leads;

• Qualifying them as real opportunities;

• Quantifying those opportunities, and setting an expected closing date for them;

• Aggregating all opportunities together into a sales pipeline to see the big picture; and

• Closing the opportunities as sales.

By having an automated system that remembers all your leads, can convert them into opportunities once qualified, can add them all up to show a sales pipeline, and can accumulate a history of account activities, your business gains three big improvements.

First - you can now see how business is shaping up over the next couple of months in a more tangible and quantifiable way than ever before. The sales pipeline is your distant early warning system - it shows you when business levels are falling off, or growing faster than anticipated. In a smaller business it is your best friend when it comes to business planning, giving you a more detailed and distant view into the future, helping you to make appropriate staffing and expenditure decisions.

Second - all your sales leads, opportunities, and account history are now formally recorded in a central system that the business owns. Your vulnerability to the sudden defection of sales personnel, is much reduced. If a sales person leaves the organization, you still have all the leads and opportunities the business paid to develop, and the account history needed to help a new sales person take over the account quickly and effectively.

Third -  the sales person on an account is not the only person in the organization with access to details of activity history. Accounting and service personnel who have direct customer contact can now base their decisions about grey-area judgment calls in the account on hard information from the account history.

Some of the key CRM capabilities of info@hand include:

• Salesforce automation - including lead capture, and the promotion of leads to Opportunities;

• Opportunity tracking with sales stage and percentage likelihood;

• Sales pipeline tracking, with graphical charts that offer drill-down from the bar or segment of the chart to the data that underlies it;

• Definition of sales teams and territories, to manage information sharing, and track sales performance by territory;

• Sales forecasting, and comparison of forecasts to quotas and actuals, by team or by individual;

• Lead source analysis of sales and opportunities;

• Flexible reporting, to extract precisely the information you want to see;  

• Corporate calendar management, for arranging calls and meetings; and

• Integrated Inbound and outbound Email, which is automatically added to account and contact history.  

Marketing campaigns may be conducted, with email templates for automatically customized emails, management of prospect lists, and tracking of campaign click-through rates.

A prospect list for a campaign may be assembled from a mixture of prospects plus pre-existing contacts and leads. You can also import lists of prospects (in either Comma Separated Values (CSV) or Tab Separated Values (TSV) formats). Target lists may also be exported to MS Word for letter mail campaigns.