Learn
to create a simple sales tool that will help you track and follow up on
every lead. This is a great tool for salespeople and for anyone who
wants to put a system in place to help automate their networking
activities.
After falling in love with the Hipster PDA and Levengers Shirt Pocket
Briefcase,I started becoming more and more dependent on 3" by 5" index
cards. They are great for note taking on the go and keeping organized
at my desk, so I naturally started thinking of ways to use the cards to
automate my sales process. From this, the "3X5" was born. I may not be
the first person to use index cards in this way, but I do think a lot
of salespeople will find the system easy to use and very effective.
You will need the following items to create your own 3X5 sales tool. I
found everything I needed at my local Staples and everything cost me
around $25.00.
* A box to store the index cards
* Monthly 3" by 5" index tabs
* Daily (1-31) 3" by 5" index tabs
* Alphabetical 3" by 5" index tabs
* A ton of white ruled 3" by 5" index cards
* A bunch of colored 3" by 5" index cards
* A small case to carry cards in your pocket
Once you have purchased the required supplies, you can organize your
3X5. For the sake of simplicity, let's assume that you are assembling
your 3X5 on January 1st. If this is the case you would first organize
your tabs in the order below (front to back):
* January tab
* Daily tabs 1-31
* February - December monthly tabs
* A-Z alphabetical tabs
* Blank index cards - white and your favorite color
All of your cards should now be in the file box and the first thing you should see is the January tab.
Next, you should start creating cards for your leads. In the beginning,
this is going to take some time (assuming you have a lot of leads). I
use white cards for leads and colored cards for my customers. You can
do whichever you prefer, but I think it is helpful to break down leads
and customers.
The system works like this.
Let's imagine it is January 1st. and you attend a networking event
where you meet a potential client. You get this lead's business card at
the event and you want to contact him/her on the 2nd., so when you get
to your office, you staple the leads business card to a white index
card and drop it behind the "2" tab and then go home for the day. After
all, it is new years day and you have been working hard to create your
new sales system and you attended a networking event.
So, you arrive at work on January 2nd. and open up your 3X5. The first
thing you should do is move the "1" tab back behind the February tab.
You will always be rolling the system forward like this, so that the
first tab you see in the box represents the most current month, then
the most current day.
Now, you go to the tab for today (Jan 2nd.) and find the card for the
lead that you met at the networking event yesterday. You call the lead
and learn that he/she is out of town until January 6th. so you make a
note which says, "1/2/05 - Mr. Lead is on vacation till 1/6". Now you
drop the card behind the "6" tab for the month of January.
You will continue to roll this lead forward in the system, making notes
at each step, until the lead either turns into a customer or asks you
to leave them alone.
When the lead turns into a customer, I staple their business card to a
colored card and place it behind the appropriate alphabetical tab. If
their is another opportunity with this client, I move the colored card
back to the dated section and move them through the process again.
Of course, as you add more people to your pipeline, you might not get
to contact everyone on the day you have them slotted for. Just move
them to the next day's slot at the end of the current day so you
contact them tomorrow.
You will not want to carry around a huge metal box full of index cards,
which is why you want to have a small index card wallet or box, so if
you are going to be on the road or out of the office, you can simply
grab your cards for the day and go.
Not just for salespeople.
While the system is great for salespeople, it also is a great tool for
those of us who are focusing on networking. I actually use three
different colored cards and use white for leads, blue for clients and
red for my networking contacts (patriotic, I know). On the red cards, I
write either 7, 14, 30, 45, 60, etc in the upper right hand corner of
the index card to remind myself how frequently I want to contact the
person, so I simply move the card forward based on the number on the
card. If I want to contact someone every seven days, I move the card
ahead a week after I make contact.
This really ties in well to Keith Ferrazzi's book Never Eat Alone,
which recommends you regularly ping your network. By the way, if you
have not read the book, you should. You can get book notes for free
from the Never Eat Alone blog.
Options / Enhancements.
I have been considering adding daily tabs to each month so that I can
move people ahead to a any specific date (IE. August 11Th.) in the
future.
You could also keep some sticky tabs handy so you can add a tab to the
top of any index card for the contacts birthday. If you do this, you
could just put an August tab on the card for every contact whose
birthday is in August so you could quickly compile a birthday list each
month. Again, this is probably overkill and you could probably just add
the contacts name to a calendar and keep it separate, but what fun is
that?
