I was recently put in charge of completely re-inventing the sales process and technology for my company. The system used consisted of printing out thousands of leads each week, and passing along sheets of paper from place to place until a sale was made, or until the person asked us to never call again. Then those peices of paper would have to be re-entered into a separate computer system manually by dozens of secretaries.
If you ask me, that’s quite possibly the least efficient system there could possibly be. But to my surprised, when I began researching how to update our sales process, I found that every company in my industry (Mentoring and Coaching) performed the same way. I was very surprised. Companies that actually sold consulting on how to improve your business were still using techniques from the 80’s! People like Harv Ecker and Robert Allen (author of Multiple Streams of Internet Income) were all still using ancient paper-based systems. Outrageous! Not only was the wasted paper and toner a huge drain on company resources, but the man-hours necessary to process all of them would put any company as small as us out of business.