MAGE IS A GAZELLES INTERNATIONAL FOUNDING MEMBER

For the past year Mage has served as the New England Regional Coaching Partner of the Gazelles Network. Gazelles offers Fortune 50-quality executive programs to improve mid-market executives? overall business and management skills while meeting their time and budget constraints. Gazelles International also provides focused follow up implementation and consulting to Gazelles seminar participants across a broad spectrum of business functions. Gazelles was founded by Verne Harnish, who also founded the Young Entrepreneurs Organization and is a staff writer for Fortune Small Business Magazine.

?We are extremely pleased to be a member of the Gazelles International network,? said Jonathan Freedman, president of Mage, LLC. ?Mage?s mission is to increase the value of growing and emerging private organizations throughout New England, and our relationship with Gazelles International enhances our ability to accomplish that objective. As a Regional Coaching Partner, we will continue to offer our clients extensive executive coaching and business counsel, helping them become more efficient, effective and productive.?
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Eliminating the Cracks in Your
Sales Efforts
Utilizing sales force automation to turn leads into closes

Is your company a well-oiled machine? Does every sales lead, regardless of how it is generated, get efficiently processed and followed up on? Does your supply chain and forecasting match your sales pipeline and customer demand? Do you effectively track your leads? Is the visibility of information across your enterprise seamless and does everyone know their role? Most importantly, is it rare for your sales team to drop the ball when a lead is identified? If you answered yes to all these questions, then you need not read any further.

However, if you are like most companies and the only forecast that you see comes from the local weatherman or your sales follow up is organized on a bunch of Post-It notes, read on. If you utilize a spreadsheet to track your leads, if your leads never seem to turn into real opportunities, or if you find yourself calling your customers to explain why their order was never shipped, then sales force automation is right for you.

When used correctly, sales force automation can produce significant increases in sales for the salesperson and the organization. However, don't confuse sales automation tools with the contact management package that you have on your laptop. Sales automation is the application of technology to assist the sales process. A well-designed sales automation tool can bring enormous improvements in efficiency to the entire company.

Communication and organization are keys to any successful enterprise. Unfortunately, some companies have major communication barriers in sales due largely to a lack of organization. For many executives and business owners, the frustration of a salesperson making initial contact with a prospect only to lose them because of lack of follow-up is an all too familiar occurrence. Often, the lead information that a salesperson secures is never captured, resulting in the sales and executive management having limited knowledge of the contact or the necessary 'follow-up' reminders. Result: another lead falls through the cracks because the current tracking system is inadequate or underutilized.

A sales force automation tool can correct this problem. By implementing a lead tracking workflow, the initial contact information for every lead can be captured in the application. This, in turn, will notify the sales and executive management team about the lead, where it stands, and who is in charge. Reminders can be forwarded to the entire team and/or specific salesperson to alert them of milestones or follow-up dates, ensuring the lead does not fall through the cracks. Also, by assigning values for 'probability of close' at each step of the sales process, pipeline analysis and forecasting can be created. <<more

MAGE MODERATES PANEL AT INT'L SEAFOOD SHOW

Jeffrey Davis, Chairman & Founder of Mage, LLC, recently hosted a panel discussion at the International Seafood Show highlighting how to improve branding and customer service efforts. Joining Jeffrey on the panel were Richard Stavis, CEO of Stavis Seafoods, and Bill Demmond, VP of Inland Seafood. More than 70 attendees showed up for the thought-provoking session. If you would like to receive a copy of Jeffrey's presentation, please click here.

Operations
Jonathan Freedman
jfreedman@mageusa.com

Organizational Consulting
Craig Bentley
cbentley@mageusa.com

Technology
Frank Cincotta
fcincotta@mageusa.com

Marketing & Sales
Michael Lynch
mlynch@mageusa.com