As Sales Force, the leading software for CRM states: “Customer relationship management is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships to grow your business.” Sounds good to me.

But what is the Relationship aspect of Sales? And what does it have to do with me or my business? A website won’t make your business successful on its own. You have to drive potential customers there. There are several ways to do this:

• Collection of user contact information
• Posting to Social Media of your choice
• Chat Software to create a dialogue
• Follow ups and Analytic tracking
• Customer Retentions

I’d like to focus on Collection of Contact Information. You can pay hundreds of dollars per month to a company that will capture your visitor information. But what if you can easily get that for practically free by publishing a few white papers or other material for download? With the right plugin for a one time fee for $60, that download can lead to your visitor’s contact information which you can then collect. You can also see what categories or types of information this visitor downloads and the number of downloads. There are lots of other goodies in the software that may be useful as well.

If you already publish posts, whitepapers and slide shows, this will be invaluable tool to stay in touch with visitors and grow your business.