An Interview with one of the "50 Most Influential Sales Lead Management Professionals":
Jim Cecil, Nurture Institute Inc.

Company URL

Who are your mentors and why?

What is the most helpful advice you've received to improve your business?

What is the most helpful advice you can give to help others improve their businesses?

• Get very serious about nurturing.
• Decide to Automate and systematize selling process.
  Identify, your A level clients and prospects
• Individualize, with a dossier approach
• Interact, with messages that matter and content that counts.
• Influence, earn the right to help them succeed
• Nurture, to cultivate the ones you want and the ones you want to keep.

"When your heart is in your dreams, no request seems too extreme". Jimminy Cricket

How do you give back to the professional community?

What is your favorite business book?

1. Blush, blush: "Nurturing Customer Relationships", Bu Jim Cecil and Eric Rabinowitz.
2. "Think and Grow Rich", Napoleon Hill
3. "Permission Marketing", Seth Godin
4. "Persuasive Proposals", Dr. Tom Sant
5. "Rockefeller Habits", by Verne Harnish, Gazelles, International.

What's your recommendation of the 4 steps?

Which 4 basic skills or process steps do you recommend?

SELECT a Niche(s)
DO it, Create a campaign of touches to cultivate your best client(s).
TEST it, Send ten first touches and evaluate your responses
DELEGATE it, Assign your own "Nurture-Maven" to manage expansion
AUTOMATE it, Use the tools of software, the cloud and the Internet
or DUMP it, Learn what works, test the rest and know when to change.

In your opinion, the best book on marketing is:

Your reasons for choosing this book are:

What would you say to someone who asks what to do first in managing sales leads?

Scientifically Re Engineer your entire selling process and your sales-force. Commit to actually helping sales-reps succeed with diligent, pre, mid, and post funnel communications processes.

If someone wants to nurture sales inquiries what process would you recommend?

Clearly software is the seminal tool in Nurturing. I was an early-excited yet skeptical early-adopter of MSCRM 1.0. As is to be expected from a company that traditionally takes 3 or 4 iterations to get it right. In my opinion, MSDynamicsCRM 4.0 is now the dream platform for all segments, from the lone-wolf to the enterprise, whether locally installed or cloud, in my opinion, with Intelligent Mobile-CRM apps raging, absolutely the most flexible and affordable solution for those serious in long-term nurturing.

What steps would you suggest to measure the ROI for sales inquiries?

Because metrics are so abundantly embedded with Dimensional eMail campaigns today, setting up infinitely flexible alerts over multiple interactions and results has never been.