When your sales prospects come through the contact center, you have to be aggressive. After all, for the professional, sales is a sport. There is a clock that limits the number of leads you can handle and presentations you can make in a day. There is competition because performance determines who gets the compensation prize. There is a limited sales and marketing budget from which to staff your sales reps and provide them with quality leads. And of course, there is strategy and technology that can be leveraged to provide a competitive advantage relative to other companies in your space. This perspective is not just for those in the big leagues. As in any sport, you can always study and apply what you learn from the pros to achieve exceptional performance.

Here is a winning game plan that has been successfully deployed by one of our clients, a large Midwest database marketing services provider that runs up to 400 different campaigns simultaneously, including Super Bowl ads, to generate inquiries. The company had a fast-paced contact center, with the typical challenges of tight staffing and escalating call volumes. Executives wanted to be able to track and measure performance on a real-time basis and to use that knowledge to create an environment of teamwork and friendly competition among the sales team.

Fred Reichheld argues in his book, The Ultimate Question, that companies profit when they delight their customers so much that they are both willing to return and to recommend the companies. I believe that this philosophy has been true since the beginning of time, and there is no doubt in my mind that it is critical to the success of our business.

We operate a CRM consulting firm, enabling midsize and Fortune 1,000 companies to successfully implement salesforce.com, an on-demand CRM application. Increased demand for on-demand CRM has resulted in the doubling of our staff in the past 12 months alone. We continue to add clients and team members at a rapid rate. But with growth comes the need to be proactively aware of what has made us successful, which I believe is the customer experience we've created, along with customer satisfaction.

Part of this challenge is defining the right metrics and then having a customer-friendly approach to capture the inputs needed to measure it. Deploying a survey strategy was natural in our case, because we practice what we sell. Our company takes advantage of every opportunity to leverage CRM to facilitate and monitor all of our key processes and procedures. Now we're using CRM to support Reichheld's directives.