Cutting Through The Chaos: Why Your Sales Team Needs CRM
We all know time is money and every day brings new demands on your sales team’s time. Since the day isn’t getting any longer, it’s vital your sales team finds effective strategies to work more efficiently and boost productivity – and that starts with implementing CRM. We’re highlighting our top reasons why your sales team needs CRM to power every part of the sales cycle.
Your sales team needs a CRM that can perform data analytics to map patterns and trends, line up leads, improve efficiency and track customers. A good CRM can streamline your entire sales cycle. Your CRM can automate time-consuming tasks, such as order processing and preparing quotes, leaving space for a steady flow of new prospects to filter into the pipeline, increasing time spent selling, and arming sales reps with the info they need to close a higher percentage of deals.
And that’s just the beginning. The CRM productivity envelope continues to be pushed as Artificial Intelligence provides an ever more comprehensive view of the customer’s experience.
Sales Pipeline Management
Managing your sales pipeline is a lot of work. Finding time to bring in a steady flow of new customers can challenge a small business sales team’s resources. If poorly managed, opportunities can be lost because they never reach the appropriate sales rep, because available information or knowledge about the prospects is lacking, or because of poor visibility and forecasting of the future pipeline. CRM allows your team to answer several important questions about pipeline management.
- Accurately predict future revenues
- Analyze sales processes and identify potential areas of concern
- Alert a sales manager about a future sales slump or sales growth
- See aggregate sales velocity — the time it takes on average to turn incoming lead into a paying customer
In other words, if your sales process is a black box, CRM is a tool that creates a window into that process and exposes its inner workings. CRM is transparency. Even for a small business, the sales process can be a highly complex operation with many moving parts. Your leads, prospects, and sales opportunities are not only situated in different phases of the sales cycle, but they are constantly migrating.
CRM not only helps your sales team identify and evaluate points on the cycle, but it also measures the progress of these opportunities as they move through the pipeline — from a simple unqualified lead to a fully satisfied repeat customer. It allows sales reps to store the data on prospects so the information is at their fingertips for each interaction. Plus, it quickly provides metrics related to visibility and forecasting — data that is key to boosting productivity.
Time Management
Albert Einstein famously said, “Time is an illusion.” That’s all well and good if you’re talking about the mysteries of the universe, but for your sales reps time is very, very real and there is rarely enough of it. Even the most talented of your representatives get bogged down in time traps that limit the volume and quality of their interactions.
When your salespeople are out of the office, does it feel like they’re on the dark side of the moon? Communication is a big challenge for a sales team on the go, but surprisingly few teams leverage smartphones and tablets as part of their regular workflow. Making the switch to mobile can eliminate downtime and increase communication.
Are your salespeople spending half their day performing administrative work? The automation of repetitive tasks gives salespeople more time to concentrate on closing, How has Amazon become a $1 trillion company? Early on, Jeff Bezos understood the importance of automating everything possible to boost productivity. Perhaps most importantly, CRM automates the schedule to follow up with prospects, leads, and established customers. These kinds of reminders can be highly advantageous when your salespeople are managing a large group of contacts — particularly if they span different countries and time zones.
Are your salespeople constantly caught in endless email loops and games of phone tag? CRM provides one easy-to-use channel for reps to share information. The right CRM system syncs with mobile devices anywhere, anytime via the cloud, so the entire team is on the same page and has the most current information at their fingertips.
Better Intelligence
Accurate, comprehensive, and timely metrics are the keys to creating the modern buying experiences customers expect. Today, businesses have access to the analytics, computing power, data, and ease of use that can transform how they approach their customer relationships. Discover critical insights about customers and their preferences, predict the best actions to move relationships forward, and recommend and automate actions to increase sales productivity.
Capture real-time signals, wherever they occur — from a customer’s support request to a prospect’s tweet. Analyze every data point, pulling together data from your CRM, to create a complete view of every customer.
Data is automatically captured, enabling reps to focus on the most valuable leads first. Predictive sales helps reps capture new opportunities and forecast potential sales. Digital assistants will analyze pertinent news about each prospect and customer.
For successful prospecting and pitching, you must gather vital information on potential clients. CRMs collect, store and display everything in easy-to-find categories such as client history, current client preferences, client social media presence, past interactions with a client, and client infrastructure details.
Think Mobile
Not only is the CRM industry booming, but mobile CRM is expected to grow by 500 percent. More than 50 percent of businesses are currently planning or actively rolling out a pilot mobile CRM. Why? The modern sales team is no longer confined to their desks for eight hours a day. They are always on, always connected, and incredibly mobile.
Implementing a mobile CRM provides sales teams with access to real-time customer information in the field. Mobile access to a CRM means a healthier sales pipeline and a double-digit increase in sales productivity.
Yet all mobile CRMs are not created equal. When considering CRM tools, you’ll notice that a rare few have functional mobile components. Make sure the technology you are considering does not just add mobile functionality as an afterthought. Solutions like Salesforce1 were built mobile-first with a team’s productivity in mind. Designed with apps and features that streamline the sales process and enhance everyday operations, a true mobile CRM can mean the difference between a solution that merely helps your business and one that revolutionizes it.
Increased Communication
While collecting and managing the right data is an important aspect of CRM, possessing the ability to problem solve and collaborate through CRM is equally impactful to your productivity. Easily share ideas, solutions or even crowdsource input for a particular organizational project.
Completely integrated customer intelligence provides your team with the ability to share historical, real-time, and projected information. View similar customers and compare any issues or customizations that they needed to help provide a better experience for other customers. Make better, faster decisions.
Artificial Intelligence
No longer just a plot device in science fiction, AI has become a business tool with the potential to deliver solutions at lightning speed while simultaneously eliminating the “human error” that drives away customers. While it creates faster solutions by transcending the limitations of an actual salesperson, it does not replace them. It simply organizes all the data in a way that can be easily interpreted while eradicating the burden of many menial tasks.
A product like Salesforce’s Einstein AI is billed as a “smart CRM assistant.” Leveraging AI-powered predictions and recommendations, Einstein AI identifies significant patterns and trends you can act on, understand your customers in a whole new way, and derives AI-powered insights from existing records and apps.
Most importantly, you learn which channels, messages, and content resonate with your customers by automatically analyzing the interactions they have with your business across all touchpoints.
Customer First
Smart businesses are putting the customer first. By using customer data, they are able to deliver relevant and targeted content that adds value to the customer experience. And without CRM software, you will find it difficult. As the CRM industry continues to grow, your competition is putting more focus into understanding what customer wants, and needs.
According to Gartner, CRM software revenue is the fastest moving software market with the growth rate of 16% in 2018, having tipped the topper database management systems (DBMSs) by the end of 2017, producing $39.5 billion in revenue.
Don’t get left behind.
