Posted in: CRM Success, Sales Success
Your customer relationship management (CRM) system is designed to organize and track your contacts and relationship with your customers, but it can do far more. In the hands of your sales team, your CRM can provide insight into your customers, turn prospects into customers, increase your sales team’s productivity and boost your sales. Take a look at 11 ways your CRM can help your sales process become more effective and efficient.
1. CRM Helps You Manage Your Time More Efficiently
The heart of sales is spending time with customers — but how often does busywork eat up your time? Your CRM system makes it easy to track key prospects for timely follow-up and to ensure you’re not ignoring long-standing customers. When you use your CRM to optimize your time management, you can make customers your priority, in turn strengthening your relationships and ultimately closing more deals.
2. CRM Puts the Information You Need in Your Hands
With your CRM, you’re not limited to your own memories of contacts with a specific customer. Instead, you have access to the complete history of your entire sales team with that customer. When you have all the information you need in front of you as you talk to a prospect or customer, you’re more likely to deliver just the right message at just the right time. Making sure your sales team members all input observations and notes about each contact with a customer paves the way for the next salesperson’s interaction.
3. CRM Facilitates Communication between the Sales Manager and Sales Team
When a sales manager is able to keep on top of what’s going on in their department, the whole sales team benefits. Your CRM system lets your sales manager know what deals are pending, which ones are ready to close, and which ones might need a little nudge. Having this information at hand speeds up communication and saves all that time wasted catching up. With a great CRM system, the sales manager is now in position to provide the best possible assistance to the whole team.
4. It Also Boosts Communication across Your Team
CRM opens more communication channels than just between the sales manager and the team. It also facilitates open communication between your whole team, so you can coordinate your pitches and follow-up. With your CRM, you won’t be put in the embarrassing position of calling a contact that someone else from your team is already pursuing (and making your company look disorganized in the process). Additionally, your CRM offers document templates, email integration and calendaring functionality to keep your whole team updated, so you’re always working with full knowledge of everything that’s going on.
5. CRM Provides the Data Your Sales Team Needs to Generate Results
Remember the days of collecting information manually to use in reports? With CRM, those days are over. Now you can actually use the data you collect to make key decisions and to generate and implement your team’s strategic approach. A CRM’s automated features collect and display the information you need in real time whenever you need it, making it easy to generate reports so your whole team (and your supervisors) knows what’s happening.
6. CRM Solutions Lower Your Sales Costs
CRM software is a key tool in helping you retain customers — and it’s always cheaper (and easier) to keep a customer than to gain a new one. As you use your CRM to establish rapport and trust with your existing customers, you increase the likelihood that they’ll keep making purchases into the future — and it also opens the doors to referrals to new customers. In addition, your CRM unifies your sales messaging, which in turn increases your sales team’s efficiency and effectiveness. Use your CRM to increase cross-selling as well as to minimize time to closing, all of which benefit your bottom line.
7. CRM Makes It Easy to Capture Leads
Your sales process essentially begins when you get a lead — and your CRM is designed to feed leads directly from your website to your sales team. This saves time and keeps your salespeople focused on leads that are likely to be more productive than those generated via cold calls.
8. CRM Facilitates Communication With Customers and Prospects
The combination of calendaring and data management inherent in a CRM system helps you contact customers just when they need to hear from you. Because you’ve tracked all communication with each customer and have all that information readily accessible, you know when it’s time to reach out about contract renewal. You can track any factor that’s relevant to your relationship with a given customer, including when they anticipate need for renewables or new equipment, as well their receptivity to upsell possibilities. When you contact a customer about their needs just as they become aware of those needs, your chances of closing the sale skyrocket.
9. CRM Boosts Customer Retention
When your whole team has access to the same important information about each customer, you amplify your company’s ability to meet customer needs. There’s no lag time to communicate a given customer’s challenges, pain points or interests, because all data is visible at all times. Handoffs from one sales rep to another become seamless, and customers feel understood and respected. That relationship then feels satisfying, leading customers to think well of your brand and want to return to a company they can trust.
10. CRM Tracks Your Sales Process
Your company may have a well-delineated sales process — but all too often, it’s easy to skip steps. Your CRM can lead you step-by-step through the process to make sure you’re touching all the bases. It also helps sales managers see what steps are falling through the cracks, allowing for further training where needed and for making changes to a sales process that isn’t doing everything it should. CRM also helps you track sales results, so you can monitor cyclic or seasonal changes, modify your methodology as needed and understand what is and isn’t working.
11. CRM Helps You Allocate Resources Appropriately
Every client and customer is different — and some clients require greater effort and resources than others. Your CRM can help you make smart decisions about what services and resources to allocate to each client. With its assistance, you can deploy a larger team to a bigger client that demands a lot of service to maintain the relationship — and you can avoid wasting energy and resources on long-shot prospects that show no signs of paying off. By managing your sales resources intelligently, you can maximize your team’s effectiveness.
With the right CRM, you can collect the data you need to drive your sales team to new achievements. At LinkPoint360, we design solutions that keep your sales team organized while putting the most relevant data in your hands right when you need it. Contact us today to see how we can help take your sales process to the next level.
