Automate Your Sales Process
A CRM solution can develop workflows to manage all of your sales opportunities. Without a system in place to manage all these leads, a sales team can be thrown into chaos. With marketing automation technology to handle much of the organizational grunt work, and organizational tools to keep everything neat and orderly, a company can harness its inflow of leads to start driving business results.
Accomplishing Common Tasks
Before a lead even makes it to a salesperson, marketing automation tools like Salesforce.com’s, Sales Cloud can automatically take care of most of the administrative work. Leads can be automatically scored and graded by how well they fit your ideal lead profile. Bad leads can be added to lead-nurturing journeys, while good leads can be routed to the appropriate salesperson based on location, industry, or business type.
Creating a Lead
With a CRM solution in place to manage leads, salespeople enjoy an incredible degree of transparency. They can see whether a lead already exists in the database, who else from that company is already a lead, and the complete activity history of a new lead.
Contacting a Lead
Once a lead has been qualified and looks like a good fit, a salesperson needs a cohesive strategy for approaching that lead. Creating tasks is an easy way to keep salespeople organized and on top of all their active deals. Access to lead information and the last account activity also allows a salesperson to have one-to-one interactions with a lead that can make it feel like you just spoke with them yesterday.
Tracking Opportunities
Prioritizing your time is now a must-have skill for the modern sales professional. A CRM makes this much easier by providing opportunity reports and dashboards to keep track of top deals and opportunities. With Salesforce’s new Sales Path tool for example you can visualize your sales process from start to finish.
Selling as a Team
With collaboration at its core, a CRM solution allows you to leverage the collective intelligence of your entire organization for every deal. With easy file sharing, you’ll always have access to the most up-to-date information and pitch decks. If a lead asks you a tricky question, you can find the person in your organization who knows the answer in seconds, whether they’re across the office or across the globe.
Closing the Deal
Getting a deal past the finish line is often the most arduous part of the entire process. Using a CRM solution, especially one with a mobile app component, allows you to be ultra-responsive during negotiations, never creating a delay. With electronic signatures, you can also close a deal from anywhere.
Achieve Superior Results
While having a sales tool that can be customized to meet your needs and automated to make life easier and more efficient for your sales team, how does all this translate to real business results? While customization and automation may seem like nice-to-haves, they can have an incredible impact on your company. By better understanding your sales cycle, you have all the insight and efficiency you need to take your results to the next level.
Better Reporting/Forecasting
The usefulness of sales forecasts has always been iffy at best. Sales professionals would merely look at their list of prospects, and make their best guess of how many would move to close in the next quarter. This process is not very scientific and can make it incredibly difficult for sales managers to guide, advise or direct their teams.
However, with added visibility to the sales process comes added sophistication to sales forecasting. Once sales managers understand the stages of the sales process, the velocity at which leads move through the funnel, and the relative rate of close, forecasting becomes far more scientific.
This sophistication makes it easier to make accurate, meaningful predictions of sales performance. It also makes it easier for your sales leaders to guide behavior such as prospecting to support their overall goals. This means forecasts hold more weight and the rest of the organization can lean on your predictions more heavily when planning for the year.
Better Sales Process
Having a sales process that is tailored to your team can dramatically impact their efficiency. With fast-moving sales teams that are often spread geographically across the country or even the globe, alignment is crucial. Proper alignment can mean the difference between and incredible buying experience for your customers and a fumbled opportunity.
A good CRM system eliminates any confusion and aligns your team around a central process, no matter where they are. Using the same labels and terms in your sales app as you do in your weekly sales meetings puts your entire team on the same page — and keeps them there. No more confusion over where a prospect is in the sales cycle or what next steps need to be taken. Your whole team will work from the same framework and handle their own pipelines with the same process. The right CRM tool can transform your sales team from a herd of scattering cats into a highly disciplined army of salespeople.
Better Results
Armed with a better sales process and a greater understanding of performance and effectiveness, a team with a CRM solution is poised to dramatically improve their results. A team can be more responsive to their prospects creating a better buying experience. They will have a better understanding of where deals are in the pipeline and the appropriate next steps to take. And most importantly, they can automated the most time consuming tasks to spend more time doing what counts: selling.
Conclusion
Understanding and optimizing your sales process is more important than ever before. Efficiency and alignment have become must-haves for any sales team looking to compete in today’s business environment. A good CRM system can be a secret weapon for not only understanding and standardizing our sales process, but for automating it as well.
Stop adjusting your sales process to match your sales tool. It’s time for a Sales tool that can be endlessly customized to meet your teams’ needs, and supercharged with features that are designed to automate and enhance your teams ability. I have found from my experience that Salesforce.com gives you that competitive advantage.
