New technology comes fast and goes, even faster. These days, there’s a new app or widget every week promising to make businesses and their sales reps more productive, efficient, and effective. Although some technology has proven to be more useful than others, one piece of sales technology that’s definitely here to stay is customer relationship management (CRM) software.
A properly deployed CRM system is an extremely useful tool. It tracks and manages all interactions and communication your representatives have with prospects and customers. It also helps to flag opportunities that might require additional nurturing or follow up (among many other things).
CRM literally helps to boost sales!!
Back in 2012, *Tech News World published research, which revealed that more than half of all businesses (54%) expected to improve their sales with CRM.
But, has this happened by now?
Well, #statistics point out to “Yes”, as 2014 saw an amazing 87% increase in the use of Mobile CRM, which is particularly appealing to salespeople who are always on the move.
Talking about the needs, what could be more important for sales representatives than achieving the targets?
According to **The Tas Group, on an average, 2/3 of all salesforce (67%) miss their sales quota.
Meanwhile, the study by Innoppl Technologies claims that that 65% of sales reps who have used Mobile CRM were able to achieve their sales quotas, and a staggering 78% of those who didn’t use CRM did not achieve their targets.
Despite all the “pros”, not all salespeople seem to be excited by the idea of introducing CRM in their daily routine. The number of salespeople who misinterpret the value of CRM is 87%, as they think it is adopted by their manager to police their activities. This fear results in them “just checking boxes” in the system, without seeing the true value of this tool.
Even though the benefits that CRM brings to the sales teams may not be immediately recognizable, they are still game-changing if implemented in the right manner.
And since those are the salespeople that need CRM the most, in this blog post I will bring out the key reasons why CRM can help them achieve their sales goals faster and improve results.
: CRM helps salespeople to safely and centrally store their contacts/ database, sales opportunities, activities, and scheduled plans in one place, and will have uninterrupted access to the database from multiple locations. Rest assured that your data won’t just get lost.
: Automation is now everywhere. The most common example would be the autoresponders you get confirming your order when you place an online order. With this increasing adoption of automation, businesses are looking to reduce the manual load on their sales team as well. A good CRM and sales management system generally come equipped with a sales automation feature. This will keep track of every single lead interaction. Using this information, it would send automated sales notifications to your sales reps/ agents. This reduces both the response time and improves your customer experience. Not only notifications, but you can also automate any aspect of your sales process. You can distribute leads to your agents’ basis geography or demography. You can qualify your leads based on prior criteria. More importantly, you can even prioritize your leads. Doing this all manually not only costs more time and effort, but it can also be prone to a lot of errors in your process that will impact your customer experience also.
: All communications, both internal (rep to rep) and external (rep to prospect), can be managed through a Sales CRM. This allows your sales rep to track all parts of the buyer’s journey, including every interaction, email, phone call, and more. For example, your CRM will help your sales rep determine if and when they need to reach back out to a specific prospect. It will also help your sales reps remember whether or not they already sent a prospect the resources they requested.
: Whenever there is a high volume of leads flowing in, it is important to filter out your junk leads and ensure only relevant leads move on to the next stage so that your reps could work on them. Lead Qualification criteria and Lead prioritization help companies to weed out their spam leads. After this, the leads are then assigned to agents to followup. The sales agents get equipped with all the information they need about the lead, thanks to the CRM and sales management tool. They can then give a customized pitch to your lead. Not just the first contact, but the CRM tool keeps reminding your reps to constantly followup with the lead. This way leakage of leads is reduced to the minimum.
: By tracking all customer communications, CRM helps salespeople to know exactly when customers need to be contacted; for example, for product replacement, contract renewal, or for an upsell to a new product or service. This way it increases your chances of closing a sale.
Now that you know how CRM brings value to your business, and if your business is ready to adopt one, it’s time to start evaluating your options and to book a demo, email at sales@teammas.in
Sources:
https://www.technewsworld.com/perl/partner_download_v.pl?partner=itic-crm-deployment-trends-surveys-2011-2012
#https://www.superoffice.com/blog/social-selling-statistics/
**https://www.superoffice.com/blog/sales-quota/
^https://www.slideshare.net/SathishMariappan/mobile-crm-6803102
