Give Your Sales Team Superpowers with a CRM
Recently, Oracle published a study Getting Past the Breaking Point of Yesterday’s CRM (registration to download is required). They surveyed the responses of 500 sellers in the US and found that 98% of salespeople wish they had superpowers to accomplish their day-to-day duties. This statistic isn't surprising considering one seller uses an average of eight tools to complete those duties including; e-mail, CRM, invoicing system, inventory management, smartphones, video conferencing, and word documents.
CRMs offer a plethora of benefits for sales reps; however, your team may never get to reap those benefits due to variables outside of their control. As mentioned in this report, systems of intelligence arm sellers with modern-day selling superpowers. CRM should be the primary system you and your team are using daily however, user adoption continues to be a barrier. Only 47% stating they regularly use their CRM, and those that do are likely misusing it, with 46% say they have found a roundabout way or created a non-standard shortcut in their CRM.
There are many ways to standardize and encourage the use of your system. One way to increase user adoption is to demonstrate to your team how this tool will help them sell more (thus make more money) and make their lives easier. With this tool, they can spend more time with customers and prospects and less time on repetitive administrative tasks. Here are a few superpowers your team can look forward to with the correct use of a CRM.
Sales Superpower #1: Predict the Future
Most CRM vendors offer some level of predictive analytics capabilities within their software. CRM reporting offers many insights into the future by allowing you to segment various aspects of your data and identify trends to help with future decision making. Predictive analytics can calculate a variety of factors and then generate on a report which choices your customers might make or what direction your market may be heading in. For example; the products or features, that are most likely to motivate more sales and less churn, or the type of offer will most likely resonate with a customer and help to close a deal, up-sell or keep them from switching to a competitor.
In a perfect example of predicting the future, Zoho CRM has the "Best Time to Contact" feature. The system will help predict the best time to contact someone based on, the actions of the customer. The time they answered your call or opened and clicked your e-mail will help the system determine the best time for you to contact, helping you predict the future of a successful conversation.
Sales Superpower #2: A Perfect Memory
There are only so many names and faces the human mind can remember, let alone the specifics of the each conversation. A CRM is the extension your brain needs. A centralized location, a single source of truth, that stores e-mails, call details, notes, attachments, past invoices, and more. Your sales rep no longer needs to try to remember all of this information for each customer, the CRM will do it for them.
CRMs directly integrate with many other systems, so some of this information can enter automatically, saving your sales rep time and giving them more accurate information. For example, when a contact in your CRM places an order from your online store, the invoice is automatically entered onto the unique record in the CRM, making this information easy to find and leverage.
Remembering when to reach out to a prospect at the right time can be the difference between winning or losing the relationship. Making a mistake during follow up will cause a bad customer experience. Associate tasks and reminders with individual contacts in your system; this will help your team connect with the key person at the optimal time. Storing customer information in a centralized location will help to make these conversations more personal and productive.
Sales Superpower #3: Super Focus
Using multiple tools can drain your focus. CRMs can bring together many tools including, e-mail, call details, and documents, helping your team to focus on the relationship rather than focusing on searching for the information they need.
E-mail insights will help you to focus on the right contacts, information such as the date and time an e-mail is opened, clicked, or if it bounced back is very valuable. If the e-mail was opened and clicked, it might be a great time to follow-up with a phone call. If the e-mail bounces back, you may have the wrong person or, the contact information is outdated or incorrect and needs attention.
Many details are exchanged during a phone call, and it can be hard to remember everything. Storing call details to refer back to can help your team focus on the most important aspects of the conversation. A CRM will also give your team all historical customer information in one place so they can easily reference it for the most focused and personalized conversation.
Sales Superpower #4: Extremely Organized
Depending on the number of relationships your rep has to manage, they might be able to organize everything in their head. They know who to call when their next meeting is and the next prospect to reach out to. The problem begins when your team grows and the number of relationships your rep manages increases, something is bound is slip through the cracks if there isn't a structured system in place.
A CRM is a fundamental tool to keep your reps organized. CRMs provide you with the tools and resources to track your customers and their relationship with you as well as critical information that will assist you in moving them through your funnel. CRMs ensure that you have consistent interaction with your prospects, through activities like scheduled email campaigns and meetings, as well as creating a centralized collection for all contact-related information.
Organizing a chronological account for your customers and prospects is hugely beneficial. Storing the details of meetings, e-mails, and other important customer information in the mind of your rep is not a good long-term solution. If (and when) they leave your company, all of that information goes will go with them and, you're left putting the pieces back together to keep the relationship intact.
These are just a few benefits or superpowers your team will achieve when you successfully implement a CRM system. A poorly implemented system will not give you these benefits and implementing a CRM is not a one-size-fits-all project, every company and team will have different needs and processes. Getting outside assistance can drastically increase your chances for a successful project and in less time. If you have questions, click the button below and we’ll be in touch to help.