Coreen MenezesThe sales paradigm has drastically changed. Businesses are expected to be more customer-centric. The buyers are well-informed and cautious with a vast amount of information flowing on the web. Sales reps who are just interested in customer’s money are doomed to failure. Customers want to deal with companies who understand their business pain points and challenges to growth. A strong sales strategy is essential for winning the trust and loyalty of modern buyers.
Moreover, to support this sales strategy and ensure its success an advanced sales tool like CRM is required. The two together can help you in increasing your sales and maximizing your profitability. CRM consists of data and features that can aid in nurturing a customer relationship and converting the deal into sales.
How can CRM data benefit your sales strategy?
A CRM has a wealth of information that can guide you and aid in increasing your sales strategy effectiveness. As the popular adage goes ‘you need to hit the iron when it is hot’. CRM data helps you in identifying opportunities and spotting risks in real-time. Data collected through various reports aids in understanding what’s working and which sales areas needs your attention.
Here is how CRM data benefits your sales strategy:
1. Activity insights – Know how you are spending your time
How many calls did you make in a day and how many clients did you follow up through emails? All the data of your outbound activities are streamlined in CRM. For instance, you had set a target you’ll call 30 prospects in a day. So at the end of the month, you can track your performance with the activity insights report. You can find out the exact number of calls you made in a day and what was the outcome. Could you set an appointment or did you just waste your precious time.
You can see what efforts you’ve put and where do you need to walk the extra mile. See which activities are driving results and what needs to be cut down. Planning sales activities is imperative for investing your valuable time in the right place.
2. Sales forecasting – Better sales planning
Sometimes most of the high-value deals slip through the cracks because they aren’t given attention at the right time. Which deals are going to close, and who in your team is more likely to hit the quota? You can find it out with a CRM.
- CRM software provides an overview of the projected sales.
- You can forecast revenue and determine the strength and value of your pipeline.
- A CRM provides statistical analysis revealing the predictive insights for planning your sales efficiently.
3. Sales pipeline – Measure everything from lead to closure
With the sales pipeline data in a CRM, you can visualize the progress of your deals. For instance, you wanted to know the status of a specific deal. Instead of relying on your memory, you can easily take a glance at your sales pipeline in a CRM. You can see at which stage of the sales pipeline the deal is and also check the past conversation you had with the prospect. Everything is systematically streamlined in one place. A CRM also helps you in finding out if your sales pipeline has enough deals to fulfill your monthly or quarterly sales targets.
- You can track how much time does it takes to close a deal.
- What percentage of deals are moving from one stage to another?
- View the average size and value of each deal.
- See which sales stages have the maximum stalled deals.
This data will help you in working on improvements to decrease your deal closure time.
4. Customer insights – All vital details in one place
Every detail related to your customer is of crucial importance for your sales. Wouldn’t it be better if you find everything in a single place instead of toggling between various platforms for finding the data? The customer’s contacts, activities, and conversation can be viewed on a neat dashboard in CRM.
Besides, a CRM even helps you in collecting most of the information about your prospects. It automatically updates your customer profile with the necessary information like contact data, social media profile, company information, and many other details.
It becomes easy for a new sales rep to handle a client when all the information and past conversation is available. Everything from the email threads to the notes is systematically organized in the CRM. The sales rep doesn’t have to ask the same details again and annoy the client. He/she can easily refer to the data available and continue from where the past sales rep left that too without being dependent on anyone.
5. Call recording – Better customer understanding and sales training
The only way to help a customer is by understanding what they want. Most of the time during a sales call we miss the vital details mentioned by the clients. Thankfully these sales call can be recorded in CRM that has a built-in virtual phone system. The call recording data can aid in discovering the customer’s needs, goals and challenges. Based on the information garnered through the call recording you can optimize your sales strategy to provide a best-in-class experience to your valuable customers.
Besides these, call recordings can also help in providing feedback to the sales rep. You can find out how are your sales reps treating the customers. What messages are being conveyed? Based on the information gathered, you can guide your sales reps in handling difficult sales calls and tricky scenarios.
The sales call recordings can also be used to train the new sales reps. They can listen to the recording of your best sales performers to understand your company’s tone and sales approach.
6. Shared team inbox – Provide real-time assistance
The best thing about CRM is that it facilitates collaboration through a shared team inbox. Every conversation your teammate had with the customer is visible in one place. You can see which teammate is handling which customer’s query. In case of unavailability of one teammate, the other can assist the client by referring to the past conversation. In this way, you can increase your response rate and resolve the client’s query at a faster rate.
7. Product – View all your products on a unified dashboard
Selling becomes complicated when there are multiple products. The good news is that you can view all the data about your product like the specifications, variants, and price right next to the deals. It allows you to keep track and maintain records of everything you are selling.
- You can even add images and documents to each product.
- Calculate discounts for finding bets selling price for each product.
- Change the currencies and view the product in different currencies.
- A CRM allows you to add tags to sort and find the information you need about your product.
8. Email tracking – Measure the effectiveness of your outbound emails
Emails are the most important medium to connect with your customers and engage them. So, you need to measure the effectiveness of your outbound emails to improve performance and boost your response rate. CRM helps in tracking those emails. It provides actionable insights for finding out which email subject lines are getting the highest open rate, and which call to action are receiving maximum clicks. A CRM doesn’t only offer a wide array of email templates but also allows you to measure the performance of each email template and optimize it for higher engagement.
Wrapping up
A CRM can be very beneficial for your sales strategy provided you make the most of this intuitive technology. The CRM data can help you in understanding what’s going on in your sales process and what you need to change to achieve better sales results. Every information is easily accessible. Moreover, most of the best CRM software even have mobile apps so you can access your data from anywhere and keep a track on it.
This is a guest contribution by Coreen Menezes of Salesmate. Interested in contributing to the CloserIQ blog? Check out our guidelines here.
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