Small and medium-sized businesses invest in online sales software platforms like easy to use CRM solutions primarily with certain strategies in mind. The biggest among these necessities for purchasing online lead management software or a business growth technology and tool is the need for collecting data that will help organizations to make informed business decisions that drive long-term growth.
With 379 CRM systems listed on G2, only 18 % have a 4 or 5-star rating, which includes ConvergeHub - G2 Learning Hub (2019). Click To TweetIn certain cases, this news can be bad for sales staff.
Since once you buy CRM for your business as a sales software means your sales teams have to learn another new unintuitive and complicated software. Which implies spending a significant chunk of extra hours each day for manually logging all sort of activities into the system, and thereby, finding lesser time to actually ‘sale’.
In other words, adopting easy to use CRM software for the organization most often means a decrease in productivity of the sales reps, and this happens so often that according to DMNews (operated by AC Business Media, Inc) 63% of all new CRM rollouts fail.
Nevertheless, the paradox lies in the fact that there are also several studies that show that sales teams using easy to use CRM software platforms most often outperform teams without online lead management software across several growth metrics in an organization.
Therefore, the good news is that it is possible for easy to use CRM software platforms to give you the best of both worlds, assist you to drive in strategic growth, and so in reality increase productivity consistently.
In this article, we are going to illustrate to you why so many CRM initiatives waste money, sabotage productivity, and suffocate the sales rep’s performance into a slowly diminishing, gasping tickle.
We shall also see how the right CRM can actually help your sales employees to track data from the CRM database , drive strategies, and actually increase productivity in the process.
First things first: Why a modern sale is really this complicated
Doing Sales (going by the books), should be really simple.
A sales rep makes a contact, qualifies the lead, and then tries to close the deal.
Hence, a traditional sale is all about:
So what is it that is getting things complicated?
Well, in modern times the complicacy arises, as there are other handfuls of big problems that tend to scale up with the growth in any businesses, such as:
In the modern digital world, there are numerous channels than ever for harvesting leads for businesses, and each of these channels brings in different types of leads among which some even bring in multiple unique business segments for your businesses.
Now, each of these segments must be sold to after nurturing them independently, and all these actions must be recorded, tracked, and thereafter analyzed.
Well, over here we are not refereeing to hundreds but a few thousands of data events and the larger the business grows, the more activity it needs to coordinate and track its interactions and workflows.
Therefore, to do this, it is impossible to perform such a monstrous work, without the aid of software.
Hence, when it comes to sales, the core piece of business growth technology and solution required to perform these actions is an easy to use CRM or a Customer Relationship Management software.
In reality, your easy to use CRM is supposed to be the central cog for your organization’s business machine, which bridges marketing, sales, support, customer retention, finance, and business analysis into one automated, cohesive system on which you build your business.
As mentioned earlier, the CRM’s goal is usually to help in strategic decision-making, which often comes at the cost of the sales team’s success, and productivity.
Nevertheless, instead of making day-to-day activities more efficient and easier, CRM platforms often at times end up doing the exact opposite.
Let us take a look at why?
Why is it that 63% of CRM rollouts fail?
Just as it requires two people to begin an argument, CRM failures can also be the result of both the CRM software solution and the business organization itself.
Here are four key software platform based factors, which makes even the best CRM fail:
HOW CRM SOFTWARE CAN DOUBLE YOUR BUSINESSES’ BOTTOM-LINE
The best sales and lead management CRM software do not just drive strategies, but it also makes jobs simpler for your sales teams.
Easy to use CRM solutions solve all the issues we were just talking about as it allows salespersons to make contact, qualify, and close the deals.
Hence, here is how CRM software can actually DOUBLE your businesses’ productivity scores, instead of suffocating it.
While in one hand, an easy to use simple setup, which is low-cost, beats a complicated and expensive CRM setup anytime.
Nevertheless, most businesses are willing to take up an upfront hassle even if a little bit of complication is involved for a long-term boost in productivity.
This is exactly the reason as to why maintenance cost and ownership of a CRM is so important. Always remember, the more often your system is out of service or being worked on, the less productive your teams will be with that software.
Therefore, if you use an essentially maintenance-free system, that is simple and easy to use, you will never have to worry about losing your team’s productivity, while you implement or perform regular updates and checkups on your CRM.
Thanks to the growth of social media and digital marketing techniques, nowadays leads can reach the sales teams with increasing diverse histories. This includes:
Sorting through these leads, matching them to relevant sales reps, tracking their activities through the sales pipeline, and briefing sales staff on all their past activities are functions that can take an entire team of managers if it were not for lead management software platforms to do it.
Best CRM software solutions, be it Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms most often used by startups and small business are designed to integrate seamlessly with marketing software on the front end, which helps in allowing sales managers to easily import, sort, and thereafter assign leads to staffs with an automatic briefing on each leads history of their past likings and transactions.
For when these stated actions are done in the right way, it allows the sales reps to sit down and start contacting the leads, as easily as they would have done working their way through an email inbox.
The most convenient ways to contact a lead in modern times are over email or phone calls, neither of which requires advanced online lead management software.
You can always pull out a Smartphone and can do both these without even needing to download an app.
However, although sending emails and calling is the easy part, nevertheless, the more challenging part comes with tracking and recording the conversations for the purpose of future training, and reviews required for strategic adjustments.
As we have expressed earlier that many CRM rollouts become unsuccessful because they are not built with sales staff in mind, therefore the best CRM platforms are built with salespeople in mind.
Hence once you buy CRM it not only eliminates all these issues by allowing emails and phone calls directly through the CRM platform with the help of different third-party integrations, but it also helps in tracking and recording every single activity, without the need for the sales reps to do a thing manually.
While your primary priority is to help your sales teams to send more emails and make calls, you would also certainly want to train your staff, refine your sales rep’s sales approaches, and thereafter evaluate and redefine your company’s sales strategies over time.
It is a data analysis of your CRM database that allows you to achieve this. However, in order to collect usable data, you have to track everything from the beginning until the end, from marketing to sales, customer support and if you are using a QuickBooks CRM that integrates with financial software packages, then even accounts.
Hence, the ability to accommodate third-party integrations is a fundamental part of any sales CRM software that is worth its salt.
Conclusion: Sales software does not have to suffocate productivity
As we have discussed, in spite of most conflicting debates lead management platforms, like easy to use CRM solutions in reality, does not drain your sales team’s level of productivity, but instead, CRM software platforms drive a significant boost to your team’s success in the following ways:
So, get started and buy CRM to boost your businesses’ productivity there is nothing better than a lead management software that can help your company to find business growth.
