Are you trying to streamline your sales process?
We all know that sales are always an integral part and a component of success for businesses since if your sales teams have trouble selling efficiently, you are surely going to see your businesses’ growth drop- which is not a good predicament for anyone in businesses.
Now, in general everyone in the sales team spends quite a large span of time on admin works, which includes setting up reminders, scheduling meetings, sending emails, and several other mundane tasks that take a significant amount of time out of their day, which they could have spent closing deals.
Therefore how can you streamline your sales process in a manner that all of that administrative work still gets done, but still your sales reps have the time to close their deals?
For many businesses, sales CRM or Customer Relationship Management software for sales is the answer.
Now while some people’s opinions might be better than others, nonetheless the general purpose of an easy to use CRM software solution is to make it easier for the sales teams to foster a positive relationship with all the leads and prospects who come into their sales cycle and also eliminate a lot of busywork that keep the sales reps away from closing their deals.
In fact, back in 2012 a research published by Tech News World, revealed that even more than half of all the businesses (>54%) in the USA expect to improve their sales with the help of a CRM tool.
Now even though the real benefits that a sales CRM software brings to the sales reps may not be immediately recognizable, nevertheless CRM is a business growth technology that can act as a game-changer if implemented rightly.
And since CRM is a tool that the salespeople need to most, in this article as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions let us bring out the key reasons as to why Enterprise CRM can help the sales teams achieve their goals and thereby improve results easily.
So, why do salespeople require a tool like CRM?
In general, without the anxiety of oversimplifying the facts, the greatest challenges that sales reps face nowadays include:
Sales CRM is a tool that helps the sales reps to safely store their contacts, sales opportunities, schedules, and activities in a centrally located CRM database, whereby they can find constant access to the information from numerous locations. Rest assured that their data will not get lost.
CRM is a software that helps the sales reps to prioritize their tasks and optimize their daily work schedules to ensure that the customers are not ignored and that the key prospects in their list are contacted in time.
In other words, easy to use CRM permits the salespeople to invest more time with the customers, which eventually leads to more deals closed and a stronger customer base for their company.
Once the reps in an organization use a sales CRM tool, it is a software that can help the salespeople to easily prepare their weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports for the management.
The process of creating a report is transparent and can be automated in a CRM, and it even takes just a few minutes and clicks to inform other staff within the organization what sales reps are presently working on or deals that are in progress inside their sales pipeline.
CRM created for the salespeople helps the sales reps to segment their data in the CRM database to identify cherished opportunities using criteria-based selection, which prevents the sales reps from cutting and pasting from various documents or from surfing through a list of disorganized data.
Once you adopt a CRM for your sales teams, it offers to share document templates, calendars and even provide email integration, so as to keep the whole team united and keep everyone up-to-date on the same page.
Now sharing selling patterns and processes allows the sales reps to view what worked best for their company.
Additionally, CRM also boosts communication between the sales reps and sales management in an organization.
As CRM can track all communications with the customers, it is a tool that aids the salespeople to understand exactly when the customers need to be contacted, which can be for several reasons like product replacement, contract renewals, or even for upselling a new product or service to the existing customer base, which increases the chances of closing a new sales and earn additional revenue.
If you are trying to streamline the complete sales cycle, CRM is the right technology that can assist businesses to do it.
Streamlining sales not only results in easily closing low-hanging deals in your sales pipeline but it also helps everyone in the sales team to reach their targets faster, easily.
This is because orders processing and preparing quotes can be automatically done using an easy to use CRM, which helps in reducing production costs and increase sales revenue considerably.
As because all the customer-related data is centrally stored in a sales CRM software, it helps the salespeople to regularly analyze the needs and requirements of their prospects and customers and even anticipate the customer’s problems at the ‘right time’.
This the reason why CRM is a tool that helps in increasing the satisfaction of the customers and ensures their loyalty, as well as generates higher profit margins for businesses.
As we said even before a sales CRM releases the sales reps from the majority of their admin-related tasks by reducing and removing some of the repetitive actions performed by the team, which takes a lot of their precious time, but yield negligible profitability.
Using Sales Force Automation (SFA), CRM software solutions are capable of triggering reminder activities, store and update product and price details, or take the sales reps step by step through their sales pipeline for closing the deals.
Most CRM solutions are capable of integrating with a plethora of other business growth tools, for seamless transfer of data between multiple applications that can help the sales reps to accomplish their task effectively.
For example, when a sales CRM is integrated with an accounting software solution, a QuickBooks CRM can help businesses to unlock the precious customer data that is locked inside QuickBooks and use it from the CRM to drive sales and customer engagement.
This way, businesses can continue to use QuickBooks for accounting, and at the same time see the customer details, products, invoice and payment information directly in their CRM.
They can then use this information from QuickBooks in their easy to use CRM for creating reminders, follow-ups, customer service and build business process automation.
Conclusion
Hence, in a nutshell, even though salespeople and a sales CRM might not be an immediate “match made in heaven” as many sales reps do not like using a CRM as the extra time that is invested on entering data into the application adds to their irritation, whereby many salespeople think that CRM keeps them from their main task – “selling”, nonetheless, the more time these two spend together, the stronger the attraction between them becomes and makes the reps admire the software.
And this applies even to those who were not at all “happy-go-lucky” about using a sales CRM in the beginning.
