Sale is not easy and it needs a continuous work and follow ups. And its getting tougher day by day. Modern tool sets are intended to help in simplifying the sales process, however repetitive tasks like continuous data entry makes it more complicated. Just because the tool is there, doesn’t mean that they feel the need to use it. If data isn’t put in, and records are updated, the return on investment is poor.
Some of the factors that a CRM system provider should keep in mind:
Make sure goals for CRM are communicated with your sales team
Give salespeople an incentive for buying into new tech
Provide sales-related context for CRM use
Collect and act on feedback from your sales team
Encourage leadership to set a good example
Keep the CRM system as simple as possible
Especially now that most sales teams have moved to a remote selling model, CRM systems need to be both powerful and easy to use.
Another important thing that a CRM system should aid collaborative selling. Collaborative selling is not new, but its a age old sales process which is achieved by a team.
What is collaborative selling?
Collaborative selling involves collaboration not between sales team members, but between your salespeople and your customers. Working together, sales professionals and customers can find the right solutions for individual clients, while driving more sales success for your team.
Collaborative CRMs are a great tool for team-based environments where data or customer interactions are shared across the organization.
Collaborative CRM is a method in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) where various departments (like Sales, Marketing, Service, Finance) within an organization share customer information to maximize profitability, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Example: Feedback from a customer, gathered by technical support team could help marketing team to suggest more suitable products or services to the customer.
Advantages of collaborative CRM
– Improves customer interactions across channels – Reduces service cost by using web or online collaborations – Synchronizes customer data with call centre to allow multi channel interactions
Its well known facts that sales team does not like to use any tool, because they have to spent lots of their time on data entry work. Even if a company manually manages its sales team, still the sales team has to apprise their manager about their activities. Most of the time they end of using excel sheet to record all their sales activities, manage their prospects, inquiries, etc. In an average, they spent 40% of their time in such works, which is a non-sales work and absolutely adds nothing to their sales volume.
However, with advancement of technology, companies are now more focusing on automation. Now is the time for smart CRM, that would help field sales team to reduce non-sales activities by automating most of their data entry work.
ezTask.io is a Sales automation platform which focuses on reducing non-productive tasks and efforts incurred by the field sales team in capturing operations information in the CRM. EzTask.io enhances the productivity of the field sales team up to 30%.
It is extremely light weight and smart CRM that can make leads capture and management, pipeline and work flow management, contacts and client management and reporting a breeze.
Running a sales team is not easy, it needs a coordinated effort among team to get best of individual team members, . We have compiled some industry best practices and by following such practices, I am sure it will immensely help sales people.
Its considered challenging task to manage or balance between encouraging quality performance and pushing sales reps with new goals and also for sure be more environmentally friendly teaching of the members of the team the benefits of paperless paystubs.
Sometimes success depends on your team abilities to meet the task with great performance.
Here are some steps to lead you sales team with lots of motivations and encourage to touch a height of success.
Understanding the meaning and the importance of sales
First thing is to understand what is the importance of sale in order to have a fruitful growth in business.
How sales should be done, what are the important points should be consider during sales.
Without sales, business will die.
For managing a sales you need a great sales team for creating a relationship between customers. Without a team it can not be done.
Having One-on-One
Having One-on-One or individual meeting between you and your team members is most necessary part of sales process.
It helps to understand your team members in and out in personal level and to build a good relationship with them, give managers the ability to keep a pulse on how the the rest of the team is feeling.
Take time to understand your team members, who they are, what motivates them, what they want out of a career and show care.
Paying attention to each team members pay off to great investments.
Being the best leader for another means you must first become the best version of yourself.
While you’re giving your reps candid feedback, allow them the opportunity to do the same. You won’t regret it.
Track progress and success
When you start your sales you need to be update with your success and failure rate, what fails you, how you succeed, everything matters.
You need to define what is win means to your team, because success can only comes with both behaviour and results.
Both are important, works in parallel manners like if you only focus on behaviour how you talks to customers and keep repeating in the same way without knowing if it is the good way to have conversations with customers, in this for you result do not matters whether you win or lose. So its important to have good behaviour which leads to positive results.
Managers importance
As successful mangers leads to successful salesperson.
Mangers play a vital role for developing powerful team. Mangers should be very confident and competent to lead a successful team as a good leader.
Should always have conversations with team, discuss ideas, be happy with the team and never discourage your team
Hire who fits in the culture
It’s all about hiring people who will continue to build on that high-intensity, winning mentality that you created when you assembled your first sales team. Hiring individuals that do not add and complement to the existing culture could break all of the success that the team has had.
Analyse your weak spots and improve them
Every salesperson brings something unique to the table, but they also may lack a skill that is holding them back from the results they want.
So it is important to understand the weakness of each team members and start leverage it.You can assign work to your teams according to their area like in which area they are good and let them work on their weak points by learning from other team members, it builds more cohesion and less tense competition.
Having competition between the team members may leads your sale in reverse direction, so having good relationship within the team members is important.
Practice Before Talk To Real Customers
The most important thing that should be to understand by sales teams is the habit of practicing before they talk to real customers.
Need practicing because sometimes we didn’t know how to speak, what to speak and most important sometimes we are not familiar with the product which we are going to sale, so first practice to understand your product.
Without prep and practice before they start conservation with the customers leads to disaster to sales.
As a leader, if you are not establishing a culture where roleplaying and practice is inspected, then you will allow your sales teams to practice on your customers.
Always explains with an example
Start motivating your team with an important examples so that they can have a clear idea about the process of work, because you are in a leader positions to handle you team, if you gave up then also your team.
Better providing a joyful and positive environment, sometimes mind needs peace for work-flow. Success comes by team when we have clear communication with each other, collaboration of ideas and dependability – let them work dependent to their own ideas and projects so that they can get up with some good strategy which may help in sales, you’re empowering your team to respect and adhere to the same business drive as you have.
ezTask.io – a sales automation platform for SME. We are offering introductory price of 50% discount for 6 months for any number of users for our sales automation platform ezTask.io(available in Android, Web and iPhone). This is valid till Feb 29. Call 9880398951
ezTask.io is a cloud based sales automation and team collaboration platform available in native android app, iPhone app and web app. It will help you to carry your business solutions with you wherever you travel. Our realtime dashboard provides you a 360 view of all your existing customers and new leads with their related data. Its advanced date-time based filtering system will help you to get snapshot of your business at any point of times instantly. Why ezTask.io? Most sales management solutions are designed around Enterprise There are not many customized solution in the market SME cannot afford Complex CRM solutions – too pricey Transition from Traditional Practices SME needs a platform to have end to end functionalities – Cannot afford multiple applications for their operations
Recently there is a growing trend to use whatsapp collaboration as a task management app. I was talking to one startup that deals in delivery services, they have around 40 employees and they have 20 whatsapp groups to manage coordination among employees and delivery persons for successful delivery of products to consumers. I asked them how do you manage such big number of groups? They said, though they have problems in managing all groups but they don’t have any alternative. Hence, the problem is can WhatsApp be used for managing tasks? This is not the problem with this company but others too.
A task management needs to have a todo with time, a task and then a supervisor and owner who needs to see if task is completed. A task also need to remind the owner just before task started. For a group task, it needs to remind all participants and help them communicate with each other like whatsapp does. Whatsapp is a communication platform and it used to communicate between people. And one part of task management process is to have an effective communication and thats where whatsapp comes into but the core of an effective task management process is not only communication but also timely reminder, monitoring too. The good part with whatsapp is that number of people using whatsapp quite quite large, that makes it a de facto way of communication and collaboration. You can communicate with people immediately who is on whatsapp and has net connection. It does not give you reminder or snoozing the task. It also does not give you freedom to repeat the task. With growing trend of using for a task collaboration among people is self detrimental, it makes more complex. Objective of any task manager app is to save time, collaboration effectively and timely reminder. It needs a specialized application that would help on these activities. Whatsapp would be solving on portion i.e. communication, but other factors those are more important in execution are completely missing. In fact by using WhatsApp for team collaboration is not going to help in long run. Instead of optimizing time, it would lead to spending more time managing tasks. If any communication has some important information then user need to search and there is a high chance that you miss it giving the volume of data exchanged in whatsapp.
The other important factor that I feel which is missing from whatsapp’s feature list is real time status update and push notification whether a task is completed or not. If a task has multiple subtasks and you have shared the task with your peer and need to get real time status update on sub tasks then you need to better use a task manager that would help you on this. And planning is completely missing.
In summary, for a better planning, collaboration, communication and execution you need to use a task manager that gives you these features, instead of using a communication tool like whatsapp.
This post will tell you how the environment and your immediate surroundings have great impact on your growth and well being. Many times, we think that we are independent and we are not bothered about happenings in our surroundings. But this is not true, we are nurtured by our environment, friends, neighbors and surroundings. My office at Diamond district, Bangalore is almost 500 mts from the place where I park my car. I have to walk through a busy surrounding of offices, footpath vendors to my office.
Cassia tree opposite to a Wine shop
Cassia plant opposite to a tea stall
Recently BBMP or some local people, not sure has planted some saplings in the footpath. This is indeed a noble work. The green cover of Bangalore is depleting in a alarming rate and such initiatives in large scale would definitely help in bringing back lost glory of beautiful weather of Bangalore. I everyday cross two cassia sapling on my way. One of the cassia sapling was planted opposite to a wine shop- top left side plant and another cassia sapling was planted opposite to a tea stall where people from nearby offices come, spent time smoking, gossiping. In the beginning two plants were growing properly, and we quite healthy – for first 2 weeks. The plant opposite to tea stall is always poured with water, no litigation, grows properly. As you can see the plant opposite to wine shop, neither there are water and people also took out the remaining leafs. Some other day, some one has broken its branch. So the point is our growth and wellness is heavily influenced by our surroundings. Most people come to wine shop – an open bar are mostly daily workers, rickshaw pullers and I can see some time there are altercations, some people even out of sense lying in the footpath. They might have broke the plant, plucked leafs. Where as, the other tea stall has people from nearby offices, blue collar/ white collar executives. They understand the importance of a tree at current situation, that helps to pour some water and the plat grows. Similarly, One need to be with good people. That not only increases the effectiveness of your collaboration with your surroundings but your growth too. Collaboration is always two sided and equally participated by both. If you cannot take care of a poor plant why should you expect anything in return be it oxygen or shed from sun.
This is my first venture. I was a techie, transitioned to tech manager, tech architect, technologist throughout my career. And when I first thought of the idea of a startup, the very first thing that came to my mind was to develop a technology driven product to simplify some of the complex tasks. As part of the job, we use various tools from productivity to project management. Same with sales and marketing, they use different tools for collaboration, tracking, task management etc. The main problem is that there are no common integration point to synchronize information or activities among these tools. Platforms like slack took the advantage of it by providing a simple chat interface for collaboration, with plugins supporting various tools. However, still it did not solve the problem of ontime decision making when multiple stakeholders are part of a task. Imagine you are part of a task that needs to connect with customer, chat and take a decision. And all the message exchange with your customer will be archived part of the task for any audit in future. There will be a summary extractor to show summary of the discussion on the fly. This can be done not only in chat but also for voice based or video based collaboration. And what you get for such type of collaboration
– Firstly peace of mind, as the decision you have taken is already archived and you dont need to explain again and again for any adverse situations.
– Then, you saved resources of chain of calls to take a decision
– Thirdly you saved time
– Lastly, your customer loved it, as s/he does not need to respond multiple times
The main purpose of any task automation tools are to aid in quick decision making by automating some complex processes. Then dynamic/real time report and audit of archived data.
Are there any tools in the market that provides such features?
To summup
If you want to make a profit in the business of sales marketing, you need to get organized to manage tasks from end to end. And there is no better way to that than using software, the choice of right software will make it or break it.
Companies spent huge amount of resources to showcase products in audio visual ads, and the more creative the ads are, the more audience it will have. All the audiences might not be the consumer but it definitely impacts publicity of the product. However, some time too much ads also irritate public and in return public switch of the device or move to other channels to get rid of such ads. Recently I have observed how ads are perceived by public, here is my experience
During rush hour, most of the FM radio channels in Bangalore put more ads and less songs. But there is a new FM mirchi 95, which has very less ads and I generally don’t change the channel while listening. I am sure the value of such ads would be more compare to the other FM channels. Radio mirchi would selectively put ads with higher value to get more revenue and it makes sense to public too. This is called win-win for both, fm and public. However, in some other channels, its like playing music in ads and some time I switch off my car audio system because its so irritating. In this case, the relative value of the ads would be much lesser irrespective of how much creative these ads are. But with competition and publicity, the two topmost priority, companies tend to pay for ads.
And then some times, ads are so factual that I wish to have a central authority to monitor the ads. E.g. there was a fairness cream ad and your skin color with be fairer within 2 weeks. This also reminded me a movie(Traffic Signal), a dark skinned kid saved all his money and bought a fairness cream based on the ad. After 15 days, no change in skin color and the kid got so much angry, that he tried to throw stones to a nearby hoarding with this cream. Quite funny though.
But some time, ads are quite realistic too and shows the important features of the product. Irrespective of how the ads are perceived by public, the companies will keep on spending more and more on this.
Though this is not the first time I had been into recruitment of resources but this time I am recruiting for my startup. The risk doubles when you recruit for a startup because we lack in remuneration, facilities but only thing that is guaranteed is challenging work. If a person passionate about the work, the project then definitely he would be interested to join. Unfortunately finding such resources is not easy at all and a wrong choice or two will derail the whole project, efforts and noble intention behind startup. And then there is google, which tries to be master of everything, you just need to know how to search intelligently. Here is one answer from a candidate, who has less experience in python but s/he has good confidence
I consider myself as an intermediate in Python knowledge but I am very comfortable with it as long as I can access google.
Thank you
Look at her confidence, I decided to give her a chance. But this is not the solution to knowledge, experience, capability or learning. Searching google and getting your job done will work as long as you understand the problem and you know how to write programs in any language to solve it. But blindly using search will not yield any result. It will give short term solution to get recruited but in long run, you will be thrown away unless you learn and show your capability.
Its my nature to not to give more importance in face to face interview, rather I give a task and ask the candidate to solve it within stipulated period. I expect honesty on solving, though completion of task is not the priority, rather I look at the approach of the solution. But honesty is very expensive and some time its not available so cheaply. I had such experience where I waited 8 months for two resources to be productive, gave lots of chances to show result. Finally, there is a limit to it. And I had to take tough decision, though it was not easy. In a startup if you are recruiting then please focus on problem solving in front of you and face to face interview. Otherwise you have to suffer a lot.
I attended a seminar organized by successgyan at hotel Vivanta by Taj, MG Road, Bangalore. It was well attended by leaders across domains and age groups. Though I generally don’t pen any blog about any seminars or conclaves but this seminar has its own proposition and it gives an insight of how to look everything from a different perspective. One of the important phrase we generally say for any task is “Rome was not built in a single day” that indicates any beautiful creation cannot be completed overnight and it takes time. And this phrase was beautifully modified with “Rome was not built in a single day but everyday”, that adds positivity and inspiration with proposition of slow and steady behind every successful creation. The success of any individual is driven by the continuous improvement in every front be it finding new opportunities, learning new skills and steadiness in execution. The moment we stopped increasing our area of influence then we stopped our growth, its a continuous process of learning that brings more opportunity in different ways. However, we are now so much stressed in our work, we simply forget to brush up our skills, improving our abilities and learning new technologies. This impacts not only our development but also the environment in which we work. This is also same with enterprises too. I always compare between FlipKart and Amazon. Both these companies started with retail market and however Amazon increased its portfolio into Cloud Computing, Tablet, etc but FlipKart failed to diversify its business. Continuously FlipKarts market valuation is going down and down. Same thing happened with Nokia too. These are few lessons for everybody to keep on expanding their area of influence in different ways and then only you can succeed.
