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.
What is CRM? As per wiki “Customer relationship management(CRM) is an approach to managing a company’s interaction with current and potential customers, is one the best ways how you can do a combination in between accounting and business. It uses data analysis about customers’ history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth” wiki
In most of the CRM tools available today, sales people need to enter data and this data would be processed for meaningful strategic outcome. However, entering data manually comes with a cost. Data entry is costing your employees valuable time and energy, and the trend shows that this cost is just increasing. With today’s technology, the question could be asked if CRMs shouldn’t be more intelligent by now. Have a critical look at your sales organization and you’ll probably start seeing the leaks. Don’t allow this to eat your sales organization from the inside.
First of all, Sales employees to focus on sales, but you also need the data in your CRM to be able to manage your operations. Research has shown that the average employee using CRM tool spends about 4 hours per week entering data into the CRM system manually.
Secondly, imagine your employee who generated good sales, but doesn’t get paid out because the data hasn’t been entered properly. Shouldn’t this employee concentrate more on sales instead of spending time on entering data?
On average, only40% of all sales updates are ever entered into a CRM. Again, the reasoning behind this is actually easy to understand. In addition, data is typically only entered at certain moments of the week or month. Either when a reminder is sent to enter the data, or shortly before a team meeting where results are being discussed. This means that only at specific moments will you have all information in your CRM to actually make good decisions.
And finally, what happens if a sales rep leaves the company? Typically, a large part of the pipeline simply goes up in smoke. Vanished, as if it was never there. You lose any progress made, and might even sabotage other sales reps who pick up those prospects and don’t know the history. All because the data wasn’t entered.
Why automation is the only solution?
The only real solution can be to take this work away from them. The 4+ hours per week spent on entering the data, and the time and energy spent on the discussion around it, can be saved by automating this process.
With advancement of technologies, it is possible to use latest technologies to automate most of the tasks. Here are couple of automation those can help to reduce the burden of manual data entry
Email automation – Email is the first communication channel to reach customer. The user should be notified when customer opens the email, entering data to the system when email received from customer. The system should notify the summary of emails received from customer with sentiment analysis. This will help sales people to further engage with customers in real time. This will help relieving sales employees of administrative work and support sales leaders in creating a high-performance sales organization.
Call Management – Imagine you are talking to customer and phone screen flashes with some visual clue to inform you the mood of the customer. Based on that you can decide how to talk to customers, whether is customer is interested or not. After the talk is over, the system should generate summary of the talk and also sentiment of discussion. This will help sales people to improve their communication skills as well. As the summary of talk is already stored in the system, further communication with customer will be more productive.
Geo-fencing – Geo-fencing is another feature to inform sales people of any nearby customers based on their movement and geo-distance. It is a virtual perimeter that allows users to see existing clients and leads on a map. For sales professionals with access to a geo-location tool in CRM, targeting and selling to a specific geographic area has never been more simple.
With advancement of technology, it’s now time for CRM+, CRM plus smart automation with intelligent data analysis.
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
