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
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.
Its a common practice among sales team to use excel sheet to manage all sales related activities. Excel is a very nice tool, it provides lots of inbuilt features and powerful macro to help in complex and frequent calculations. Early days, there was no alternative to excel for doing sales activities. But it was made for one purpose: managing numbers. Using it to do anything beyond this capacity like as a sales automation tool for managing sales well, with all the other options out there, Excel just isn’t the answer, and it can brings a lot of problems with new businesses.
If you are using excel as a Customer Relationship management tool then I would request to look at following points, please ensure its not hurting you and your business than the help you are getting by using excel as sales automation tool.
Excel is not secure: First of all excel is not secure. If you are a sales leader then you must be knowing how important it is to keep your estimation secret and not to share with your team. A company’s financial information shouldn’t be visible to just anyone who works there—there needs to be measures in place to secure this data to only a select few employees to prevent it from getting leaked. You can though password protect an excel sheet, but you cant share with anybody and all it takes is your password to get insight of your sensitive sales data.
At the same time also you need to share portion of your sales data with your team, that means you cannot password protect your whole excel document. You need to maintain multiple excel sheet.
And imagine how much work it needs for a medium sized team.
Excel is not scalable: Your customer base keeps increasing day by day, so it’s important they’re well taken care of. If your company’s just starting out, then sure, you may be able to get away with using Excel to organize lead and customer details and sales data. Once you start adding more customers and salespeople to the equation, however, your Excel tracking system will get messy, fast. Messy data means it’ll be harder to effectively take care your prospects, inevitably leading to lost sales.
Excel can’t contain all your data: Your data is spread out throughout your emails, your computer (which you’ve been meaning to organize), physical sheets of paper scattered around the office. Wouldn’t it be nice if all this data was in one place?
You could try consolidating it all into a spreadsheet but you need to do all manual data entry to keep all data, then maintenance is a nightmare.
Excel isn’t mobile-friendly: You need your data to be ready, at your fingertips, for whenever you may need it. So, having it sit on your computer’s desktop or in a shared folder only accessible via VPN isn’t going to help you much when you’re working remotely or anywhere besides sitting at your desk.
Difficult to collaborate: The same spreadsheet has been emailed back and forth so many times, it’s hard to know which one is the most up-to-date version.
UX and Intuitiveness: You need to view all your data in a proper format, some time generate report on demand.
This is not how collaboration should be done.
Excel doesn’t let multiple people work on the same file at once. If the spreadsheet is located in a shared folder, multiple people may open it, but only one person can make edits at a time.
Passing a spreadsheet on from one person to another to make edits is a slow way of doing things. Plus, there’s no version control, so you can’t tell who made what changes when edits are made.
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