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What is collaborative selling and why it’s important now?

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:

  1. Make sure goals for CRM are communicated with your sales team
  2. Give salespeople an incentive for buying into new tech
  3. Provide sales-related context for CRM use
  4. Collect and act on feedback from your sales team
  5. Encourage leadership to set a good example
  6. 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

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ezTask.io: Why another sales automation platform?

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.

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Why you need a smart sales CRM?

Smart Automation using Artificial Intelligence
Smart CRM uses power of smart phone and AI

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, only 40% 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.

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Why you should avoid excel sheet for sales activities

Hand pick red man of Social Network

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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ezTask.io – a smart and lightweight sales CRM for SME

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