How to Spot a Rising Sales Star

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How To Spot a Rising Sales Star

 

Great salespeople don’t just happen. They are a combination of natural affinity to sales and the right environment to succeed. In a sea of job hunters and aspiring salespeople, how do you spot a rising star that will take your team to the next level?

Active Listener & Empath

Everyone knows how to listen, but to listen effectively? That’s a rare skill. Most people listen with the intent of replying. Because they have a goal to close deals quickly, many salespeople fall into this trap and make it hard to form a genuine relationship and connection with your lead.

Outstanding sales representatives will know how to read the conversation. They’ll be able to hear what customers want from your product or services. They’ll know how it will fit into their lives. Empathetic salespersons can also give valuable feedback to your product teams about how to improve it.

Great Communicator

Sales require meeting various kinds of people, one after the other. Salespeople need to blend in when meeting their prospective clients. From coffee shops to board rooms, they have to know how to adjust their situation.

You can tell when a person knows their stuff when they can easily explain complicated things. Excellent communicators can adjust their language, tone, and energy with what the conversation demands. Great salespeople can speak to everyone from the staff to the CEO without losing their attention.

Networker

Sales go beyond just closing a deal. It’s a process that requires relationship management that sometimes lasts a lifetime. After meeting a client for the first time, salespeople need to remember little details that show they care – birthdays, anniversaries, coffee preferences.

Trust takes time and consistency to build. Salespeople know that it’s not just about who you know, but who you continue to have a relationship with.

Resilient

Anyone who comes from sales knows that everyone goes through difficult times. Dry spells are part of every seasoned salesperson’s book of experiences. During periods of uncertainty, exceptional salespeople view it as an opportunity. They’ll look hard times as drivers to do and be better.

Great salespeople can see the silver lining in every situation. They know that tough times don’t last, but tough people do. No matter what happens, their next sale is on the verge of happening.

Once you find these traits in a sales team member, you’ll know that this is a person who will be an essential part of your team. After hiring the best possible people, the next challenge for every company is to give them everything they need to succeed.

Salespeople spend 66% of their time working that isn’t related to their primary function. Sales enablement platforms like Hey DAN rid them of time-consuming responsibilities such as data entry, expense tracking, and note-taking – leaving room for the things that matter.

Don’t waste their talent and their time doing tedious administrative work that someone else can do. Make sure that your salespeople stay at the top of their game and focus on what they do best – selling.

9 Fields of an effective CRM template

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At the heart of every CRM system is a CRM template. Make sure that your teams don’t miss asking the right people the best questions. Check out these fields and see if your CRM template is as effective as it could be!

Work Information

Whether your product or service is for other businesses or freelancers, it’s paramount to know their position, job title, and company name. This allows you to identify stakeholders and key decision-makers that will likely need your product or service.

Name

A customer’s name is the fundamental element of a lifelong relationship. According to Campaign Monitor, personalization increases email inbox open rates by as much as 26%. In a crowded marketplace where everyone is trying to sell you something, sometimes being called by your name makes a huge difference.

Contact details

After learning about your potential lead, the next step is knowing how to engage with them. With the rise of social messaging platforms, you can find a way to interact with people even without knowing their traditional contact details. To achieve institutional memory you have to make sure the data stays not just with your sales team but with your company.

Estimated Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

When a company begins to grow its CRM system, there needs to be a way for your team to know the estimated value that you expect to get from your customer and their company.

Prioritization

Once you have the Customer Lifetime Value, you can determine where to spend your team’s resources and prioritize nurturing high-value relationships.

First and Most Recent Contact

After engaging with your customer, it’s necessary to keep track of when you last interacted with them. Being able to identify how long each stage of the CRM system will reveal how to improve it.

Status

Whether it’s in the demo, pricing discussion, or pilot stage, it’s good to know exactly where you are with each of your customers. When you are aware of the objective for your recent contact was, you’ll know where to bring the conversation next. Status tracking helps for when the relationship has to pass on from one employee or department to another.

Next Steps

After you’ve made the first touch, it’s important to note when the right time to follow up is. Many executives have their hands and their schedules full; they would appreciate timely follow up. On the other hand, not timing it can make you appear unprofessional. Make sure to give just enough time to engage people without being too pushy!

Additional Notes

It’s important to remember the little things. Whenever a customer shares their opinions or preferences, it’s a token of their attention and time. They may have change requests or reservations about your product or service that you’ll need to address before your next engagement.

While the CRM processes are different per company, customizing the right fields is only one part of the equation. Authenticity, usability, and timeliness of the data are equally important. Avoid making mistakes during the data entry process by partnering with integrated systems such as Hey DAN’s Voice to CRM solution. Get the right data to the right people at the right time.

5 Strategies For An Effective CRM Foundation

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Customer relationship management (CRM) helps businesses understand customers like never before and nurture relationships with them that last a lifetime. Every good relationship has a great foundation. How do you make sure your CRM system stands the test of time?

 

Engage Your Leadership 

 

While often a term associated with sales, CRM is a tool that entire businesses can leverage for holistic success. Leaders from all stages of the CRM process should understand the value of CRM and how it affects their business units and overall company targets.

CRM systems are only as effective as the strategy behind them. The people calling the shots should know the value of CRM and be able to lead people on how to utilize the platforms effectively.

 

Establish Cross-Functional Teams

 

Initial adoption into a CRM system isn’t always easy. According to McKinsey & Co, 70% of change programs don’t succeed because of employee resistance and lack of support from their management. Through systematically rewarding high performers and early adopters, you can encourage your teams to continuously improve their performance.

By creating cross-functional teams with the singular goal of doing better than the other, the culture of excellence will be the gold standard within the company. This is one way to guarantee success in all four stages of the CRM process from Marketing, Sales, Product to Support.

 

Create Templates

 

While there are templates provided by various CRM providers, tailoring content specifically for your business is important. From the way your sales team approaches their leads to the language, the support staff will use when they need help, having a unified voice will help build a more cohesive user experience.

Great templates will save companies time and prevent them from missing out on key information that is necessary to close a sale. Companies who know how to utilize them will make every customer feel important.

 

Celebrate the Little Victories

 

The journey of creating great customer experiences is often a long, ever-evolving process. This doesn’t mean that one can’t celebrate when you’ve done something right. Good performance should always be rewarded and performing teams should be thanked for their contributions.

CRM will give you up to date data that will tell you exactly where you are in your company’s goals. Celebrating milestones and targets through regular updates is one way to keep employees engaged and happy with their progress.

 

Streamline the CRM Process

 

At the foundation of every great CRM system is clean, usable data. Proper data entry, integration, and workflow automation are essential to not miss out on great leads. To make sure that the right data is given to the right people at the right time, companies should consider outsourcing time-consuming administrative tasks.

Integrated system integrations such as Hey DAN’s can painlessly optimize your team’s productivity and accuracy through their machine-learning enabled Voice to CRM Entry, Data Cleanup, Consulting Services, and BPO.

By spending less time doing what could be outsourced means more time to focus on your core responsibilities – create meaningful client relationships and drive sales.

The Efficiency/Profitability Equation

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With the world turned over its head by the current health crisis, adapting to a “new normal” has become mandatory for people and businesses alike. Our everyday routines may have changed a lot, but keeping your business profitable with an efficiently run CRM has not.

Businesses have taken such a big hit from the current global situation that some of them are in danger of having to close shop. But don’t fret, even during these times, having sound business fundamentals can still have a positive effect and one of the best attributes to have in any given situation is efficiency. Aside from thinking up new ways to adapt to the times and having a positive outlook, configuring your CRM systems for maximum efficiency can be a great way to keep your business profitable. The crisis is real, yet, keeping your business profitable is still very possible.

CRM systems do more than just keep records of your clients. Here are some ways your CRM can help with your business efficiency:

  • Email, calls and other relevant customer engagement activities are tracked and can be configured to be routed to specific departments so that it can be quickly addressed.
  • Admin and business processes such as accounting, expense reporting are handled by your system, easily creating pipelines and reducing “double tasks”.
  • Get access to your database in real-time and make adjustments on the fly,  making timely “at-the-moment” reactions. Fine-tuning your next move enables you to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves or may even help you avert a crisis.
  • Stay uniform across your email proposals and responses. Employees can access templates for letters, forms and contracts and not waste time trying to compose letters for each new client.

With so much information to be tracked and encoded, mistakes are a dime-a-dozen. The solution is to eliminate the risk generated by manual data entries. Why not give your CRM a needed boost? Let Hey DAN put the “turbo” into your business charge. As an early adopter of voice technology, Hey DAN was developed with a unique combination of machine learning AI and voice technology, forming a robust and efficient Voice-to-CRM solution that seamlessly integrates with your current system. This makes note-taking a thing of the past. With Hey DAN, you only have to dictate all the relevant data into your smartphone or internet enabled device and let the technology do the rest. With virtually error-free data input, you can rest easy about committing errors in data entry and boost your company efficiency.

Efficiency in business equates to profitability. Time equals money and efficiency means getting more focused on relevant tasks. Lesser expenses, more work accomplished vs. time spent, better communication between customer and agent – these are just some of the advantages and benefits of having an efficient business process. Having the right system in place keeps you one step ahead; an upgraded system gives you two.

Give your business that well-deserved efficiency boost today. Learn more about Voice-to-CRM, request for a demo today!

Crushing Sales Goals with Voice to CRM

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As a sales leader in a large business, every bit of advantage can make that small jump in percentage in sales which is already a huge benchmark in achieving your goals for the month or the quarter at hand.

You want to give your sales agents that edge in maximising their time on closing deals than doing data entry into their CRM.

CRM Adoption has been a big issue for large companies where people just don’t have the time to adapt to a new platform better yet keying the minutes of every meeting into a CRM that well, so you might say not that user friendly most of the time.

This is why Voice to CRM companies are becoming a necessity so that it enables top sellers continue what they do best – SELL. All they have to do is record their meetings and a combination of AI and human intelligence would be able to process the data entry into ANY CRM.

The most popular CRMs are not usually the easiest to use, but with the most functionalities and its easy to get lost within and waste time by spending too much on processing your meeting notes then just fail at saving it correctly into the company CRM.

1 hour a day saved in theory is 5-7 hours a week, and 20 hours a month. Those 20 hours can be very much well spent with your agent’s specialty may it be conditioning clients or closing sales.

These hours can surely make a whole big of difference cumulatively in a quarter better yet in a year’s time.

The best part is, as a manager, you work with the CRM all the time and now, DATA is promptly and accurately entered by your team members which makes it also an improvement in the overall sales performance of the company.

Maximizing Time – Improving Sales

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People to people meetings, and coordination and most of all, SELLING – clearly eats up a lot of energy.

As the saying goes, you should always be 150% mentally and physically present when you meet with clients.

A simple hi – hello can really mean much to your target market and it is very important to be there in the moment when it actually happens. Conditioning the sale is an art in itself, you can’t be too slow, and you can’t surely rush it. Clients are sensitive and they feel every bit of intent in your body language if you look at them as just numbers you want to close. Most prospects do not like that.

So being there 150% in every meeting takes a toll in someone physically and most of all mentally. Most of the time you’d feel exhausted after a whole day of meeting/s – yeah there are clients that take a whole day to meet while they feel you out and see if they can establish trust and build a relationship.

What do you think you would be able to put in your CRM at the end of the day? Probably you’ll wait till tomorrow and just entering your data and trying to remember what happened in the meeting and be able to assess when the next follow up would be, or do you close the sale in the next meet. Most likely the data you would be able to put in will just be 80% complete if you really are good and lucky to remember everything.

Why not just record the meeting, or better yet do voice recordings (memos) for you to be able to get the most important parts of the meeting and have someone else enter it to your CRM? Listening to it on your own and putting in the details into your system will still eat up an hour or more perhaps. Personal Assistant – probably not cost-effective if this is the only thing they do for you.

This is where data entry service companies are available for you to tap into. More so there are companies that are just focused on CRM Data Entry. They understand the policies and complexities different CRMs have.

With such service providers, you are assured that

  • Security and Privacy – CHECKED!
  • Data Entry – ACCURATE.
  • Turnaround time – FAST!

Wake up and review your data the next day and plan the next course of action in closing the sale. You save time, and your energies are always refreshed making you a more effective Sales agent.

How CRM can help SMEs

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Most if not all businesses start with an idea where it then builds processes to generate leads and eventually make a sale. In reality there is so much to that which we will be getting into.

Start it up

Each year, thousands of entrepreneurs start a business. A large number of these startups are home-based businesses that account for 69 percent. Data reveals that, of the businesses started in 2014, 80 percent made it to year 2; 70 percent reached year 3; 62 percent got to year 4; and more than half (52%) survived to year 5. Basing on the data, there is a 44 percent startup failure rate. But the good thing is, more than half make it through the fifth year.

Let it ride

Congratulations! You made through year 5. So, what now? This may be the right time to re-evaluate your customer relations. Do not get complacent, especially with your current client roster. Find ways to generate new leads and expand your business. If you have a growing business and have yet to deploy a CRM system, now is the perfect time to do so. Here is why.

CRM Benefits

SME’s should deploy some sort of CRM system if just for these reasons:

  • Improved Client Relationships. Your business is built on customers, and the more you know about them, the better for your business and the more important your clients feel.
  • Better Service. A synchronized client database means that every agent in your pool has access to all the pertinent information. Companies become more efficient in servicing their clients because of this.
  • Increased profitability. When utilized correctly, CRM systems increase productivity by improving sales cycles and processes. This will naturally result in increased revenue as sales people can make more sales with the shorter sales cycle.
  • Cost savings. Your agents can be more efficient in creating meeting schedules, as there is more information readily available to plot an efficient itinerary. Efficiency also results in more time for more sales related activities, thus lowering the cost per client sale or acquisition.

Being apprehensive of the cost implications is no longer an excuse to deploy a quality CRM solution. There are many decent, cost-efficient solutions that would fit your organization.

Hubspot offers a CRM solution that is 100% free – forever. Robust and full-featured, Hubspot enables you to instantly view of your entire sales funnel on a clean, visual dashboard. It also automatically logs your sales activity like emails, calls and social media interactions. Keep everything organized in a timeline that stores your emails, meeting notes and calls. It’s easy to deploy and it doesn’t cost a cent, so there is nothing to lose and virtually a ton to gain. And as your business grows, more and more options are available to you like data entry services and voice enabled solutions. Hubspot together with its partners can sure be swiss knife in your toolbox.

Starting a business is hard, but staying the course and seeing it through is harder. Having the right tools at your disposal will greatly increase your chances at making it to the next round and with a little imagination and a lot of hard work, who knows; your brand could become the next big thing.

Hey DAN in Action

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It’s 4 AM. An electronic alarm goes off. Stan gets out of bed, puts on a pot of coffee and takes a quick shower. He scans his CRM system for the day’s itinerary, and it’s packed; it will take him across town through 5 different hospitals to meet with over a dozen doctors; one over lunch and another over coffee. He is also reminded to go over the details for the new product he is presenting to a new group – a chance to make a good first impression. A very important meeting is noted – one of the doctors in the itinerary is performing surgery – it’s all good because Stan can wait a bit, the schedule has been lined up so that there is ample time between meetings, dodged a bullet there. There is also a reminder to send over lunch to another group across town – just so he can take the meeting late in the afternoon before he retires for the day. Stan doesn’t have to worry about rushing back to the office to record his client meeting notes on the office computer though, he’s got a voice-to-CRM system that handles all of that for him – in real time.

A sales job is tough, pharma sales – tougher. It makes you wonder how a they cope with the constant pressure of mounting tasks on top of their sales quota. The selling part is hard, but before you can get to that part, there is the matter of setting up an initial meeting and making the follow-ups thereafter. Before the advent of mobile and voice technology, all of the client notes were recorded on a spreadsheet somewhere in office desktop computer. After a tough day running around town and catching up with clients, the rep had to return to the office and collate all of the notes written down on paper or a table napkin. Sometimes there are no notes at all, and everything has to be recalled from memory! Thankfully, our guy Stan gets a boost from Hey DAN, an advanced Voice to CRM solution that implements a unique combination of voice technology, AI and human intelligence. This makes the system fast and efficient, plus, it adapts to whatever CRM system your reps currently use. With Hey DAN, the sales representative can dictate all the information into his mobile device after each meeting – when everything is still fresh in his memory. Hey DAN then parses the information and enters the data into the CRM system with speed and accuracy. This way, the rep can easily plan his future itinerary around those small details incorporated into the system. Lunch meetings, sending over coffee or food before he drops by, the doctor’s schedule – all of this is vital for the sales rep. Pharmaceutical sales is a competitive arena and for the sales rep, anything that can give him an edge over other sales agents would be welcome.

It’s another day, and the alarm buzzes. Stan wakes up and has a smile on his face knowing that the day’s itinerary is going to be smooth – thanks to Hey DAN.

Social CRM – New way of mining data

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Social media has become the Holy Grail for the modern business. Nearly every company, established or startup, has 3 billion reasons to hedge its marketing efforts on social media. Social media usage has been surging, and there seems to be no bucking this trend. Data tracked in the past 10 years shows that usage has grown steadily by an average of 300 million users per year. From 970 million users in 2010, the figure has ballooned to a staggering 2.97 billion in 2020.

Tying in your CRM with Social Media

Gaining market insight is easier now than any other time in history. Technological innovations in data mining and analysis coupled with the transparency provided by social media have brought about this “golden age” of marketing insight. It is no surprise, therefore, that businesses are moving towards this trend in leveraging marketing campaigns and product development; resulting in more efficient business processes. It is no different on the CRM front.

Having permeated society in general, traditional CRM systems have morphed into Social CRM – systems that integrate social media platforms into their systems; think of it as CRM on steroids. Whereas before, it mainly tracked customer names, phone numbers, emails and such, today’s turbocharged CRM systems incorporate potential customers’ social media data into the mix. Integrating social media into data mining thus create more value that would correlate data to gain more insights to closing a sale.

Gathering Intelligent Data

Hubspot has developed specific functionality for social media integration. Social media lead intelligence automatically links Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook profiles to a company’s leads category. Data mining has never been more people centric than it is nowadays. Clicks, shares, schools attended, current jobs, previous jobs are just some of the information that can be greatly taken into account from social. This greatly benefits sales people, as they can learn about potential customers interests and challenges quickly, and without having to devote additional time into research. This definitely adds value to the data entered to your CRM.

They also included a feature that creates social media follow and share buttons on all marketing content. This helps in growing their audience, reach and leads. The last feature may sound trivial, but automatically adding a follow or share button, without IT intervention, greatly increases efficiency and was virtually unthinkable before. An automatically placed share or follow button is an added effort to increase presence – effortlessly.

Social media has become as ubiquitous as television, and is slowly becoming the go-to platform for advertisers and marketers alike. Having a solid CRM that leverages on this huge audience will prove to be a worthwhile investment. If you are still the exception to the rule, it’s high time to consider the tremendous benefits and jump over to the greener side of the fence.

The Pharmaceutical Industry and CRM

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The Pharma Industry

Medicine is big business. From $390 billion in 2001, the pharma industry has seen tremendous growth and was valued at $1.2 Trillion in 2018. By 2023, global spending on medicine is projected to reach $1.52 Trillion. The pharmaceutical revenue for North America in 2018 was pegged at 48.9%, while China has seen the highest growth rates in recent years.

The pharma industry is also responsible for the research and development of new and better medicine. The task for marketing these products also falls under their responsibility and this is where the sales team steps in.

The CRM Industry

Would it be a surprise to know that CRM is now the biggest software market in the world? Don’t be, because it is. It is projected to reach $80 Billion in revenues by 2025. This can be attributed to new trends emerging and merging with the CRM space that includes social media, mobile apps and voice technology and AI. 2019 saw increased mobile CRM use which was due to the fact that a lot of companies were adopting cloud based CRM solutions, which allowed their sales reps to access the system from anywhere with a plethora of devices. Sales and marketing departments benefit the most out of CRM software – and ironically, customer relations come only third on the list of departments that use CRM.

When worlds collide

The pharma industry is a gigantic place to navigate – sales or otherwise, and without the necessary tools, tracking your customers and products could prove more than a handful. With a trillion-dollar industry at your doorstep, wouldn’t it be natural to have every bit of an advantage right at your disposal? Taking a slice out of the pharma pie will be daunting, but don’t fret; recent advancements in CRM software technology provides the perfect solution for this gargantuan task. Voice technology cuts down the time your team spends on administrative tasks, like data entry and gives them more time to track down and close a sale. Arm your team with an efficient and reliable voice-to-CRM services. Hey DAN is an advanced voice-to-CRM solution with a unique combination of technology and intelligence that is both fast and efficient. The sales rep just needs to speak into their devices and let Hey DAN do the rest.

Voice-to-CRM and the Pharma Sales Pipeline

Keeping your pipeline busy

With so much sales to be closed in the pharma industry, your pipeline should always be growing – voice-to-CRM ensures just that. Quickly access customer data and know exactly when a sale is closed – and reload your pipeline instantly.

CRM systems ultimately aim to improve sales performance by streamlining its processes.

The art of the follow-up

Easily recognize which client needs a follow-up and create schedules that work. Voice-to-CRM gives you better leverage of your time plus getting  up front information already in your CRM by the time you are ready to work on it.

This gives you more time to do what you do best, nurture those leads and close.

Pharmaceutical clients should be handled with precision thus understanding their schedules and interacting at the right moment increases the chance of making the sale.

Laser focus

One benefit of having an intelligent voice-to-CRM system is the amount of time you save – which can then be repurposed for sales activities. Reps will have more time to focus on selling by freeing them from data input duties. All the freed up time can be used creatively to get a bigger slice of that pharma pie.

You will not believe how diverse accounts would be and each will have its own strategy to close. Getting all your points in line fast and efficient will give you that edge in closing that sale from your competition.

The sheer size of the pharma industry cannot be taken lightly. Taking advantage of the latest trends in CRM technology will at least give you a chance to keep abreast with your competitors. Get with the times and take advantage of what technology and services available to you to be able to perform better in the highly competitive pharma industry.