Tag Archive for: sales performance

3 Main Types of CRM Leads

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Leads are the lifeblood of a great CRM system. For most CRM systems, a CRM lead is a kind of customer who could already be in your sales pipeline but has not completed their lifecycle yet.

Unfortunately, not all leads are made equal. Focusing on the wrong ones can be detrimental to both your company’s budget and your teams’ time. So what are the types of leads in a CRM system?


3 Main Types of Leads

Information Qualified Lead (IQL) – Cold Lead

In the early stages of interacting with your customers, companies are often given contact information in exchange for freebies, promotional offers, or relevant information. With a stream of nurturing activities from marketing and sales teams, IQLs need to learn more about your company, your offerings, and how it answers to their particular needs.

IQLs can be considered cold leads. More often than not, it’s good to keep tabs and regularly maintain your relationship with them. However, they shouldn’t be a priority for your team’s follow-up strategies.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – Warm Lead

Marketing Qualified Leads are a kind of lead that is likely to convert into sales. While they’re not likely to buy right now, they are likely to respond better to being nurtured. MQLs are also called warm leads. After a combination of time and effort, they can become paying customers.

Different companies will have different ways of qualifying an MQL. It is often a combination of the prospective customers’ positive interactions with your marketing campaigns, their existing history, or how well they fit into your ideal customer persona.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – Hot Lead

A Sales Qualified Leads is also what you call a hot lead. The main difference between MQL and SQL is their readiness to commit to purchasing your product or service. After being qualified by marketing, prospective customers are nurtured by sales teams to avail of your product or service.

Through careful vetting, sales qualified leads to feel that their needs are understood. The marketing department’s budgets are also better spent, and the sales teams maximize the effort they are putting in.

Nurturing Every Kind of Lead

The key to a great CRM system is knowing exactly where each lead is in their buyer’s journey. As a rule of thumb, it’s always best to prioritize the hottest leads first before going after the colder ones.

It’s not enough to have a lot of leads. You also have to find good quality leads. With limited time but a mountain of opportunity, sales teams need help to find the best prospective customers at the right stage and the right time.

One way to make sure that each lead is taken care of until they are ready to be closed by sales is by working with Voice to CRM enablement companies such as Hey DAN.

With their data management system, consulting services, and opportunity spotting technology, they can help you nurture each kind of lead at every stage of the sales pipeline.

KPIs: Lagging vs Leading Indicators

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The sales process takes a village. Nurturing relationships with prospective clients require multiple, well-coordinated touch points, and strategic engagements that pass several hands. With this, there will be a multitude of targets from several people before a sale is closed. How does one tell how effective their sales activities and engagement are?

What are Key Performance Indicators?

Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are metrics used by organizations to determine if their business goals succeed during a set period. With every company having their version of success, they will also have unique targets that can accurately determine if they are doing well or need to improve in the ways that matter to them.

Leadership and sales teams use Sales KPI to track the effectiveness of their sales activities within a company. While there be a myriad of ways to manage sales performance, there are two major categories that all metrics fall under – lagging indicators and leading indicators.

Lagging versus Leading Indicators

Lagging Indicators are performance metrics that rely on historical data. Some metrics under lagging indicators are monthly, quarterly, or annual sales data, deal closing rates, and withdrawals. They are the best starting points for measuring the effectiveness of old sales activities versus older, established practices. These indicators are most important for long-term, strategic changes.

While Leading Indicators utilize forecasting and using mostly real-time metrics such as sales pipeline status, and customer lifecycle value. They also include the data on prospecting new clients such as contact tracing, presentations, and proposals. These are the data that sales teams on the ground need on a daily and weekly basis. These indicators are most relevant for sales teams to make tactical changes quickly.

The Importance of Both Indicators

When both types of Sales KPIs are inaccurate, it can lead to tension. Management can be giving unreasonable targets that are not backed up by historical data. Sales leads will not be able to defend the number of resources necessary for their sales targets to be feasible. Both lagging and leading indicators are necessary to a holistic view of a businesses’ sales goals. They are two sides of the same coin that give both management and sales leaders clarity on how to proceed.

After properly defining sales metrics, the next challenge for companies is to make sure they are being tracked, managed, and refined. When data is improperly segmented, not updated regularly, or lost, it causes a lot of issues with reporting. One way to improve the Sales KPI tracking experience is to outsource the data entry process. By outsourcing the time-consuming administrative work to dedicated providers like Hey DAN.

Hey DAN offers a range of solutions to make sure your sales data will be accurate, updated, and transparent. From cleaning outdated, duplicate or incomplete data, organizing unstructured data to creating target lists, and identifying target gaps, their data specialists will work with your company’s unique sales tracking needs to create the ideal customized workflow.

Increasing Sales Performance with Voice to CRM

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Efficiency and accuracy – two qualities that any manager would want for their sales team and also from their CRM system. With Voice to CRM, you can increase the efficiency of your sales team while virtually eliminating mistakes during the data entry phase. This translates to more opportunities and better client relations which in turn increases sales performance.

Voice to CRM boosts your sales rep’s productivity by removing the tedious administrative task of typing in customer details. By cutting this out, you could gain anywhere from 2 to 6 hours a week. Multiply that by your number of agents, and you’ve just created an abundance of valuable time. This can be repurposed to generate more opportunities, do more sales activities or close more clients. It’s pretty basic. After each meeting, they need only to speak the specifics into their devices and it’s off to the next. The data will then be parsed and will meaningfully populate their CRM system. No drop-downs, no buttons, no frills. Just pure simplicity.

Without a Voice to CRM system, sales reps would either scribble down notes, or worse, try to remember all the important details from each meeting they took that day, which often times number in the dozens. Handling valuable information in this manner will most certainly produce costly mistakes down the line, especially during the data entry phase. Imagine having to manually enter all the data that you committed to memory or extracting important details from your hastily scribbled notes at the end of each day. How about having to collate all this information and performing the bland administrative task of inputting them after each week – that’s a lot of time and effort to put in for something that can be rendered non-existent by Voice to CRM. What’s more, this also leaves them wide open to commit critical errors that can badly hurt the relationships they painstakingly built with their clients. Voice to CRM fixes all of that. When your sales reps use Voice to CRM, they effectively save all pertinent data in real-time. This virtually eliminates those instances that they may forget some useful nugget or make a clerical mistake from trying to remember all the information they collected from the numerous clients they interact with each day.

The best kind of data are the correct ones and Voice to CRM ensures that valuable client info is fed to your system with utmost precision. By utilizing a unique combination of technology and intelligence, Voice to CRM produces spot-on data captures. And the best part is that it only takes 30 seconds on the average to dictate the information, then all the work is done in the background – quickly and accurately.

With its simplicity and ease-of-use, Voice to CRM will prove to be a boon to your business. By spending lesser time on data entry and having a clean, accurate database, your agents gain more time to dedicate on sales and not worry about pulling the wrong information on a client. This creates a happier sales team which leads to a natural increase in sales performance.