The Advantages of adopting a CRM for your Sales Team
Sales Departments dominate the CRM user population, as 80% of CRM users have stated. Yes, CRM can be used throughout all departments and teams, but the bulk of its impact and usability can be found in the Sales Team. This is due to the numerous advantages that busy salespeople can benefit from adopting a CRM system. CRM software such Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP CRM play a big role in a lot of sales departments specially here in the United States.
Because the sales team is the ones who often interact with customers, it is important that all customer information be stored and organized, in a reliable centralized system. This information will be used to build more meaningful and personalized customer relationships. With this, CRM makes it easier to automate sales, show analytics, track leads, and altogether bring customer satisfaction.
Here are the top advantages of adopting a CRM software for your Sales team:
Manage Customer Communications and Interactions
A statistic provided by Software Advice shows that the top 3 most requested CRM features are:
- Contact management (88%)
- Tracking customer and internal interactions (80%)
- Scheduling or reminders (75%).
These are the basic functionalities of CRM that are considered to be the most important. Un-coincidentally, they are all related to customer communication and interaction.
When it comes to sales, strategically interacting with customers is imperative. Adopting a CRM software helps streamline that process by managing leads, recording calls, meetings, and client messages.
Tracking customer communication helps your sales team paint a better picture of the client, making your marketing strategy more effective. Having a convenient list of customers or prospects, their contact information, their interests, as well as previous interactions with your company, and many more, are extracted from these recorded interactions. It can even remind salespeople of their scheduled client meetings, improving customer experience overall.
With the data gathered from tracking customer communication, follow-ups can be automated, emails and ads are customized, and the entire sales cycle is improved.
Data is made Actionable
Data is an essential part of running a business, and it plays a key role in customizing a sales approach. However, it’s not enough to know which ads people click on or how many times a lead was converted. That huge amount of raw, unsorted data, might as well be useless until it is cleaned, sorted, and made actionable. That’s exactly what CRM does.
CRMs can organize, tabulate and visually present data automatically, reducing the amount of manual data entries and cleanups the sales team have to put up with. Most CRMs also have a Personalized Dashboard feature that enables individual end-users to track their progress. They provide deeper insights, and data that are laid out neatly, helping the sales team make more systematic and informed decisions that drive up sales.
Reduce Administrative tasks
One of the biggest benefits that a CRM can offer is its ability to shoulder time-consuming admin tasks. This includes filing paperwork, reports, data entry on spreadsheets, handling correspondence, calls, and emails, etc.
These activities are necessary, yet do not directly generate sales, and it is one of the major complaints of salespeople as it takes up a lot of their time. Sales reps are said to spend an average of 10.5 hours per week on administrative activities, which is almost equal to the amount of time they spend making sales.
When properly adopted, CRM can be a great tool to help Sales representatives focus on their main goal, which is selling. Making reports and paperwork are easier due to the actionable insights and metrics that a CRM provides. It also allows emails to be automated and calls to be recorded. Using a Voice to CRM solution would make data entry even more seamless. The user only needs to speak, and the recording and data input is properly taken care of, no more manual data entry needed.
Sales quotas are Achieved
It has been reported that more than half the population of salespeople don’t reach their sales quotas. However, a statistic from Innoppl showed that 65% of salespeople from companies that have enabled a mobile CRM solution, were able to reach their quotas. Whereas only 22% of the salespeople from companies who didn’t have mobile CRM, reached their quotas.
This is where the power of Mobile CRM comes in. Salespeople are always on the move, jumping from one meeting to the next, having quick and easy access to their CRM is the key. It shouldn’t be a burden, but rather, something that’s convenient to use. Having access to the company’s CRM on their phone will greatly improve the sales team’s performance.
Mobile CRMs help sales representatives be more effective because not only does it improve user adoption, it also creates better, and more accurate data. Instead of waiting to get home, or to get back to the office, to input data and meeting notes, having mobile CRM allows real-time data capture. It can also utilize Voice to CRM enablement to record calls and meetings, as well as input data in real-time, thus eliminating any chance of misinformation brought about by time and memory decay.
Lead Nurturing and Conversion
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, implying that it is a system that helps the company better understand its customers, have meaningful interactions, and build solid relationships with them that will result in better sales. But how?
The data needed in order to personalize a sales pitch, or to even know when to call, is powerful information stored in a CRM software. This data can be used to make your customers feel valued. Rather than focusing on profits and sales, being customer-centric creates lead retention, and after all, selling to existing customers is easier and more effective than looking for new prospects. These loyal customers can then become ambassadors, attesting to your company’s good customer service to their friends and family. Thus, more sales conversions will naturally come in.
Building a relationship takes effort and time, but having a CRM helps you do this more efficiently.
Bottom line: The sales team bridges the company to its customers, and for them to effectively do so, adopting a CRM is paramount.
- It has been proven to increase the likelihood of reaching sales quotas.
- Data is organized, cleaned, and handled more efficiently, with visual presentation.
- It frees up administrative tasks and allows salespeople to focus on selling.
- Overall, it creates better customer communication and relationships.
