How to boost sales team productivity

Top five (plus one) ways to boost productivity

 

To consistently hit sales targets and ensure productivity, sales executives need tools to help them effectively engage customers and close deals. Sales management can reduce the administrative burden by providing accurate forecasting tools and easily accessible, complete customer data. CRM boosts both productivity and effectiveness, yet 22% of professionals don’t know what CRM is used for—and 40% still store customer data in a spreadsheets and/or email.

Here are five ways (plus one) that CRM can increase the productivity of your sales team:

  1. Gain a deeper understanding of customers – CRM makes is possible to capture many streams of customer information from both internal and external data sources. With CRM, sales representatives can enjoy anytime access to rich, accurate customer profiles that gather information from across the entire enterprise. As CRM has matured, customer profiles now contain much more than contact information and appointments. Robust profiles include demographic data, social media profiles and activity, purchasing history, buying habits, preferred communication channels, and much more.
  2. Selling on the move – Access to CRM anywhere gives the sales force a strong competitive advantage, especially in the field. Mobile CRM can inform sales representatives about the current status of active orders and available inventory when they are in front of customers, and also allows them to follow up on open customer support issues. With information on mobile devices, sales professionals can refresh their memories just prior to meetings, as well as enter notes and take actions directly after meeting a customer—while details are still fresh. Mobile CRM facilitates better in-person customer interactions and enables the capture of higher quality, more detailed customer information for later sales, marketing, and customer service purposes.
  3. Get a 360-degree view – In order for sales representatives to focus energy on the very best customers and opportunities, it is essential to have a complete view of the customer. CRM must integrate with other back-office systems such as ERP in order for customer-facing employees to stay informed. Every interaction with the customer— from marketing to sales to customer service and billing—needs to be available to the sales team.
  4. Accomplish tasks faster – It’s the CRM conundrum: Sales and marketing executives need the system to capture and display every customer interaction, yet data entry is the least productive use of a sales professional’s time. Although 75% of surveyed sales reps understood that tools like CRM are an integral part of the sales process, 56% felt the tools were not designed to their needs. The best way to ensure that sales professionals can be as productive as possible is to choose a CRM system with a consumer-grade user interface that is easy to learn and provides a smooth user experience. An intuitive user interface will increase adoption and use of CRM. By helping sales professionals complete their data tasks with speed and efficiency, CRM will increase overall sales productivity.
  5. Actionable Analytics – Analytics drive decision making in modern sales teams. Hiring savvy pros with an instinct for closing deals is still important, but it is equally critical to arm them with the data to identify the best prospects and opportunities. Forrester analyst, Kate Leggett, recently predicted that, “In 2017, organizations will continue to use analytics to prescribe the right action for customer-facing employees in the context of CRM applications.
  6. Utilize a native email marketing automation system like InboxGuru to assist with nurturing and scoring leads and contacts directly from your CRM contacts and leads (no list uploads). Click here to view more.

 

Fill out the form to request a demo or call Bryan Marks 727.216.8062 to schedule or answer any questions.




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