How to get the most out of your CRM in Sales

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In this blog, we will walk you through how to get the most out of your CRM in sales. A CRM system is incredibly valuable and essential to the success of your sales efforts.
If adopted and used correctly, CRM will boost the performance of your sales team and help your salespeople excel in areas that are critical to them and the success of the organisation. These include better search, sorting and qualifying leads, prioritising and rationalising follow-up opportunities and activities, and increasing target reach faster.

Shared information across your sales team

If your sales organisation processes aren’t coordinated, it can cause a lot of unnecessary emails, phone calls and time-wasting. Not only does having all your sales team on the same page keeping everyone informed with up-to-date information, but it will reduce the risk of mistakes that can make your business seem unprofessional.

Pipeline reporting gives every relevant person immediate access to progress of sales, who is involved, sales value and likely close date, allowing managers to plan, manage their resources and support their sales teams at key stages in the sales process.

Get an end-to-end view of your customers

One of the biggest challenges for any organisation is tracking a customer’s journey across multiple devices, channels, purchases, and interactions, which can lead to a disjointed and inconsistent customer experience. Your CRM will give you a 360-degree customer view where a collection of your customer’s data is stored in one place. If you utilise this, your sales teams can track all customer touchpoints in a single digital profile.
You can then turn this data into insights to keep your current customers happy or connect with new prospects.

Use purchase history for up-selling opportunities

It’s easier to sell to existing customers than to acquire new ones. With your CRM, you can boost your sales performance by analysing your existing clients’ purchasing history and designing promotions, discounts or events just for them. Not only does this widen your profit margins, but it also makes your customers’ lives a lot easier and promotes repeat business.

Automate your processes

Since many of the tasks associated with data entry can be automated, take advantage of the workflow automation features in your CRM to eliminate time-consuming and repetitive functions. For instance, when new leads are added to your CRM, you can program your CRM to send follow-up emails, offer promotions, and push other marketing efforts to keep your business at the forefront of their attention and to help them remember your brand. This saves you from writing the same canned responses while also making sure that you’re engaging your clients throughout the entire sales process.

Stay up-to-date on what’s happening

CRM offers shared calendars, document templates and email integration, uniting all team members and keeping everyone up to date. Sales can also see interactions from other departments with their customers, be that customer service or support, engineering, finance and so on. Being on top of what interactions a customer has had with the organisation before attending a meeting can help smooth a new sale or update the client with any current issues or orders.

Activity management makes the life of your sales reps easier by keeping a record of all their activities, including historic & scheduled meetings and actions. This capability helps keeps track of all scheduled meetings, calls, tasks etc., and provides a holistic view so that nothing is left unattended. Make sure you’re utilising this!

Pipeline Management

Many salespeople say that a long and complex sales cycle is one of the most significant barriers to sales effectiveness. The more efficient way to track leads and prospects in the sales pipeline is to use a CRM. Sales pipeline maximises sales potential and segments the entire lead database into different categories. In addition, it helps your salespeople plan effective strategies to move leads from one sales stage to the next and notifies other internal stakeholders whenever a lead moves to the next stage.

Pipeline dashboards can help sales managers measure potential sales and closure rates and determine if sales reps are meeting their daily, weekly, and monthly sales targets and helps them to support their teams in performance reviews and key sales opportunities.

Conclusion

Hopefully, throughout this blog post, we have demonstrated some of the ways you can get the most out of your CRM in sales. Ensuring that your sales teams are ‘on board’ with the use of CRM and trained in how to use it effectively is crucial to the success of your CRM.

We’re here to help. Get in touch with our team today for a demonstration and to discuss your needs.

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