Customer relationship management (CRM) software makes it easier to handle your sales processes from beginning to end.
While true for any business, small sales teams can reap the optimal benefits from the resources available in CRM software. For instance, most sales managers are constantly trying to find better ways to:
• Identify, qualify, and follow up with leads
• Effectively prioritize sales tasks
If your revenue is generated through meaningful, long-lasting relationships with customers, these tasks will eventually become too demanding to handle manually—if they haven’t already. Some businesses try to solve this problem by adding more members to their sales team. However, this can be costly and does not truly and fully address most pain points businesses experience.
Sales leaders appreciate the fact that CRM tools keep their customer and pipeline data safely stored in a central, functional location. CRMs also allow salespeople to easily manage and monitor sales and staff performance, making it easier to optimize every aspect of the sales department.
Increase efficiency among your sales team
The statistics demonstrating the benefits of CRM tool integration are undeniable. As of 2014, the U.S. saw an astounding 87% increase in the use of CRM and mobile CRM tools.
CRM tools not only improve the sales pipeline and execution process for sales teams, but harness potent and powerful data that empowers organizations to dramatically improve their decision-making process.
In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, companies whose decision making is data-driven are more productive and up to 6% more profitable than those that don’t rely on data. If implemented correctly, a CRM tool can be a game-changer, boosting confidence, productivity, communication, collaboration, and overall profits.
1. Customer organization & storage
The right CRM tool can help a sales team store their customer and lead contacts, sales activities, and conversations safely in one central location. This information can be accessed from multiple locations, giving your sales team the flexibility and resources they need to close the next deal. The best part is that your important data will not be lost since it is now stored on a secured digital platform instead of in piles of paper or outdated spreadsheets.
2. Data-driven reports
A CRM tool keeps sales teams on track and arms them with ways to efficiently prepare reports for management. This ability fuels transparency and collaboration for sales teams and quickly and easily provides information about sales currently in progress in the pipeline.
3. Planning & tracking
A CRM tool allows sales teams to prioritize tasks on a day-to-day basis, ensuring customers are not forgotten, and that important prospects are contacted on time. Most importantly, CRM planning automation allows sales teams to spend more time with customers at the right time, which often leads to an increase in deals closed and fosters stronger customer relationships.
4. Built-in targeting
If you have been tracking your leads and prospects using spreadsheets, CRMs help sales teams isolate data and identify critical patterns that impact conversions. This eliminates hours of copying and pasting from multiple documents or searching through several disorganized lists of data.
5. Keep your sales team on the same page
With the help of a solid CRM, sales teams can share their schedules, calendars, pipeline templates, and email conversations, thus bringing unity to sales teams. The ability to quickly identify sales patterns and processes allows organizations to work effectively with a smaller sales team. Sales management can also reap the benefits of a CRM by having direct access to team members’ progress documentation, eliminating the need for multiple check-ins that can cost sales teams valuable time.
6. Reduced administrative tasks
A good CRM relieves sales teams of the majority of repetitious administrative tasks that consume a lot of time, yet yield little profit. A CRM stores product and price details, provides reminders for tasks, and gives a specific pipeline for a sales team, to name a few. Combined with built-in automation features, CRMs can take much of the workload off of busy salespeople’s shoulders.
7. Reduced cost
While CRM systems are not free, they certainly help save costs in the long run. With a small sales team, it can be quite costly to double-back and correct erroneous communications with prospects. Also, businesses save money and time spent on the trivial tasks of sorting through clutter and multiple documents to complete vital sales tasks since new information can be safely stored in the system and viewed by all.
Solid customer retention practices are also vital for a sales team’s success. Businesses can offset customer acquisition costs through sales to their existing customer base. Gain greater access to the cross-sell and renewal opportunities in your customer database and see an increase in repeatable sales thanks to the trust you’ve already earned.
Where CRMs truly shine, however, is in the money they earn through the optimization of sales processes. Between automation, reports, and historic timelines across all the deals, creating new plans to re-focus sales efforts becomes easy. Streamlining the sales process from the top-down, with the help of a solid CRM, is where businesses see the most return on their investment.
8. Analyze your prospects on a deeper level
When prospect and customer data is stored in a CRM, the needs of customers can more effectively be tracked and analyzed. This keeps your sales team focused on conducting the right actions at the right time. The result is an increase in customer satisfaction and customer loyalty (as well as higher profit margins).
