The importance of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technologies is still growing, due to its contributions to optimisation and efficiency in sales process. Here we offer 4 simple ways that CRM technology helps you to shorten your sales cycle and boost your team’s productivity.
Identify new sales opportunities
As part of our inbound marketing strategy, we can run different types of initiatives through multiple channels to convert website visitors into potential customers, identifying these individuals by collecting their personal or professional data. As an example, we can collect their data from our blog, gated content, landing pages, etc. These tactics are geared towards not only increasing our website traffic but also converting those visitors into potential sales for the business.
Using a CRM system, we can take advantage of the data, and segment based on users’ behaviour such as the pages they have visited, or the products they are interested in. Once we have done the segmentation, we’ll have a list of contacts we can consider qualified sales leads. At this point, those hot leads will automatically go through to the next stage of our sales funnel.
It is also helpful for your team to see exactly where your customers or leads are at every stage of their journey with your brand. Extensions like Customer Journey designer help you create your customer experience and see within a visual diagram where the customer is at every step along the way.
360-degree customer view
If you are a customer-centric organisation, it is essential to have instant access to customer data such as behaviour, purchase activity, communications, tickets, etc.
Having a CRM implemented, will provide full information to anyone who needs it, from sales and marketing to finance and management. Your team will be more aligned in their activities and provide better service. Also, the CRM information can help run up-selling and cross-selling campaigns within minutes, taking advantage of the contextual information available in the CRM.
Save time with personalised and augmented CRM functions
Your sales team likely spends a considerable amount of their time working with CRMs as they are a fundamental tool for carrying out their job. To get the most out of that time, we can integrate the CRM with email tools (Outlook, Gmail, etc) to manage business communications. This way you have access to every email exchange, all in one place.
Another tactic that helps you shorten your sales cycle is to connect a business card reader to your CRM. How much time are you spending on manual data entry after trade-shows you attend? This extension simplifies the data entered, adding value to your business and directly impacting your sales team efficiency.
A CRM platform must allow sales teams to create their own personal dashboards that better help them complete their job. For example, pending task boards, an opportunity pipeline, meeting schedule, etc. This way, users can visualise the data and have direct access to all relevant information they need.
All those CRM capabilities can help you to manage our selling time in a more efficient way, thereby increasing our overall productivity.
Mobile: sell whenever you are
Giving your field sales teams the capability to work with the CRM on the go will help you improve data quality and make sure they stay in the loop.
Mobile CRM helps sales agents update CRM data in real time, even while traveling with no internet access. The most powerful CRM solutions keep sales teams connected as they can schedule meetings from anywhere and use voice-to-text functionality to register a call result into the CRM, without even typing a world.
The integration with Google Maps assists your sales force to locate the clients closest by at any time. It’s never been so easy to plan routes for sales agents who normally visit their customers personally.
A CRM aims to prioritise, collaborate, and organise sales activities in a more efficient way, directly impacting your pipeline and business results.
