One of the most powerful ways to improve commercial performance is maximising the sales productivity, keeping the focus on the most important tasks linked to customer relationships to increase sales. Being a company which works with many other commercial organisations to optimise sales cycles, we would like to show you some tips on sales efficiency, and more specifically on how to improve your sales team’s productivity with a crucial tool – CRM.
Low-value task automation
Your sales force inevitably needs to spend time on tasks not directly related to selling. But whenever possible, we should try to automate the administrative tasks. As CRM systems get more advanced and intuitive, a larger number of activities and workflows can be automated, leaving more time for your team to focus on sales.
Discount approval processes or expense management are good examples of low-value tasks that usually involve more than one department and could easily be automated. In this case, we could set an automated workflow which would be scaled throughout its different stages with the CRM system. This kind of duties can be time-consuming and with a simple automation you can provide your sales team with more time to devote to their customer portfolio.
Tool integration
Working with different tools can be inconvenient for salespeople who need to have a global view of their customers. CRM system integration is crucial when it comes to sales efficiency and data accuracy.
We can integrate the CRM system with many other marketing, customer service or productivity tools among others. Many of these integrations can be out-of-the-box, so they will not demand much effort from the IT department, but they will have a great impact on the sales force’s daily activity. Simple integrations such as email manager integrations (Outlook, Gmail, etc) can offer huge time saving in terms of communication with the CRM database, and they are done just with a click. For instance, a salesperson can turn an incoming email into a new opportunity linking the information provided by the customer in their email to a new record automatically generated by the CRM system.
Promote higher quality leads at the sales funnel
To achieve a productivity increase, it is also important to align both marketing and sales departments. Marketing needs to have a commercial vision and get to understand the quality ratio that is aiming to, as well as provide consistent outputs for the sales team.
For its part, the sales department gets another advantage using the CRM system to optimise the sales pipeline. A defined lead-scoring system can make the process easier, analysing the customer’s information gathered in the CRM system to establish the quality of the lead. This way we make sure we are getting in touch with high-quality users at the right time – therefore speeding up the sales cycle, especially on B2b business, which usually take longer and are more complex.
If you would like to know more about this topic, you can review the recording of our webinar ‘Sales Transformation: Optimising B2b sales activity and growing revenue‘ that took place on March 16th.
