Automating Sales Processes using CRM

Most people are afraid of change. If it isn’t clearly explained to them, sales teams may not utilize the CRM’s full potential. You need to train and explain to sales reps how to use the CRM efficiently. This can be done by communicating the various benefits to them, such as:

– Increased productivity: Sales reps can target and complete activities faster with a CRM

– More organized: Data and contacts in a single location allow for more organized structure and collaboration.

– Time Management: Allows reps to focus on activities that make an impact, spend less time doing mundane tasks.

There are a few steps outlined below that will target specific activities that can be automated. This will help you better utilize the CRM system that you purchase.

Step 1: General Sales Administration

One of the least looked-forward-to aspects of a salesperson’s job is general administration. Thankfully, CRM technologies can streamline and even automate most of it.

Most salespeople do not like general administration, they consider it the most boring part of their day. However, it is essential. Having a CRM can streamline and automate many of these processes. Typically, the tasks involved in general administration are;

– Reminders: Scheduling and creating reminders for various tasks that need to be completed throughout the day. This can be done automatically by CRM software based on when an activity is finished.

– Appointments: Creating appointments for contacting customers. The CRM can automatically schedule appointments with customers based on their previous contact with them.

– Data Entry: Since the CRM stores all the data, prospects, contacts and sales in one place, this provides a major relief to sales teams.

Step 2: Email and communication

Many employee day-to-day tasks revolve around emails. In fact, automating emails begins with identifying the everyday emails. These may include marketing emails or even follow-up emails. In any case, spend a bit of time studying the kind of emails taken and how long it takes to write these emails. The most common emails salespeople send daily include;

– Reminders: Emailing prospects about upcoming meetings and appointments

– Welcome: Encouraging new leads to take the next steps and set appointments

– Follow-up: Reach out to leads when a response has not been generated

– Onboarding: Getting new customers up to speed and thanking them for their business

– Marketing: Sending out mass emails to prospects informing them of new products or price reductions.

A large amount of time spent on emails is due to personalization. This can be due to how difficult it is for the sales rep to target a specific customer. Although you cannot automate this completely, team leaders can create well-written templates that can be followed by sales teams when emailing customers. Thus, this ensures that customers receive warm, friendly emails that are helpful.

Step 3: Lead Prioritization

Although you may have hundreds of leads to go through, many of these may not prove to be good prospects. This may be due to several reasons, ranging from budget issues to investigative customers. The question is, how can you correctly identify leads that are actually worth your time? This is where CRM comes in.

CRM systems keep historical data of customers. It provides this data in a way that is easy and friendly to analyze. Sales reps can look at this data and ask themselves a few questions such as “which of these leads have closed the fastest before” or “what do the leads have in common”. This allows them to effectively target a selling point of the product.

Certain CRM systems can even provide recommendations of leads to prioritize. Moreover, these recommendations are usually based on job titles, company sizes and behaviour on the product site. This can help you easily capture customers without having to deal with several people.

Optimizing Sales Processes, Reporting and Analytics

Any CRM system can benefit your organization, even if you don’t utilize it to its maximum capability. The right data is everything. Firstly, it allows you to focus on the activities that make the biggest impact. Secondly, it allows you to tailor the way your sales reps are interacting with your customers. Lastly, it optimizes the entire sales journey for both you and your customers.

Identifying Appropriate Data

As mentioned above, just by using a CRM you will collect tons of data. However, it can be a challenge to extract meaningful data from here. This is why companies need to decide on the factors they wish to consider right at the beginning. You need to define and stick to various KPIs. Most companies usually already have defined KPIs which makes this easier. However, as time passes, these KPIs may change. CorporateStack recommends a regular analysis of your KPIs.

Collecting the right data with CRM becomes that much easier due to automated data collection and the reduction of manual entries. Just this fact cleans up your data significantly. Additionally, CorporateStack recommends analyzing and cleaning your data regularly.

Crucial KPIs

Companies must identify the most important KPI they wish to target. For example, ask yourself the question “which is the single KPI that leads to the most effective result?” Ideally, this metric should contribute to the success of the business.

Depending on your organizational requirements, this KPI could be something simple such as total revenue. On the other hand, it could even be as complex as average deal values. Once you have decided on the KPIs required, build your activities and analytical dashboards around them. This allows sales teams to focus on this metric.

Evaluating Sales Teams

The reporting provided by your CRM doesn’t just show you the overall health of your sales pipeline. You’ll also generate insights into how your entire sales team is performing.

Several CRM systems do not just provide data on the sales pipeline, they can generate analytics based on how well each team is performing, splitting the pipeline between various teams. Additionally, this data allows you to segment different teams. Finally, this allows you to learn from teams that are performing better and instructing teams that are performing poorly.

It also allows you to identify the most (and least) valuable activities. For example, if certain sales teams are performing better, this may be due to a certain activity they are performing more often. This can be anything ranging from capturing more leads to sending more follow up emails.

Concluding CRM

This post provides the entire CRM journey any company goes through. Hopefully, by reading this post, you have a clear idea of the steps you need to take to implement a CRM system at your organization. However, we at CorporateStack understand that this is a complex and difficult topic for many to understand.

CorporateStack provides CRM solution in UAE, Dubai & Middle East and always listens and learns from their customers, providing them with the best functionality at all times. In any case, if you are unclear about any part of this post or need help in CRM selection for your company, please contact us at info@corporatestack.com. We’d love to help you out.