10 Direct Ways Customer
Relations Management Will Grow Your Company's Sales
1. Increased salesperson
follow-up effectiveness and organization!
An important
attribute for a successful salesperson is the ability to effectively
follow-up on sales
leads and opportunities in a timely manner. Simply put…do
what you say you’re going do. A good CRM system will give
the salesperson the ability to easily capture, manage,
schedule, and view tasks, appointments, emails, and notes in one
centralized location. It will also provide the ability to set reminder
notifications so critical activities and appointments don’t
fall through the cracks. More often than not, this capability alone
can justify a business’s investment in CRM.
2. Increased efficiency
of sales and marketing representatives!
Sales and marketing
personnel spend a good deal of time meeting,
networking, calling, and communicating
with prospects, existing clients, partners, vendors and others.
In the process they acquire an array of disparate information and
generate future activities, appointments, and commitments.
CRM will provide them with the ability to quickly access account
and opportunity activity history and share this information with
other team members. A good CRM system will also automate routine
activities such as trade show follow up communication, lead routing,
sales stage progression,
quote creation, etc.
3. Use quota’s
to benchmark sales success!
Studies have
shown that the use of sales goals and/or quotas both for the organization
and for individual salespeople has a significant
positive influence on sales
performance. Goals and/or quotas help us to benchmark expected
levels of company and individual performance . Shortfalls in meeting
sales and marketing
goals prompt us to rethink our strategy and refocus our efforts
to get us “back on track”. When gauged against historical,
external, and internal
performance , goals and/or quotas become powerful success tools.
CRM can provide an enterprise with the ability to easily manage
and track goals and quotas in a many areas such as lead generation,
closed sales, quotes outstanding, contacts made, and more.
4. Accurately forecast
sales pipeline
All too often
sales managers
come up on the end of the sales period and find they have not met
their planned sales commitments. Unfortunately, very little can
be done to remedy the situation at the time. CRM can provide the
sales management team with the
ability to easily predict future sales in a number of powerful ways
such as revenue by month, by product, by sales stage, by region,
and by salesperson. This can provide
valuable insight into what working and what not, bottlenecks
in the sales process, poor performance, etc. If sales
projections suggest company goals will not be met, this can
be identified well in advance and potentially remedied.
5. Replicate and institute
proven sales methodologies throughout your sales organization!
A good CRM solution
will allow your organization
to institute an automated and proven sales process that replicates
the practices used by your top performers. Standardized and automated
activity creation, sales stage progression, and close probability
forecasting will make it easy for sales representative s to implement
the process in their day to day activities and will provide the
organization with a consistent method of tracking performance and
forecasting the sales pipeline.
William Moseley
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