Looking to super streamline your sales process? It is an integral component of your business’ success. If you have trouble selling efficiently, you’re going to see your company growth drop, which isn’t good for anyone.
In general, people responsible for sales spend a significant amount of time on admin work — scheduling meetings, setting up reminders, sending emails or brochures, and other small tasks that take serious time out of their day that they could be spending closing more deals.
So, how can you streamline your marketing & sales process in a way that all of that admin work still gets done, but you have the time needed to close deals? For many companies, a CRM, or Customer Relationship Management software, is the answer.
Implementing a quality CRM not only helps make sure those leads flow efficiently through the sales process, but it helps bring your marketing & sales efforts together, and helps each team understand better what eachother actually needs to effectively reach their goals.
Here at StormSPACE, we’re big fans of HubSpot & Pipedrive but you might also have heard of other popular options like Keap and Salesforce. While some options are better than others, depending on the needs and budget size of your business, the general purpose of a CRM is to make it easier for you to foster positive relationships with all of the contacts who come into your sales cycle and eliminate a lot of the busywork that keeps you from closing.
Here are just 5 of the top ways a CRM helps streamline your sales process
#1 Streamline Marketing to Sales Handoff Process
For most companies, the handoff from marketing to sales is where leads fall through the cracks. Whether your sales and marketing teams aren’t communicating or your sales team is just too busy to follow up on all the leads marketing sends over, it’s easy, and common for leads to fall out of the sales funnel during the handoff from marketing to sales – this is literally marketing spend and potential revenue down the drain.
A CRM can solve the majority of these sales dropoff problems.
The first fix is to notify your sales people when a lead is ready to be contacted directly, a CRM can automatically alert the right person to follow up. This is a great way to eliminate lost leads who drop out of the cycle because no one contacts them.
A CRM shows your sales team exactly where a lead has been throughout the buying process. The CRM will track every contact marketing has with that lead, including what links they have clicked on in marketing emails, giving the sales team a good idea of how warm the lead is, and how ready they are to buy.
This makes it easy for your sales people to see at a glance whether a lead is ready for them, what content they have looked at and what service they might be interested in.
And with a quality CRM, if your lead turns out not to be quite ready, transferring that lead back down to marketing is a click of a botton. You just reassign the lead, and they’re back in marketing’s “to nurture” bucket.
For many companies, a significant percentage of marketing leads do not convert to sales. This is can be handled by aligning sales and marketing with a CRM providing a very useful tool to make no one is losing track of those leads.
#2 CRMs Increase Prospect Visibility in the Sales Funnel
Your sales team is busy. There’s no getting around it. As long as your marketing efforts are delivering leads, your sales people are busy contacting them all, establishing which of your products or service is the best fit for each and then getting through the actual nurturing and closing process. A CRM streamlines your sales process by offering greater visibility on all of those prospects in the sales funnel.
CRMs make it easy to see where every prospect is in the sales funnel, at any given time. If sales are managing their leads with a post-it note system, excel spreadhseets, a notebook, or any other method, they’re probably letting leads drop out of the sales funnel. And it’s not their fault — we’re all only human!
But, a CRM can help resolve this problem, and make it easy to prioritise the warmest leads above leads who still need a bit of nurturing.
- Organise leads by priority. Most quality CRMs allow you to segment leads based on how qualified they are, and where they are in the sales funnel. When your top-priority leads are listed right at the top of the page, your sales team doesn’t even have to think about who to call first.
- See at a glance which leads have been contacted, by who, and when. Another key visibility benefit that comes with a quality CRM is that your sales reps can see at a glance who has contacted what lead, and when. They’ll be able to see which of your resources a lead has already received, and what information they might still need to make a final decision.
Increased visibility thanks to a quality CRM leads to a more effective, efficient sales process. When your leads are automatically organized by industry, job title, interest level, and more, your sales people can spend more time on what they’re best at — closing deals.
#3 Automated Tasks Help Streamline Your Sales Process
Even though it’s necessary, sending out product catalogs, brochures, and pricing guides is repetitive and time-consuming. Your sales team already knows that they don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every email, but they do have to take the time to copy-paste their text, change the names, attach the documents, and then finally send the email.
A CRM can automate these repetitive tasks so your sales team has more time to actually sell.
Quality CRMs offer tools like automated workflows, follow-up emails, chatbots, and more, so your leads still get the quality service they need to feel nurtured and supported through the sales process, but your sales team is freed up to use their time for more important tasks.
And for tasks that CRMs can’t automate, they can send automated reminders. Your sales people have to talk to any contact multiple times before they close a deal. Your CRM can automatically send reminders of when to make those calls so that no leads fall through the cracks.
#4 Easy Reporting
No one likes to make reports. What if they didn’t have to?
Quality CRMs can generate sales reports at the click of a button, so your team can easily see what’s working, and what’s not.
One of the greatest benefits of a CRM for any business is the data it has to offer. In addition to supporting your marketing & sales efforts, your CRM is constantly collecting data. Data about your clients, how long they take to close, what content offer brings in the leads most likely to close, and what sales tools are most effective at closing those sales.
All of that data, combined and compiled for you by the CRM, helps you interpret your sales success, and further streamline your sales process for even better results.
#5 Leaderboards and Productivity Reports
We’re big fans of teamwork. As an agency, we’ve seen that companies who encourage their people to work together tend to do significantly better than companies with people who are all using different sales tactics, and even different processes.
Advanced CRMs, like Pipedrive and HubSpot, are designed to give you and your sales team all of the data you need to optimise and streamline your marketing & sales process as one team. Leaderboards and productivity reports are one great way to do that.
They show you which team members are doing great, and which might be struggling with your new sales process or CRM. You can use these stats to bring your whole team up, by asking those at the top of the leaderboard to share what they’re doing to close so many deals.
Generating a leaderboard and a productivity report also helps give you a better picture of where people are spending their time.
Maybe one person has been spending a ton of time in your CRM, and is super productive, but is low on the leaderboard. This might be an opportunity to show them some more of those automation tools, so they can get out of their inbox, and back on the phone with clients.
A CRM is designed to organise and store all of your lead and customer information and data in one easy-to-access location. In addition to providing exceptional visibility, a CRM helps streamline your sales process by handling the repetitive tasks that take time out of your team’s day of selling.
The goal is to streamline your marketing & sales efforts to enable your people to sell better, and more efficiently, and when implemented properly, that’s exactly what a CRM does.
If you’re thinking about a CRM, but aren’t sure how to get started, or are afraid of a lengthy learning curve, get in touch with the StormSPACE team. We are dedicated to onboarding and training sales and marketing teams on how to use your CRM effectively, and generate better Visibility Performance & Growth for your business.
