“Without big data, you are blind and deaf and in the middle of a freeway.

” — Geoffrey Moore

“Without a systematic way to start and keep data clean, bad data will happen.” — Donato Diorio

“Where there is data smoke, there is business fire.” — Thomas Redman

A recent study produced by the Transportation Marketing & Sales Association (TMSA) illustrated that
50.5% of sales teams fail to hit 90% of their sales quota. The same study states that sales leaders
have a significant interest in aggressive lead generation activities.

Another article from Salesforce.com states that B2B companies convert only 13% of leads into
opportunities and only 6% of opportunities close to a sale.

While more leads will help to fill the pipeline and enable more sales activities, resulting in more
sales, a greater focus on the sales process, technologies and close rates has proven to significantly
increase new business revenue over lead generation alone.

The following steps outline how to professionalize your sales process to scale your growth.

Align your sales process with the buyer’s journey

Define a differentiated value proposition

Leverage technology (CRM and marketing automation)

Implement a marketing strategy founded on lead generation and brand awareness

Integrated sales and marketing data, metrics and reporting

Activate pipeline communication strategies for each step in your pipeline

MARKETING DATA, METRICS AND REPORTING

Sales, marketing and customer service should be working together as one revenue team.
Understanding that most companies have separate teams, the first step is to define accountabilities
for each team, complete with KPIs and standardized reporting. At a high level:

Marketing = Brand Awareness, Lead Generation & Lead Nurturing

Recommended KPIs:
# of leads (track qualified and unqualified)

Visitor-to-lead conversion rate on website

# of visitors to website

These are the high-level KPIs that will provide insights to guide improvement. Note: There are many
more KPIs that marketing can and should be tracking.

Sales = Relationship Building, Lead Management and Closing

Recommended KPIs:

Conversion rates for each step in the sales process

Average order value

Win/loss ratio

These are the high-level KPIs that will provide insights to guide improvement. Note: There are many
more KPIs that sales can and should be tracking.

Customer Service = Customer Happiness, Cross-Selling and Upselling

Recommended KPIs:

Customer happiness score (HubSpot = Net Promoter Score)

Customer growth

Customer lifetime value

These are the high-level KPIs that will provide insights to guide improvement. Note: There are many
more KPIs that customer service can and should be tracking.
the seven-step process of gaining new customers:

Prospecting

Preparing

Approaching

Presenting

Handling objections

Closing

Following up

1. Enjoy a safe storage space

CRM helps sales people to safely and centrally store their contacts, sales opportunities, activities and
scheduled plans in one place, and have uninterrupted access to the database from multiple
locations. Rest assured that your data won’t just get lost.

2. Plan and time-manage like a pro

CRM helps sales people to optimize their daily schedules and prioritize tasks to make sure customers
are not ignored and the key prospects are contacted on time. In fact, CRM allows sales people to
spend more time with customers, which leads to more deals closed and a stronger customer base.

3. Activity reports? – No brainer!

CRM helps sales people to easily prepare their weekly or monthly reports for management. The
process is automated and transparent, and takes just a few clicks to inform others about what sales
are currently in progress.

4. Stop surfing, start targeting

CRM helps sales people to segment data and identify valuable opportunities via criteria based
selections. This prevents you from hours of cutting and pasting from various documents, or surfing in
the disorganized lists of data.
5. Stay up-to-date on what’s happening

CRM offers shared calendars, document templates and e-mail integration, uniting all team members
and keeping everyone up-to-date. Sharing selling patterns and processes allows sales people to see
what works best. CRM also increases communication between the sales force and sales
management.

6. Show up in time for the new sale

By tracking all communication with the customers, CRM helps sales people to know exactly when
customers need to be contacted; for example, for product replacement, contract renewal, or for an
upsell to a new product or service. This all increases your chances of closing a sale.

7. Rationalize your sales moves

CRM helps streamline the entire sales cycle, which results in closing deals in your sales pipeline and
helping everyone in the team to reach targets faster. Since order processing and preparing quotes is
automated in CRM, sales teams are able to reduce production costs and increase sales revenue.

8. Know what your customers really want

Since all the customer-related data is stored in CRM, it helps sales people to analyze the needs of
customers and even anticipate their problems – all at the right time. All this increases customer
satisfaction and ensures loyalty, as well as higher profit margins.

9. Cut down on admin tasks

CRM releases the sales teams from the majority of admin tasks by reducing and even removing some
of the repetitive actions that take a lot of time, but yield little profitability. CRM stores product and
price details, triggers reminders for activities, and takes sales people through the sales pipeline step
by step.

10. Save money

Even though CRM systems are not cheap, they actually help you save your money!

With sales people, it is the reduction of mistakes (for example, in orders or quotes) that CRM can
help with. Effort and cost related to correcting those errors may be much higher. Finally, it also boils
down to such trivial things as saving money on those cluttering and often vanishing Post-it notes,
since every new information can be safely stored in the system.
Conclusion

In a nutshell, sales people and CRM is not an immediate “match made in heaven”, but the more time
these two spend together – the stronger the attraction between them becomes.

If adopted and used correctly, CRM is going to boost the performance of any sales team, and will
help sales people to excel in 4 areas that are critical for them:

better search, sort and qualify leads;

follow up on sales opportunities systematically and on time;

prioritize and rationalize follow up activities; and

increase target reach rates faster.

CRM Productivity Statistics:

75% of sales managers say that using a CRM helps to drive and increase sales. (Hubspot)

CRM system adoption increases sales by up to 29%. (Salesforce)

The average CRM ROI is $5.60 for every dollar spent. (Baseline)

A CRM can increase revenue by a whopping 41% per salesperson. (Trackvia)

Three out of four consumers say they spent more money with a company because of a positive
customer experience. (Global Customer Service Study)

65% of sales reps who have adopted mobile CRM have achieved their sales quotas while only 22% of
reps using non-mobile CRM have reached the same targets. (Innoppl Technologies)

1. Lead Management

Sales reps can automatically capture leads from multiple sources and segment them according to
characteristics such as demographics, buying behavior, tastes, and preferences; this can be done
through the Leads Module in CRM. By getting key insights from the marketing department,
salespersons can enhance the sales process by tailoring their response to each individual lead.
Being able to move leads through the entire sales funnel is a challenging task and lead management
is a feature that can simplify this task.

2. Activity Management

The activity management feature makes the life of sales reps easier by keeping a record of all their
activities including performed & scheduled ones. This functionality of CRM reduces the chance of
missing an opportunity. It keeps track of all scheduled meetings, calls, tasks etc., and provides a
holistic view so that nothing is left unattended. Moreover, you can also utilize CRM and Telephony
integration to easily make calls and provide the best customer service. Sales professionals can also
set priority against their scheduled activities and are notified each time a task such as a call or
meeting is due.

3. Centralized Data

Before any sales call even begins, sales reps will have all the relevant data about the customer at
their fingertips. The sales reps will know who the customer is and what product they are interested
in based on the past call history. This will shorten the duration of the call and enable the rep to serve
the customer in a more personalized manner.

4. Pipeline Management

According to CSO insights, 27% of salespersons say that a long sales cycle is one of the biggest
barriers to sales effectiveness. The smartest way to track leads and prospects in the sales pipeline is
to use a CRM. Sales pipeline maximizes sales potential and segments the entire lead database into
different categories. It helps salespersons plan effective strategies to move leads from one sales
stage to the next and notifies them whenever a lead moves to the next level.

With data displayed in the form of charts, sales managers can measure the sales dollars and closure
rates of potential sales and determine if sales reps are meeting their daily, weekly, and monthly sales
targets.

5. Sales Forecasting

A Sales CRM will provide management mechanisms with real-time data that can be analyzed to
optimize the performance of the organization. By monitoring data sets related to call volume, case
times, up-sell rates, revenue per call etc., managers can devise strategies by leveraging SalesCRM to
retain clients and augment sales.

6. Mobile CRM
Mobile CRM empowers sales reps to access customer data & customer accounts on their mobile
phones/tablets on the go. By having access to crucial information such as product information,
account history, price lists, etc., sales reps can make well-informed decisions quickly and respond to
leads faster. Less time is wasted searching for a contact and trying to recall the conversation you had
last time and more time can be spent on having productive and meaningful discussions.

Hence, the result of using Mobile CRM Development services will be an accelerated customer buying
process, leading to improved conversion rates.

7. Unity between Sales & Marketing

A customer demands nothing but excellence. To build excellent customer relationships, both the
sales and marketing departments need to work in harmony.

With CRM, marketing and sales departments can now stay updated by having access to real-time
data related to a customer’s profile. Marketing automation features in CRM allow the marketing
team can pass on the leads to the sales team without any manual effort. The sales team can then act
on those leads and try to convert them into deals.

8. Document Sharing

Having a dedicated document library keeps files organized for quick reference, avoids various
versions of the same document from being posted, and allows files to be shared easily. This is
especially true for industries like real estate. It becomes even more important if an enterprise has
offices in multiple countries and sales teams spread out geographically need to collaborate to serve
clients. This is the reason why Real Estate CRM plays a very crucial role and has many benefits.

9. Email Tracking

Sending email campaigns to customers and not knowing how they were received on the other end
can be demoralizing. With an email tracking feature, sales reps can have complete knowledge about
who opens their emails, when they open them, and whether they clicked on any links that were
attached to the emails. With access to real-time information, you can act instantly while your leads
are still hot.

10. Reports

Reports generated through CRM deliver sales reps and sales managers a unified view of all key sales
information including the set targets and performance assessment data. Using a personalized
dashboard, salespeople can easily track their progress with insights on overall achievement to date.
CRM software can give salespersons an easy way to benchmark their performance and strive for
improvement.
11. Analytics

With CRM analytics, salespersons can target individual customers, know which customers lead to the
most profits over time, etc. They will be able to better forecast consumer preferences, envision
subsequent requirements, and resolve other issues that influence various business decisions. CRM
analytics leads to improved customer relations and customer retention.

12. Social Media Insights

Leveraging CRM integration with social media tools lets you gain detailed insights into your
customers with regards to their demographics, tastes, and preferences, buying behavior, etc. This
will help accelerate the sales process by allowing you to identify the leads that have the highest
probability of being converted into deals.

Bottom Line:

CRM is used by other departments as well but it must be made clear that it is primarily a sales tool.
However, simply jumping on the bandwagon and investing in CRM will not make your business grow
overnight. Equally important is to take the sales staff into confidence when investing in this
technology so that both the management and the staff are on the same page.