Whenever a lead walks into your sales office it costs you money to create an opportunity with that lead. If you are not using a customer relationship management (CRM) software to capture that lead and share it with marketing and online sales, you are essentially throwing money away.
The right CRM system can help you to streamline your sales process by tracking and managing all interactions between your team and your potential and sold customers. Here’s why a CRM is crucial to your sales process.
CRMs Will Automate Tasks
A good CRM allows you to automate a lot of tasks that would otherwise need to be carried out by a dedicated employee or would distract your team members away from tasks that move the needle.
A CRM means that your sales team won’t be required to spend time logging each and every call, email, and interaction they have with a prospect or customer. The system simply collects all this information automatically and stores it exactly where it needs to be.
A CRM will also automate a projection of sales performance for each rep. This allows leaders and managers to see which types of lead are most profitable for each rep and adjust if needed to ensure they are reaching their sales goals each month.
CRMs Will Create Reports
The right CRM will allow you to create reports on dedicated dashboards to provide a transparent overview of how your whole sales team is performing.
Once the CRM has automatically-collected data, your team can then organize this to deliver information on prospects and deals through a sales dashboard or sales report. This report is essential for sales managers and leaders to see whether their team is on track, see how many deals have been successfully closed, and monitor generated revenue, all in one place.
CRMs Ensure Nothing is Lost
If someone leaves an organization, quite often, some business information will end up going with them as it was not recorded properly or where you may expect it to be found. CRMs prevent this information from being lost by maintaining a database across the entire sales department.
This shared database allows access for the whole sales team to see prospect information to ensure that a lead is never lost. Having this data all in one place means that a rep never has to waste time hunting through endless documents to find the information they need to close a deal.
CRMs Ensure Efficient Communication
CRMs create transparency across departments to eliminate the risk of duplicate work and miscommunication; both within the organization and between sales professional and customer.
Communication is key, no matter what industry or department. Efficient communication is needed to ensure that teams are working together to reach their goals, that customers are never contacted more than necessary, or irritated by having to explain the same thing to several team members.
A CRM allows individuals to bring in other reps or managers when needed, specific leads can be reassigned where necessary, and everyone can see what is being worked on in real-time. Better still, with real-time collaboration, team members can communicate entirely through the system so that all tasks and discussions are in one place.
CRMs Track Customer and Prospect Data
A good CRM will allow your team to keep track of all customer or prospect data, no matter what stage of the buying process they are in.
Sales reps will be able to see whether they have visited the organization’s website, whether they interacted with anything on the site, and whether they made contact with another member of the sales team.
With this data, it can help your sales reps to anticipate the needs of their customers, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. This helps achieve the end goal of closing the deal faster and, hopefully, with a higher profit.
This system also allows reps to log email conversations with their prospects, as well as any additional information from calls so that it can be seen by all other members of the sales team. Moreover, all of this information and data is always searchable within the CRM system so that it can be quickly and easily found by anyone who needs it.
Boosts Conversion Rates
Perhaps the most important point on this list is the fact that a CRM will boost your conversion rate. With streamlined processes, tracking of the entire pipeline, and insights into how ready a lead is to buy (or if they’re lost) your OSC (online sales concierge) and sales team can dedicate their efforts where data says they’ll make the biggest difference. The automation features mean that all actions are timed perfectly for your customer to give them all the information and support they need to make the right purchasing decision.
There are so many more reasons to use a CRM system: it will store all sales information in one place for easy access, will help your team work better together, will increase productivity in the sales team, and will ensure strong customer relationships. From these six reasons, you can see why having a CRM in place is crucial to your sales process.