[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]1) How to qualify and follow up on leads?
2) How to prioritize sales activities?
However, CRM is a tool that not only solves those key problems. In fact, it is able to handle other, no less pressing issues like:
- 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.
- Time management
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 team to spend more time with customers, which leads to more deals closed and a stronger customer base.
- On time activity reports
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.
- Focused 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 disorganised lists of data.
- 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.
- 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.
- Know what your customers really want
Since all the customer-related data is stored in CRM, it helps sales team 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.
- 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.
- Save money
Even though CRM systems are not cheap, they actually help you save your money! With sales people, it is the reduction of errors (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 team 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.
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Vritti Solutions Ltd. is a next generation IT Solutions company working towards fuelling the knowledge based economy by consulting and developing innovative IT solutions.
Vritti Solutions is a leader in ERP, CRM, WMS and HRMS software solutions in the Small and Medium Sized Enterprises segment in India.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]