10 Things you can do to Accelerate Selling to faster revenue
1. Keep Track of Important Contacts and Key Accounts. Easily identify the most important prospects and customer contacts. Identify who’s the decision maker and other influencers in each organization and down to the specific opportunity. Knowing the multiple contacts within a company account, their role, etc will provide additional insights and points of contact for the company.
At the specific opportunity level- identify the people involved and their key roles.
2. Collaboration -share information across your sales team. Coordinate your activities when contacting leads and making pitches. We have all been in the position of receiving several phone calls from the same company. It seems as if the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing – as if there is no organization. Under the contact record in your CRM system view who’s been talking to your contact and also use that history to get a quick refresher before the call.
CRM systems help your team share documents, keep track of sales calls and give sales managers a better look at what’s going on. You can see a bigger picture here! CRM collaboration enables team selling to land those really big accounts.
3. Power up with mobility. Use new capabilities like voice to text. Tablets and smart phone are taking over the world and increasing engagement. Mobility provides 24 x 7 x 365 access. Turn voice notes from a meeting immediately to text that is saved in CRM. More with Infor CRM mobile or Act mobile to eliminate typing.
Mobile is mandatory for sales and service professional in the field. As business changes, it’s adapt or get left behind. Having the right mobile strategy and tools are a business success requirement. Companies can reap substantial percentage improvements in their business metrics from mobilizing sales force automation technology and services. Per the “Anywhere Enterprise-Large: U.S. Mobility and Business Applications Survey” from The Yankee Group.
4. Keep Up with Notifications and Reminders. You need reminders about when to touch base with those important contacts. CRM can provide daily insight into who your emails reach and when. Failure to follow though could mean losing an important relationship. So, CRM system provide notifications and reminders about important contact and prospects you maybe haven’t spoken to lately. Be sure not to lose contact and miss out on that next big sale.
5. Make it easy to share sales materials and other documents. Sharing sales materials creates a Win-Win. This helps them improve their performance and ultimately close more sales. It also saves time and boosts the efficiency of your sales department. A good CRM system will provide a sales library with folders for digital documents. Additionally sales assets are identified so that readership is tracked, thus showing active engagement by the recipient.
6. Simplify Reporting Requirements. A well-used CRM system will automatically capture sales activities and the linked information about the prospective business, contact(s) and sales opportunity. Email, completed activities and timely notes provide information for on-demand sales call reporting without taking out time for call reports .Eliminate those dual entry call reports. Such tools make it easier for the sales team to input important data.
7. Use Web-based Lead capture directly to CRM solutions. Use tools to create a lead capture form for your web site that routes the leads directly to the person in your sales department who can reach out and make a connection. Say goodbye to hot leads being lost in an over crowded inbox and die without follow up. Research shows that today’s buyer is expecting responses within minutes to web requests.
8. Keep track of your sales process. A sales system needs a multi-step process to keep your team consistent when following up with leads and closing sales. A well-defined, useful sales process also accelerates the on-boarding of new sales reps.
9. Use GPS on CRM apps to connect in person and setup travel routes. GPS enable CRM applications can also identify a contact’s company coordinates and lead you right to the prospect’s door. GPS enabled CRM lets you identify were your customer base and prospect reside. They also can provide a map with diving directions for the sales road-warrior.
10. Communicate with sales manager- keep them informed. CRM software keeps your sales manager in the know. These tools let the head of the sales department kept track of what deals are in the pipeline. More importantly, it keeps track of what stage each deal is in, including what deals are ready to close or have already closed. In short, it allows your sales manager to keep his or her finger on the pulse of the whole sales process.
Know where you stand: Better sales reps will want to know how they are doing. Individual members will need to know how they’re doing. An important step toward self-improvement is to understand how you measure up. CRM software can give the sales person an easy way to benchmark their performance and strive for improvement.
Infor CRM Opportunity dashboard:
SwiftPage ACT opportunity dashboard:
HubSpot Sales – Deals Dashboard
Learn to use the tools available. Your CRM database and its productivity tools are a gold mine waiting to be discovered. Today you can find Help How to Do XYZ answers typically built within the CRM system, on YouTube and from the software publisher. Additionally, your experienced CRM business partner can educate you on best practices and tips they have found in other businesses who have implemented your CRM.
Stay turned for ideas and practical tips on Sales Acceleration with CRM leading to business success acceleration…
- Using targeted and personalized templates for email correspondence
- Tracking email sent and PDF access responses
- Lead scoring to identify the hottest prospects
- Outbound call tracking
- Lead capture routing leads into CRM
- Measure engagement from sent links of PDF and video assets.