Boosts Sales Productivity with CRM: Now & Later – Part II

35 Ways CRM boosts sales productivity; today and every future day.

In Part I we covered 22 ways the use CRM can boost sales productivity and effectiveness, NOW.

Later has arrived. Knowledge of the customer, of the market place, and about your sales team, has been building. As the CRM database grows with knowledge and insight, this appreciating asset delivers more ways to boost your business:

Later has arrived:

• Use CRM to gain historical context about what was communicated, promised, and delivered. Now you can get the enviable 360 degree view of the customer relationship.

• To better understand so you can avoid making a bad or ineffective decision. With the knowledge gained about your ideal customers better decisions can be made day in and day out.

• To spot trends of competitive advancement or decline. Is your market share increasing or not from competitive pressures?

• To view which sales opportunities are advancing and about to close before end of the quarter. Sales forecasting is as much an art as it is a science. 70% of the best-in-class organizations maintain a centralized repository of all current sales deals, identified by stage or likelihood to close.

• Use CRM to unstick sales opportunities and re-focus on the REAL best opportunities.

• Increase productivity by viewing which company accounts are increasing in value and which are not. Value in dollars, value in time to close and resources used per sale, value in support time and resources, value in related reference and the ultimate value in referrals given.

• To determine your company’s depth and breadth of contact relationships in your key accounts. If one of your people left or one of their people left, what would be the positive and negative effects?

One company mentioned to us that they had too many sales people who recently passed away or left. That lost knowledge and past connections not found in CRM was just too costly!

Thus they developed a renewed interest in quickly capturing and sharing knowledge in their organization about the market place.

• Use CRM to measure sales productivity.
• • Are your closing-won rates increasing and is your sales cycle time decreasing?
  • Is the average size of opportunities increasing?
  • Are you making enough timely contacts with the decision maker?
  • Is your pipeline filled with opportunities throughout the sales cycle?
  • Have you gotten busy with current work and forgotten to keep the top and middle full?

• If your company provides new distributor or dealer training, has this now reduced the amount of time with service calls OR has it generated new sales opportunities? What was the ROI?

• Use CRM to identify which marketing campaigns are generating new qualified and sales-ready leads. Time for any changes?

• Strategic partnerships are a life blood of long term business development. Are these growing yearly or withering by lack to attention?

• Is their a +/- trend of certain product line sales occurring overtime, over geography, over type of account on by sales person?

• Let’s not forget the customer service department which can be helpedwith CRM to more quickly identify areas and categories of key service and support issues. Do they point to issues about products, training, delivery, or missed expectations? You now have customer service improvements to make. Or has a CSR discovered some new insight about a change in your customers’ organization that needs to be acted on and shared within others? Thus you can make more effective changes now and less costly mistakes in the future.

As the adage states “The right knowledge at the right time is power” – Make CRM a key foundation of that repository.

We have only scratched the surface of the possibilities to amplify sales success and ultimately business success with CRM.

What needs to occur in your business to boost sales productive now and for the future?