CRM for Sales

Sales teams want to use CRM features that help them close more deals with less administration and friction. Your CRM tool needs to be seamless, easy to use with only important, up-to-date data that saves time.

The “ease of doing business” applies to the sales rep as well as the customer. CRM software should help your sales team to connect with customers and prospects whatever the channel or stage of sales cycle (arranging meetings with instant calendar access, use email templates, task management, live chat, integration with social media and so on.)

A good mobile enabled CRM (that is able to be used on either Android and Apple iOS devices) will help the field sales team members to manage their tasks, email, activities and meetings, with access to the relevant data, from wherever they are, reducing unwanted administration time and building in best practice into prospect management.

Sales automation in a CRM is now one of the most essential features. Workflows in your CRM software can help the sales team navigate the sales process, supporting them to move efficiently to the next stage, adding relevant data in bite-size pieces as they go, complying to business requirements from leads to opportunities right through to closing the deal with the customer. Tasks are also automated, with notifications (e.g. an email) sent to the sales person, triggered by behavior of either themselves, colleagues or their customer.

A typical scenario might be the leads qualification or handover from marketing process within the CRM, the outcome being better visibility of sales activity for the marketing team on leads nurtured and passed on, and the sales rep being made aware of their responsibilities to act quickly and provide a seamless customer experience. This collaboration will also help motivation and good spirit between the two teams.

Innovative features of today’s CRM software include easier access to deeper customer (and potential customer) insights. Using historical sales data, perhaps overlaid with other data sources, your sales team can learn, adapt and forecast future plans. Predictive analytics that use machine learning automation takes the CRM one step further in suggesting next best actions, reducing churn risk and improving personalized selling to add business value.

One of the biggest impacts on sales productivity and success is for sales management, who have to ask for status reports by email to the team, then manually update spreadsheets with that information about sales performance, which is quickly out of date and wastes valuable time for the business.

Sales managers need real time transparency to help review their team’s sales pipeline and KPIs, with the key feature of visual, configurable and easy to use CRM sales dashboards.  Additional sales reports and views on activity will provide sales management the tools and data they need, in order to focus on specific areas for improvement. The CRM should be updated in real-time for tracking versus targets, to help spot trends and resolve issues before it’s too late.

When reviewing CRM choices, the sales features in Customer Relationship Management software should cover:

• Salesforce and pipeline management from marketing lead to sales opportunity with predictive forecasting
• Sales stage automation from the start including full history and prospect information from marketing nurture and qualification at the handover and visibility for marketing and sales collaboration
• Lead, contact and prospect management with leads scoring features for help in prioritization
• Full quote and sales proposal support aligned to your business product catalog, with CPQ functionality if complexity is found within your pricing or offer structure, including customer preferences and suggestions for up-sell and cross-sell 
• Discount management with automated approval processes within business guidelines for more efficient and accurate customer quotations 
• Mobile enabled for sellers to update and view CRM in the field, with integrated contact features such as sending an email, scheduling the next meeting etc.
• Personalized dashboards for sales personnel and business management to manage their pipeline and KPIs 
• Integration with calendars, documents and email to embed the use of CRM into daily business life 
• Guided best practice help via Sales Playbooks and templates for each step of the sales processes 
• GDPR compliance for best practice storage and easy access to prospect and customer data held in your business
• Meeting note support with records kept of customer visits and shared automatically with colleagues (look for text-to-speech functions for field sales) 
• Sales insight to monitor performance and proactively provide sales analysis as part of daily collaboration tools. Dashboards based on user roles can serve up frequently used KPI performance views which can then be personalized by the user easily to help empowerment, coaching and upskilling
• Social selling features that are integrated with the CRM software for relationship sales integrated with social media platforms such as LinkedIn to connect with customers and their business networks
• Look out for Contextual selling for suggestions of next best step in nurturing customers and prospects. Artificial Intelligence embedded into CRM software supports this deeper level of customer insight to help build a single and enriched customer view