How do you improve your sales, maintain a healthy team dynamic, and keep everyday processes as simple as possible? The answer is CRM.
What does CRM stand for in sales? Moving away from manual work and digitizing your business development is essential to stay on the frontiers of the sales industry in 2019. This article will show you the advantages you’ll get from using CRM and how other teams successfully introduced CRM into their routines.
10 Reasons Why Sales Teams Use CRM
CRM for sales teams is an incredibly powerful relationship management tool that allows them to easily follow up on leads and create priority lists for sales projects.
Other major reasons teams use CRMs are:
- Safe storage of client and project data
- Effortless time management
- Transparent activity reports
- Targeting key opportunities
- Cloud-based data integration to keep up to date with project updates
- Tracking client communication to advertise new sales in a timely manner
- More efficient sales process via streamlining the cycle
- Accurate client communication prospects via big data analysis
- Less administration workload
- Lower overall costs
Advantages of Using CRM for Sales Teams
How do sales teams use CRM? Contact relationship management software brings an array of benefits to those that choose to introduce it into their business.
Reporting and Analytics
CRM software for sales allows teams to effortlessly create, copy, share, and edit reports and offers templates for more complex cases. It also has powerful analytics platforms that enable data analysis and visualization that can be cloud-shared with other parties in the project.
Lead Generation
Generating leads is easy with a CRM. It offers guided processes of identifying sales and marketing targets, analysis of customer online activities, data import, and management of milestones and project steps.
Higher Productivity
Using CRM makes the entire sales process more productive. It helps to make forecasts for sales more accurate and allows comparison between old and new sales to make changes to the future product. It also facilitates the production of quotes. Communication is more efficient with mobile tracking and data sharing.
Shorter Sales Cycle
CRM for salespeople allows to shorten the sales cycle and make it more straightforward by segmenting the leads and sorting functionality.
Increased Revenue
How do you increase revenue with CRM? Performance is improved via boosting sales conversion rates, creating long-term relationships with customers, introducing suggestion selling, and expanding your customer base through referrals.
Marketing and Sales Alignment
To make your alignment perfect with CRM, you need to follow three basic recommendations:
- Create the persona of an ideal customer
- Create a lead
- Link marketing automation and CRM systems
Ultimately, this change will lead you to better marketing and measure its performance, allow you to see where leads originate and track them, create a consistently improving experience for your customers, and make the selling process more insightful.
Examples of How Sales Teams Use CRM
The theoretical CRM benefits for sales reps all make sense, but surely you want to be more practical and learn about some actual cases of sales teams using CRM successfully. Let’s consider several case studies that might interest you.
Wells Fargo
You’re probably well-acquainted with Wells Fargo — one of the most successful CRM examples. For an organization with such an extensive customer base, swift financial operations, data handling, and efficient communication are crucial.
Wells Fargo makes use of the social aspects of CRM, such as social media connectivity and the ability to make rapid communications with appropriate agents for customers that need help. Such an approach not only significantly lightens the burden on their management, but also improves customer service and the company’s reputation.
Bespoke Collection
American lovers of art and good wine will have heard of Bespoke Collection, an organization that provides elegant experiences for their clients. They’re known for their superb loyalty programs and memberships that create a family-like relationship between the business and the customer. This is another example where a company has earned its love and recognition through the use of CRM.
CRM solutions allowed Bespoke Collection to continue delivering a personalized experience as their customer base progressively grew over the years of operation. They’re specifically empathizing the usefulness of emails and referrals in CRM.
Activision
Activision is very popular in the gaming market not only due to their great releases, but also thanks to the high quality of the service they provide gamers with. They make use of cloud-based systems and big data analysis to monitor social media and internet searches relevant to their products, which helps them to make accurate predictions about the reactions of their audiences. Such a marketing strategy also decreased its expenses.
Choosing a CRM Solution
There are a number of factors to consider when choosing a CRM for your company:
- What scale of business is it for? Does it fit your business needs?
- How much technical assistance does the solution include? Will you need to hire an independent specialist?
- How intuitive is it? How much training will your employees require?
- What are the minimum requirements for the potential users of the CRM solution?
- Can it integrate with other software that you’re already using?
- Are there any extra fees in addition to the total cost of the software? Can your company afford it?
- Does the built-in security satisfy your requirements?
What Should a Sales Team do with a CRM?
In order to make proper use of CRM software, a sales team has to be aware of several essential usage recommendations:
- Focus on the fundamental approach of using CRM rather than getting caught up in additional features;
- Identify the main tasks and problems you need to resolve in your project;
- Set clear objectives;
- Break down and follow the process.
Features of CRM for Sales Team
More often than not, sales teams are looking for only primary aspects of CRM. These essential features of CRM for sales team are the following:
- Free access from mobile devices and adequate security;
- Straightforward and uncomplicated organization tools;
- Built-in function of sales reports;
- Data segmentation to construct better leads.
How to Integrate CRM into Your Sales Team
The integration of new software into your company’s routine may be a challenging task. What is the first step of making a successful introduction to all employees? Training, of course. This ensures everybody knows exactly how to correctly use the technology.
Don’t forget that CRM for sales reps should have a set dashboard for better navigation. Furthermore, you could throw in some pro tips and tricks to help them feel more fluid with the platform, and encourage them to use CRM for their professional development.
How to Motivate Your Sales Team to Use CRM
Even if they know how to make use of it, sales reps might simply be reluctant to use the new software; after all, it’s only natural for humans to resist change. So how do you motivate your team to use your new CRM?
Start by explaining the value of the CRM. Why do sales teams use CRM? Make sure they know the undebatable advantages: centralized integration and storage benefits, visualization, and opportunities for communication with clients. Make sure that you choose an appropriate and high-quality CRM that fits your team’s needs.
Nimble CRM Solution for Sales Teams
Looking for a CRM solution for your business? Nimble helps sales teams painlessly incorporate new software into their work process. We open opportunities for faster and more efficient management, better customer relationships with higher satisfaction rates, more sales, and easy mobile access. See our case studies and try Nimble for free to increase your revenue and make your workflow smoother.
How CRM Software Can Improve Your Business
CRM software has proven to be the choice of many successful businesses that were looking for a solution that would enable faster, more efficient management and improved client relations. How does it do that?
- Instant mobile access for sales reps
- Cloud-based integration
- Big data analysis of customer behavior
- Intuitive designs
- Lead segmentation
Conclusion
CRM is a great way to grow your business at scale. The technology helps businesses decrease overall project costs while strengthening customer base and increasing revenue by the means of its innovative tools and with the help of a good sales team.
To choose an appropriate CRM solution, make sure to keep the scale of your business in mind, have a clear objective, and know your limits. If you feel like you need help with introducing CRM into your sales process, you can try Nimble for free and contact us if you have any questions.
