Your CRM is not delivering as much value as it could. Savvy sales leader that you are, I suspect you already knew that.
A survey of over 500 sales leaders found that most CRM (customer relationship management) systems are painfully difficult to use, with 76% of respondents reporting that their team doesn’t use the majority of tools in their CRM. And almost half (47%) didn’t even believe their CRM was capable of helping them meet their business goals over the next three years.
But there are good reasons for these grim stats — and a way to turn them around: by adding a sales engagement platform. Before we explore how to do that, let’s be clear about the purpose of each solution.
What is a CRM (customer relationship management) system?
A customer relationship management system is your organization’s record keeper. It’s a repository of prospect and existing customer information plus every interaction they have with your organization across departments and channels (email, phone, website, social media, chatbot, etc.). These interactions may be as simple as a visit to your website or as complex as a phone call with customer service that results in a financial transaction.
Tracking every step of the customer journey in this single source of truth (the CRM) helps everyone in your organization stay on the same page and personalize interactions to improve customer experience. Most customer relationship management systems today are SaaS platforms that can be used by any size organization, from small businesses to the largest enterprises.
Why is your CRM underperforming?
There are several reasons your CRM may not be performing optimally, from a less-than-ideal implementation to a lack of user training. In the end, though, these lead to two critical issues:
- Poor user adoption. Sellers want to sell. Warranted or not, reps see CRM software as a tool that, too often, stands in the way of selling. In fact, one study found that 68% of salespeople believe they would be much more productive at work if they didn’t have to manually enter data into their CRM. But they do, and manual entry leads to…
- Data quality problems. While 47% of enterprises say they can’t rely on their CRM data to provide a single source of truth regarding customer data, an overwhelming 82% of sellers say they have made an embarrassing mistake with a customer because of bad customer data in the CRM. It’s no surprise then that Forrester, commissioned by Salesforce, found out that only 32% of executives and 27% of employees believe their CRM system provides a complete, single view of customer information. Or that Validity’s State of CRM Data Management in 2022 saw 75% of respondents say staff fabricates data to tell the story they want decision makers to hear.
In addition, while your CRM is built for lead and contact management, there are better tools for lead generation and sales cycle management. Adding a sales engagement platform for your customer-facing reps serves to streamline and automate your CRM solution.
What is a sales engagement platform?
A sales engagement platform (SEP) is a system of action that not only lets you record data, but uses it to plan out your next move. Where your CRM stores and organizes customer contact information and records customer interactions, the SEP uses automation to create hyper-personalized interactions with buyers — without sacrificing scale.
How Salesloft supercharges your CRM software
Sales engagement platforms auto-log and analyze each touchpoint throughout the customer lifecycle. Integrating a sales engagement platform like Salesloft with your CRM offloads tedious work from your team and gives them sales superpowers too.
It frees up selling time by automatically syncing the data from every call, email, meeting, and interaction into the CRM. Considering reps each spend an average of over 5 hours a week on manual CRM data entry, the time savings add up quickly.
It increases team efficiency and productivity by giving reps one tool for communication and information — designed for how they sell. Where a CRM is designed primarily to store information and to support many departments, a sales engagement platform is designed explicitly with sales workflows in mind. The intuitive interface allows teams to work comfortably and access data from your CRM, so they’re not constantly switching back and forth between screens.
It boosts CRM usage and data accuracy by proxy. All that rich, accurate data automatically syncing from your sales engagement platform to your CRM means more, higher quality data for everyone else in the organization who uses the CRM. Bonus: it also increases the ROI of your CRM investment.
It improves sales pipeline management and forecast accuracy with a comprehensive pipeline dashboard visible to reps and their managers. Alert notifications signal deal gaps so you can take the next best actions; real-time pipeline visibility helps revenue teams easily see what’s changed each week, and Salesloft’s AI Forecast helps you spot missed opportunities.
It increases top-line revenues — and consumer spending — with its focus on personalized customer engagement. Twilio recently found that companies that invested in digital customer engagement have seen their top-line revenues rise by an average of 70%, with a 46% increase in the amount consumers spend when that engagement is personalized. A sophisticated SEP makes personalized digital engagement easy. Bonus: personalized communications meet customer needs and increase customer loyalty.
Salesloft’s available CRM integrations
Salesloft supports many types of CRM integrations to help any company maximize CRM customer retention and satisfaction, not to mention CRM investment ROI.
Salesforce
Salesloft + Salesforce = the ultimate selling machine for your sales reps. With bidirectional data sync, automation rules, and activity logging — including more than 30 activity properties like call duration, disposition and sentiment, and email activity counts — your CRM data gains new depth and gives you an unmatched competitive advantage.
Real-time logs provide valuable insights into sync activities, sales process statuses, and interaction outcomes. Integrating Salesloft with Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM helps your reps meet customer needs and capitalize on sales opportunities.
Microsoft Dynamics 365
Flexible customer relationship management is a basic necessity for businesses with complex sales pipelines. Spend less time juggling your CRM tools and more time on your prospects with CRM Sync for Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Enjoy a streamlined setup, bidirectional data syncing, activity logging, automation rules, and more. Give your revenue team the tools they need to drive even more customer value through the combined power of Dynamics 365 and Salesloft.
HubSpot
HubSpot users can experience all the benefits of Salesloft with CRM Sync. Every sales touchpoint automatically transfers from Salesloft to HubSpot for a unified reporting experience that provides greater visibility across your sales teams.
More innovative prospecting and pipeline management make it easy to engage new customers, optimize upsell opportunities, and obtain insights from various segmentation reports.
Zoho Flow
Zoho Flow works with Salesloft’s ability to schedule calls, engage in email marketing, and provide feedback or coaching anywhere. You can send messages from Flowdeck when there is a new activity within Salesloft. It allows you to automatically log that activity into Google Sheets without manually inputting data.
Zoho Flow integrates without code, meaning you can automate your most complex sales workflows without code. Its simple design means this operational CRM is customer-centric. With action triggers, tracking capability, and automation, Zoho Flow meets business needs in a matter of minutes.
Salesbolt
Create and capture new leads with Salesbolt: Salesforce Integration for LinkedIn.
LinkedIn with Salesforce and Salesloft allows you to pull new accounts, leads, or contacts and add them directly to a Salesloft Cadence. After you install the browser integration, you can visit any LinkedIn profile to create a Salesforce Lead or Contact, find valid B2B contact info, and directly import it to a Salesloft Cadence.
You can integrate this CRM technology in less than two minutes, and you never have to leave your browser. Help your team speed up their prospecting efforts and spend more time closing deals.
Ready to see Salesloft in action?
Salesloft’s sales engagement solution helps businesses of all kinds — from startups and small businesses to call centers and enterprise-level organizations. Regardless of your preferred customer relationship management tool, Salesloft’s sales engagement software integrates seamlessly, and the Salesloft technical support team is ready to answer any questions.
At Salesloft, elevating your success is at the heart of everything we do. Request a demo today and start taking control of your engagement with CRM integrations that work for you!