Thanksgiving is that time of the year when people reminisce about things they are grateful for. As someone from sales, you may remember a high-profile customer you won or the colleagues who stepped in and helped you close a deal while you were away. But if you looked a little deeper, there was one tool that played a significant role backstage.
One system that has all the information handy for sales reps to pursue the best leads and close them faster. It helped automate sales activities so that your team doesn’t have to stay up and send those emails manually. Yes, we’re talking about your ally in sales – CRM.
Here’s a quick look at how CRM made sales easier:
The CRM helps you focus your effort on the best leads and move them down the funnel faster by offloading many sales tasks from your schedule. That is just one of the many things it can do. This Thanksgiving Day, let’s raise a toast to the impact of CRM in our lives.
Streamline sales by unifying your data
CRM assimilates all the data in one place and further categorizes it into leads, accounts, and deals. It spares you from repetitive data entry, unifies your messaging, makes it easy to collaborate with other salespeople, and ultimately empowers you to sell better.
A G2 study states that sales reps spend an average of 440 hours each year trying to find the right content to share with their prospects and customers.
With a CRM, your sales team can seamlessly feed data and map it to relevant contacts via their computer or mobile devices. This eliminates the need for post-its, loose pages, or other tools during important sales calls and field meetings.
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As leads move down the funnel, notes and other inputs at different stages come together and give your team complete context. With all the consolidated data at your fingertips, the CRM simplifies coordination and improves team collaboration. This means your salespeople remain on top of all the leads that go into the funnel.
Prioritize leads and personalize engagement
At any point of the year, your business runs multiple campaigns. This means your sales team sits on way too many leads that need timely follow-up and nurturing. New leads are added to your pipeline even as you’re reading.
Personalization is no longer good to have but a basic necessity for consumers. A Forbes article notes that the average shopper expects brands to remember them—their preferences, their history, their location, their sentiments—on every channel, at any given time.
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When dealing with multiple leads, remembering specific details like their pain points and interests is not easy. In situations like these, your friend in need, the CRM steps up.
Your CRM consolidates the history of your prospect’s engagement under one tab. This helps sales reps get a better understanding of your lead’s requirements and challenges. Reps can draw insights they need to personalize engagement, pitch confidently, and drive more deals to closure.
Not just that, with predictive scoring, the CRM scores leads based on their engagement and makes it easy for reps to prioritize which leads to go after. A higher score indicates that reps have better chances to move these leads down the funnel and turn them into customers.
Automate sales tasks
CRM with built-in automation enables you to manage time wisely; by focusing on vital tasks that need a human touch.
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It frees your calendar with sales automation that helps you scale your sales activities and give your prospects a delightful experience.
So remember to thank your CRM that helped you automate these vital tasks:
- Manual data entry into your system and avoid duplication
- Schedule emails to an extensive list of leads based on geolocation
- Set up timely reminders to follow up and prevent leads from slipping away
- Identify if your prospects are out of the office
- Send follow-up emails to keep prospects nurtured
Your CRM also ensures that your lists remain healthy throughout. It removes leads who unsubscribe and prevents any emails from reaching them. This reduces the additional effort required to weed out unsubscribers, bounced email addresses, and keeps your spam score under check.
Harness gold from your data
After every campaign or at the end of each quarter, you need to break down the performance. With multiple team members in charge of different activities, a lot of data flows in. But as is, this data will offer very little value in the current state.
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That’s where your CRM doubles up as your number cruncher. It actively gathers, organizes, processes data, and presents these findings in an easily consumable format.
State of sales 2021 report by LinkedIn reveals that nearly 70% of respondents believe that data from their CRM system was “very important” to closing deals.
With an advanced dashboard and smart reporting in your CRM, it is easier to uncover a wealth of insights like:
- What sales email campaigns did the trick?
- Who were your most interested leads?
- Which deals look like they will pass into oblivion?
Your CRM helps you dig through data, takes the vital pieces, puts them together to showcase your success story. Accurate data within your CRM plays a major role in helping you predict trends, forecast sales, finalize budgets, and make other data-driven decisions.
What’s more? The data you collect helps you replicate successful strategies and fine-tune weaker campaigns. Now that’s something to be thankful for, right?
Manage multiple deals smoothly
When you work on multiple deals simultaneously, they all look the same in your eyes. It becomes increasingly difficult to prioritize them and balance your time. You attract the lead and add them into the funnel. Next, you build a relationship with them and even show them a demo. After which the only thing you must do is wait for the revert. This wait can be anywhere between days, weeks, or months. But you can’t be idle during that time as you have to go after other leads too.
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A Saleshacker article mentions that around 68% of customers are lost because of indifference or perceived apathy, not because of mistakes. When you chase many leads, some older leads may be unattended and might slip away. This may cost you the time, effort, and money you spent in acquiring the lead.
Thankfully, your CRM identifies these red flags and sniffs rotten deals from miles away. Active deal management ensures that you constantly follow up with leads throughout the sales cycle.
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With an AI-powered CRM that offers deal insights, you can salvage about-to-rot deals immediately, thereby safeguarding your day ( and your commission!). And that my friend, makes a solid case for a pat on the back!
More often than not, in the hustle and bustle of sales, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by a number of things. One day you’re cruising with back-to-back closures, and on others, you’re looking at retrospecting your sales activities. Through the ups and downs, your CRM has always been a constant.
Thanksgiving day is when people pause, fill up their gratitude journals and embrace friendships. This time let’s all raise a toast to our friend, the CRM, for being an indispensable asset to our sales team and helping us create delightful experiences.
Do you have any more reasons to be thankful? Let us know in the comments.
Co-author: Manasa Kumar
