Being productive is crucially important for any sales professional. In world of fierce competition for every potential customer, productivity has become one of the major concerns for the majority of companies of any size – from small startups, brick and mortar store, e-commerce companies to huge enterprises. In order to win as many customers as possible and reach the established sales quota, your salespeople have to properly manage their valuable time and balance numerous responsibilities. Granted, sometimes it is difficult, as sales representatives tend to get distracted by various administrative tasks that take up too much of their time, which they could have used much more efficiently. Fortunately, there is a way to fix this problem. The implementation of a proper CRM can significantly improve the productivity of your sales efforts. In result, the reps will be able to manage the sales pipeline effectively and noticeably increase profit, as not a single lead will be lost. Thus, let’s take a closer look at the benefits that sales automation tools can offer to your sales team:
Bird’s-eye View of your Prospects
Prospecting is one of the most time-consuming processes that every sales representative has to deal with on a daily basis. Statistically, the 50% of sales professional’s time is wasted on unproductive prospecting. Obviously, your salespeople will simplify this laborious process with an advanced sales automation system that is armed with effective contact management tools. For instance, bpm’online (www.bpmonline.com/crm/sales-automation-software) is one of the best examples of automation solutions that is capable of creating a 360-degree overview on each of your contacts. The system creates detailed profiles on potential and existing customers, each profile contains various customer related data that includes, but not limited to, prospects’ basic contact details, company size, career history and so forth. Sales automation solution can even extract additional information from social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, the system utilizes website behavior tracking to collect additional information on customer’s buying preferences, as it tracks what pages an online visitor went to and how much time they spent there. In result, you will have a better understanding of your prospects, and plan your communications accordingly.
Improved Teamwork
In order to increase the productivity of your sales team, it is paramount to establish a cooperative environment between the reps in the sales department and between your core teams. In particular, collaboration between your marketing and sales team will greatly affect the productivity of your sales reps. For example, one of the most common problems that those two departments face is that marketing reaches its lead generation goals, while sales are struggling to meet their quota. The reason behind this discrepancy is that marketing does not have the same understanding of what a sales ready lead is as the sales team does. If these teams were coordinated, marketing would have set up their sales-readiness metrics set up in accordance with sales and revenue goals, the productivity of your sales reps would’ve definitely increased. At the same time, the sales teams should make their sales pipelines transparent to continuously analyze the leads and provide comprehensive feedback to marketers. Aligning marketing and sales is a complex organizational process, but businesses can take advantage of modern customer management software, which enables sharing of data across departments, automate core business processes and streamline collaboration.
More Mobility and Less Paperwork
Unfortunately, the studies reveal that the majority of sales reps can dedicate only a third of their time to communicating with clients and actively selling. The rest is lost to daily routine like prospecting, chasing customer information and data entry. In fact, 71% of sales professionals have revealed that they waste too much time on data entry. Fortunately, top-notch sales automation tools enable your salespeople to spend more time with their customers, as document management tools take care of all the paperwork. The system carefully logs all your interactions with customers. In addition, every document can be specified and linked to the required customers and orders. In terms of mobility, your sales reps will appreciate the features of sales automation app. For instance, your sales team can get an insight into critical customer data regardless of their device, may it be a tablet or a smartphone. It is exceptionally important since sales professionals spend a lot of time on meetings negotiating with customers. Having a sales automation app at their disposal, your reps will be able to access the required data, relevant stats or a presentation using any gadget.
Ultimately, the implementation of a powerful sales automation system with powerful tools makes your sales team more efficient. Once deployed, the sales representatives will be able to concentrate all of their efforts on what they do best – communicating with customers and closing more deals in less time.
