9 Strategies For Boosting Sales With A CRM Tool
The top sales professionals depend on one essential tool above all others. What is it? It’s not LinkedIn or their smartphones—although both are crucial. It’s their customer relationship management (CRM) application.
Without this tool, you may find yourself limited to a small scale, managing deals, leads, and information using notebooks, spreadsheets, and random pieces of paper. By implementing a CRM along with these nine techniques, you can transform your business into a streamlined operation and boost your sales right away.
Implement Timely Sales Reminders for Success
If you sell intricate or high-priced products and services, closing the sale in just one call is unlikely. Buyers often worry about the risks involved and need to take into account the opinions of others, such as their spouse or boss. In such cases, you can expect to hear something along the lines of, “Let’s reconvene in two weeks to talk about this project.”
One way a CRM can assist is by helping you keep track of appointments over time. You can also set reminders for activities that strengthen relationships, such as sending birthday cards (sending them through the mail will make you stand out). While a simple calendar tool can provide reminders, CRMs offer additional benefits. They can generate statistics, showing you how many appointments you have each year, month, or quarter with each of your accounts.
Monitor Your Sales Activity Levels Effectively
How many prospecting emails, calls, and meetings did you conduct last month? Most salespeople either struggle to answer that question or know the answer but hesitate to disclose it. Without a sufficient volume of activity—such as the number of emails sent, demos completed, or events attended—sales simply won’t happen. CRMs facilitate increased sales by simplifying the tracking process. For instance, if you go two consecutive weeks without any prospecting, your CRM can provide a straightforward chart highlighting your declining activity level.
By highlighting decreasing sales activity, your CRM encourages you to dedicate more time to follow-ups or any other activities that may be lagging. It’s far more beneficial to receive a helpful reminder from your CRM than to face an unwelcome surprise when reviewing your month-end results.
Strengthen Relationships with Key Stakeholders
When selling a complex solution, such as cybersecurity consulting services to a bank, multiple stakeholders are usually involved in the decision-making process. While you may have a solid rapport with the chief information officer (CIO), it’s essential to engage with other executives as well. If you overlook their comments and questions, they might feel sidelined, which could jeopardize the sale without you even realizing it.
A CRM allows you to effortlessly track notes about all key stakeholders involved in each deal. Consider this: if you’re managing five sales opportunities this month, each with five to ten stakeholders, it becomes nearly impossible to keep track of everyone without a CRM. This tool streamlines the process and ensures that no one is overlooked.
Minimize Coordination Issues Within the Sales Team
When you begin your career in sales, you might find yourself working independently. However, as you achieve greater success, you’ll likely have the resources and authority to hire assistants. Alternatively, you may be part of an organization that employs sales development representatives and other support staff. When these roles collaborate effectively, it can lead to increased sales closures.
Many sales professionals find it challenging to maximize the potential of their sales support team. One common issue is staying updated on the conversations and emails your team has with prospects. A CRM can address this by ensuring that all sales interactions are logged, helping to prevent errors, and ensuring you never miss a meeting.
Consider scheduling a weekly meeting with your sales support team to go over sales opportunities recorded in the CRM. This meeting serves as a “weekly deadline” for everyone to update the CRM before the discussion.
Maximize Selling Time by Streamlining Administrative Tasks
In sales, there’s a fundamental principle: the more time you dedicate to engaging with prospects, the higher your chances of closing sales. However, the bureaucratic and process-oriented nature of contemporary business often clashes with this principle.
When your sales manager requests specific reports from you on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis, it can significantly reduce the time you have available for selling. The key to addressing this issue is to find ways to automate these administrative tasks using your CRM. Many CRMs, like Salesforce, come equipped with built-in activity reports that track metrics such as the number of calls made, emails sent, and meetings held. Take the time to collaborate with your sales operations team to identify which administrative tasks can be streamlined through automation.
With those reporting tasks cleared from your workload, you can now redirect that time and energy toward closing more deals.
Enhance Your Pipeline by Collaborating with Marketing
Many sales professionals often overlook the potential of marketing to generate leads, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Imagine having an additional 10 leads each month to pursue—if your marketing team is efficient, they should be able to provide that. Timing is crucial, though. The Harvard Business Review reports that companies contacting potential customers within an hour of receiving a request are nearly seven times more likely to qualify the lead. The more leads you qualify, the greater your chances of closing sales.
Take some time this week to collaborate with your marketing team. Inquire if they can send leads directly to your CRM. By automating the transfer of leads from marketing to sales, you’ll increase the number of sales opportunities available to you.
Optimize Your Sales Follow-Up Process with CRM
A limited number of buyers are prepared to make a purchase during your initial conversation. The majority will require follow-up to prevent losing their interest. As you gather more leads for follow-up, maintaining consistent communication can become increasingly difficult.
Sales professionals who repeatedly say, “I’m just following up,” are unlikely to make a memorable impression. By tracking your follow-up messages and their frequency in a CRM, you can differentiate yourself from the competition. Analyze the data to identify which follow-up strategies are most effective.
For instance, you might discover that varying your follow-up methods—like using a combination of email, phone calls, and letters—yields better results than relying solely on email. Understanding what works and what doesn’t allows you to refine your follow-up process and increase your chances of closing more sales. Recognizing these patterns is possible only by logging your follow-up activities in a CRM.
Ensure No Lead Gets Left Behind in the Office
Sales professionals often find themselves spending significant amounts of time on the road, making organization a crucial aspect of their success. Historically, salespeople relied on a mix of notecards, notebooks, and calendars to manage their tasks. While these homemade systems could be effective, they had a significant drawback: they were paper-based. If you happened to leave your notebook at the office, you lost access to essential information while traveling.
Modern CRM applications eliminate this limitation. For instance, you can access Salesforce on both your laptop and smartphone. By leveraging the features of a CRM, you’ll ensure that you never lose track of a lead, ultimately leading to more closed sales.
Cultivate Better Sales Habits
James Clear outlines four laws of behavioral change in his popular book “Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones”. If you’re looking to adopt new sales habits, Clear’s framework can guide you in maximizing your CRM’s potential and boosting your sales performance.
The third law is to simplify the process. For instance, if you’re aiming to develop the habit of reaching out to past clients, you can commit to sending a brief, personalized email daily to maintain those relationships. A CRM can facilitate this by providing reminders every 60 days to prompt you to send these emails. This approach ensures your name and company remain top-of-mind with prospects, increasing your chances of securing a sale when they are ready to buy.
Next Steps After Selecting Your CRM
Can a CRM really change your sales outcomes? Absolutely! However, it’s important to note that the CRM itself won’t execute sales activities for you. It won’t draft proposals (though it can help you easily locate previous ones for reference), nor can it actively listen to prospects during meetings. What a CRM can do is simplify the process of tracking notes and organizing information from each meeting, enabling you to focus more on building relationships and closing deals.
Selecting and implementing a CRM is essential. As of 2019 and onwards, utilizing a CRM has become a necessity rather than a choice. Even small businesses find that successful sales professionals depend on CRM tools to maintain organization. Once you have the system set up, it’s crucial to commit to using it consistently. A great way to begin is by focusing on the second point discussed in this article—monitoring your sales activity levels—so you can establish a solid foundation for your CRM usage.
