How CRM Saves Sales When a Salesman Leaves
With advances in cloud technologies and Software-as-a-Service affordability, CRM is quickly shifting from a luxury for large businesses to an essential. Though choosing and implementing a CRM sales solution for your business has its difficulties, the long term benefits are indisputable.
One of the most useful aspects of CRM is keeping accounts (and revenue) in the event of sales team turnover. If you are on the fence about the benefits of CRM for your business, consider these points.
1. It’s all in one place
Specific features of CRM suites will differ between providers and tiers. However, the core functionality of any CRM sales system is to consolidate customer information, interactions and events into a single interface for easy recording of information, tracking of sales processes and future analytics. This eliminates sifting through many physical files, electronic spreadsheets, and even yellow sticky notes to access sales data from previous employees.
The best systems use APIs to integrate and interact with other office software to make the data entry process effortless and improve adoption rates among technology-wary salespeople. Inc offers an excellent guide for further information.
2. Reduce mystery for both sales staff and clients
When used properly, CRM suites offer a simple way to record virtually every aspect of the sales process on both individual and company levels. This makes it easy for managers to know what is going on with a customer or prospect in the pipeline, vs speculation.
While they will of course need to smooth over the transition and possibly reestablish a relationship or two, new
salespeople assigned these legacy accounts can simply research the history stored in the CRM and get to work calling them. This lets clients know that their business is being taken care of, instead of wondering if your firm is in trouble.
3. CRM software is getting easier to use
Of course, all of this assumes that your sales team is entering high-quality data into your CRM suite in the first place. If there was a major weakness to CRM sales strategies in the past, this was it. Adoption rates for CRM sales systems are directly related to their “tediousness.” If your CRM software is too involved or annoying to use, it will sit unused.
The good news is that thanks to cloud CRM solutions like Salesforce or Insightly, salespeople and assistants do not have to be chained to their desks to input information. In fact, most solutions have feature-rich apps which make them extremely easy to use on the road.
If you think you will still have trouble getting your team to use a platform, CIO recently listed 13 tips to improve CRM sales adoption which is a good primer.
Don’t get caught flat-footed should your top salespeople get recruited elsewhere. Get all the critical data logged into CRM sales software and protect your business.
