The Reason Why CRM is Needed for Sales Process

Contents

1. Common Mistakes When Starting a New Business
2. Differences Between CRM and Traditional Sales Process
3. Softwares That Will Upgrade Your Business

1. Common Mistakes When Starting a New Business

When starting a new business, founders are often more likely to make the mistake of focusing only on the sales themselves than on the actual sales process. As early-stage companies track only a small number of promising customers, revenue management is relatively simple. But when the company starts to grow, it becomes complicated. The more salespeople are employed, the more difficult it is to identify potential customers. Some opportunities may be missed during work. In the absence of a standardized process, the customer's purchasing experience may significantly differ depending on which employee is responsible for the given lead. If the sales process is unclear, the best solution is to run CRM. CRM can provide a robust structure for sales leaders to build consistent policies and processes.

2. Differences Between CRM and Traditional Sales Process

Traditional sales processes are infrastructure road maps that help salespeople guide prospects from product or service exploration to purchase. On the other hand, the CRM sales process is a combination of policies, practices, and procedures that make up an infrastructure simplified by CRM's accessibility and automation capabilities.

1) Create a Repetitive Process

If salespeople are free to access their prospects, your company will have as many sales processes as the salespeople. CRM helps standardize interactions between salespeople and buyers. Repetitive processes enable you to interact with promising customers and save valuable time and energy for salespeople.

2) Automates Data Entry and Reduces Time

Many sales teams rely on Excel sheets rather than CRM to find leads and opportunities. Excel's functions may save you time, but they do not relieve the burden of entering data into a sheet.

Employees who rely on Excel spend most of their energy on monotonous tasks such as typing or copying and pasting. These tasks are not appropriate to motivate salespeople. Because most salespeople would want to communicate with promising customers rather than handle administrative tasks. 

CRM has synchronization and auto-input capabilities that can simplify and reduce the amount of data input. The rise in sales time increases employee satisfaction, which enables them to attract more customers. By reducing these busy tasks, salespeople can focus more on the 'sales' tasks they want.

3) Enables Accurate Prediction

The accuracy of Excel is not that high. There is always the possibility of errors on the sheet, such as broken formulas, incorrect data entry, and computational mistakes. However, with CRM, organizations can improve the accuracy of their reporting and predictions.

Hubspot's Transaction Forecast (Image by HubSpot)

CRM automatically assigns the appropriate value to the transaction instead of an Excel function or manual calculation. With exclusive technology, sales leaders won't be embarrassed by unexpected end-of-month or end-of-quarter results.

When salespeople meet their quotas, they want to let the manager know. However, without a formal tracking system, both positive and negative performance would fall into confusion. 

Executives should not fail to identify employees who produce high performance and they must give credit to those employees. And executives need tools to know which salespeople are poor in ability or who needs more training.

Automation of the sales process with CRM helps executives see employee quota achievement more closely. Also, real-time trends can be quickly and easily captured and responded to appropriately. Thanks to readily accessible data for both agents and administrators, it can reduce the chance of misunderstanding.

5) Provides Information Storage

It would be very difficult to find the solution right away without any information. So when you ask your colleagues or other departments for information during work, they are often sent to other colleagues or departments before you even get a response. And even if you get the information you need, the accuracy of the information can be reduced as it was mixed with all different information on the way.

Adoption of CRM will significantly reduce this inconvenience. You can get the information you need right away, so you don't have to rush to find the information anymore.

6) Administrators Can Check Employee Progress

Before running CRM, it was difficult to make sure that employees were achieving their quotas. There was only one way to ask directly. But the method was not very effective or reliable.

Employee Contribution Graph (Image by Hubspot)

CRM allows administrators to monitor staff progress. Data provides figures such as how many phone calls are made, how many emails are sent, and how many meetings are planned to meet the quota.

Managers no longer have to follow their employees around to check their performance.

7) Sustains Sales Operation

Let's say that an employee is managing a sales sheet that everyone can use. What happens if the employee in charge leaves the company? It's a terrible imagination where months or years of processes and documents disappear in an instant.

With CRM, you don't have to worry about this. CRM acts as a shared knowledge system, so it documents the sales process. That's why a single employee's departure does not threaten the entire sales infrastructure of the company. Therefore, a single employee's departure won’t threaten the entire sales infrastructure of the company.

8) Improves Visibility of  Customer Information

The customer information gathered through the sales process is not exclusively required by the sales department. Customer data provides better information to marketing and customer support teams. CRM allows the sales team to stably share accumulated information across the company. It provides a centralized system for storing information and makes it easy for the entire organization to see how well it's doing.

9) Fosters a Healthy Competitive Environment

Leaderboard Tool (Image by HubSpot)

Healthy competition makes the sales process more advantageous. That's why some CRMs have leader board tools. The leaderboard tool provides visual references to show how the entire team performs its tasks.

Directly showing how the team is working can encourage overall sales. It naturally increases individual responsibility and becomes a stimulus for them. Therefore, it is also a good management strategy to drive a healthy competitive spirit through CRM to operate the sales process.

10) Keep Tracking of Sales Funnel

The ideal sales process is to help salespeople make the transition smoothly and efficiently until they close the transaction step by step. So certain CRMs have tools to show managers how smoothly and efficiently the transactions are being implemented.

Sales Funnel (Image by HubSpot)

CRM provides direct insight into the corporate sales funnel. This function allows administrators to have a clear idea of how the transaction is going. CRM with these features allows you to see if the transaction is moving forward fluidly, or how and where it is being delayed.

3. A Software That Will Upgrade Your Business

The company's sales process may be one of the most important parts of the sales department. That's why we need the right policies and practices to help our customers go through their purchasing journey. This can help you achieve your sales goals and further grow your business.

Finding the appropriate sales process for each company is not easy. But with the adoption of CRM, you need to gain an understanding of your customers and build the right sales process so that your business can move forward in the right direction.

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