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35 Examples How Sales Teams Benefit
from CRM — Achieving Growth Targets — 1. Managing Sales Goals Sales teams need to know how they’re performing in comparison to their sales goals. Are they on track? If not, how much is the shortfall? CRM benchmarks performances against your key sales performance indicators to inform sales directors, managers and other sales professionals with easy to follow charts, dashboards and reports for real-time monitoring of progress towards individual and team goals.
2. Automated Lead Scoring If you deal with hundreds, or even thousands, of new leads each month, how do you decide which ones are sales ready? CRM workflows deliver an automated solution that consistently grades and scores each lead based on your rules ensuring that sales teams receive the right leads at the right time. Any combination of data stored in CRM can be used to score leads including: job role, location, tracked email activity, web click behaviour, product detail and purchase timeframe.
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3. Understand Which Lead Sources Convert Best CRM maintains lead intelligence enabling sales and marketing teams to identify which sources of lead create the most valuable opportunities, and which resulted in the best conversion rates. With the benefit of this insight teams can prioritize activities and focus budgets on the most profitable sources.
4. User Adoption CRM user adoption is essential if any customer relationship management initiative is to achieve its objectives. CRM solutions works with familiar Microsoft tools that many users already know including including
Outlook, Excel, Internet Explorer, OneNote and Skype to quickly facilitate early user acceptance . Click here for 22 recommendations to create a successful CRM user adoption strategy.
5. Lead Routing Capture leads from web forms and other sources and uses defined rules to route them to the correct sales team or individual. For many organisations lead routing is a time consuming manual process. By applying routing rules leads are automatically directed to the right person for urgent attention. Routing rules can be based on product, location, account status and any other criteria using data stored in CRM.
— Lead Generation — 6. Telemarketing With its process driven interfaces CRM systems prompt telemarketing agents to ask to right questions that are needed to identify and qualify new sales opportunities. By guiding agents through your unique selling steps it means that leads are consistently progressed to improve opportunity quality and ultimately increase conversion rates. Each sales process can be mapped to CRM to include branching logic, mandatory fields and stage gating that prevents leads being progressed until all steps have been completed.
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7. Web Lead Capture CRM integrates with web forms to automatically import enquiries, registrations, downloads and other online activity. These actions can be used as workflow triggers that send automated email notifications and schedule follow-up activities ensuring timely communications are made and to develop increasingly efficient sales processes.
8. Importing Data Data purchased from list providers or collected from external data sources can be imported as a one-off import, or as using a recurring batched process. The result is a a complete view of every relationship from a single interface.
9. Event Management A CRM solution such as Microsoft Dynamics has the flexibility to manage all the steps to plan and followup your business events. Post-event processes handled in CRM can include attendance reporting, automating follow-up messages and converting registrations to opportunities helping sales team to maximize lead generation and assess the return from each event.
10. Social Engagement Microsoft Social Engagement integrates with CRM enabling sales teams to monitor conversations around their products and market. They can follow prospective customer needs, problems and concerns, and join the social conversation to turn a cold contact into a sales opportunity or proactively respond where service issues are identified. In addition to providing a new source of leads, the social insights gained by listening to these conversations will help to shape sales strategy, dialogues and even product development.
11. Email Marketing Integration Integrated email marketing solutions enrich CRM with campaign reporting data, including which emails are opened and which links are clicked. With real-time insight into customer behaviour sales teams are equipped with more intelligence when they make sales calls enabling them to tailor communications to known interests and anticipate new requirements.
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— Increasing Account Value — 12. Account Management Connect sales teams across multiple regions to a shared customer account, including key contacts, products ordered, opportunities won / lost, active service agreements, contact history, shared documents and any other detail relevant to your business. to instantly see a true picture of each relationship. Prepared with this detail, account managers are better able to understand the nature of each relationship and have productive conversations.
13. Contract Renewals By handling contract and agreement renewal processes CRM helps sales teams increase recurring revenue streams including income from licenses, support and maintenance agreements.
14. Increased Customer Satisfaction With tools to handle support issues and send automated email updates, helps to keep customers informed to drive positive experiences and contribute towards increasing account values and helping businesses to recognise and reward their most profitable customers.
15. Personalised Nurture Messages Nurture programs keep your sales message in front of prospects who aren’t yet ready to buy - without over committing your sales resources. Campaigns can be configured in CRM to nurture prospects who aren’t yet 'sales ready’ which ensures that matching prospects are drip fed personalized emails and triggering further actions when prospects react to your calls to action.
16. Single Interface to Manage All Interactions Implementing a CRM solution helps sales teams prioritize their actions and tasks. With full visibility you and your team know who to call first when following up customers, leads and sales opportunities. With the benefit of a single view of each relationship and interaction the value of every account is easily understood helping managers strengthen communications and focus resources on protecting their most profitable accounts.
17. Account Cross-Sell & Upsell By integrating with external data sources, CRM can store order and transactional data. As a result sales teams can check the purchase history on each account to identify new cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and even formulate loyalty programs.
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— Selling Effectively — 18. Accurate Sales Forecasting Forecasts, pipeline charts and sales statistics create insight into projected performance. This data is available on-demand CRM so sales time isn't wasted compiling reports or making decisions with suspect data.
19. Product Management CRM makes it easy to compare historic and current sales results giving product and sales managers the information they need to make changes based on market trends and the competitive activity. By capturing why a sales opportunity was won or lost, CRM solutions provide insight into critical strategic strengths and weaknesses. This may highlight changes in the win/loss ratio for a specific product line, due to new competitors, lower pricing or quality concerns.
20. Quote Management From simple quotations using standard product lists to proposals involving bundled products and services CRM quoting solutions help sales teams quickly produce professional quotes. For quotes that consist of multiple line items the cost, profit, part numbers and revisions can be tracked to transform quote quality and cut administration giving sales staff more time to sell.
21. Mobile CRM There can often be a gap in communications between field and office based sales staff due to a lack of shared information. Mobile CRM apps enable all sales staff to access their opportunities, customers, activities and other sales data wherever they go which means you can get as much done outside the office, as you do inside, by using CRM on a tablet or mobile device.
22. Email Tracking By tracking every Microsoft Outlook email sent and received on any device, CRM gives sales professionals a complete communications history on every account, contact and opportunity record.
23. Sales Dashboards Use live sales dashboards to monitor active leads and sales opportunities to react with informed, timely decisions. Including charts, statistics, sales metrics and KPI graphics, CRM systems provides real-time visibility that help to raise productivity, increase sales and improve operational efficiency.
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— Winning Customers — 24. Tracking Every Sales Opportunity Through Your Selling Stages Whether you have an average sales cycle of a few weeks involving 2-3 sales steps, or a more complex series of stages running to several months CRM tracks every sales opportunity through your defined milestones. If you want to be sure that your sales team is consistently following your selling methodology, your CRM will enforce your rules with guided processes and gated stages.
25. Competitor Tracking Build out detailed profiles for each organisation you compete with including known accounts they work with and which active sales opportunities you are competing on. As well as building up a detailed knowledge of your competitors including their strengths and weakness this provides great information for sales teams, who can see what opportunities specific competitors may be in the running for based on region, industry vertical or other criteria.
26. Electronic Order Signing To shorten the time from quote to order CRM applications integrate with electronic document signing solutions to create an effective contracting process with faster responsiveness.
27. Pipeline Management Without a CRM system, sales teams struggle to understand their pipeline in real-time leading to efforts being focused in the wrong areas. CRM applications generate real-time pipeline reports which are used as the basis for sales and production forecasts which in turn increase efficiency and predictable management of cash flow.
28. Qualifying Leads It's not uncommon for a prospect to be perceived as highly qualified by one sales representative yet appear completely unqualified to another. CRM processes guide users through your defined sales steps with guided steps that are supported by your business rules to remove subjective verdicts and improve opportunity quality by ensuring leads are consistently qualified.
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— Selling As a Team — 29. Sharing Sales Documents CRM gives your team an effective platform to share sales materials and other documents helping them improve communication and ultimately close more sales - especially if sales teams are spread out. For advanced document management CRM can be integrated with libraries on SharePoint, OneDrive and other storage resources.
30. Managing User Access Using sophisticated security permissions, customer relationship management applications safeguards sales and customer data by restricting access to authorised users and ensuring that permissions to access sensitive data is only granted based on defined roles or individual sales user names. Further permissions can be set to prevent users exporting data or deleting records.
31. Calendar Integration Synchronises calendars between CRM and your preferred email application to manage schedules, check availability and alert office or remote sales staff about newly scheduled tasks, activities, meetings, appointments, phone calls and recurring events.
32. Bringing Sales & Marketing Teams Closer A major disconnect between sales and marketing teams can arise in defining when a lead should be qualified. In an alarming number of instances the leads directed to sales reps aren’t actively worked on. Often this is cause by differing views of what a qualified lead is. For better sales effectiveness, a precise qualification process can be mapped to CRM that removes uncertainty and provides sales and marketing staff with clear assessment if a lead is ‘sales ready’ Through other functions including lead scoring, automated lead routing and email campaign tracking, Dynamics CRM creates greater transparency to remove barriers between sales and marketing teams.
33. Territory Management Territory Management enables organisations with complex sales structures to organize their activities based on regions, product lines or other criteria. CRM territory management handles any customer segmentation. Simply apply rules to automatically place customers into defined territories for measurement of territory profit levels and plan resource allocation.
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34. Assigning Sales Tasks Assign tasks and responsibilities to sales individuals to give them responsibility for ensuring a positive outcome.
35. Collaborate with Automatic Sales Notifications Automated CRM workflow rules trigger email alerts when important events occur prompting urgent sales attention to avoid lost business. This can include notifications when new opportunities are assigned, high value opportunities are created, no recent account contact or in the event of opportunities not followed up within a defined number of days.
About Preact Preact have been implementing CRM solutions for sales teams since 1993 and with low staff turnover our team is one of the most experienced in the UK. Our CRM services include requirements scoping, database customisation, project management, CRM integration, training and user support. We offer you the reassurance of strong customer reference sites in many industry sectors who advocate our services. User adoption is a prerequisite for achieving success with CRM but as highlighted in this document this is also a frequently encountered obstacle among sales teams. We recognise that every CRM system must meet the needs of its users so we place user empowerment at the forefront of every project and we’ll continually promote user engagement and training. Our Microsoft Gold Competency and Microsoft President’s Club member marks the fact that Preact is one of the top performing partner’s in the UK to have met Microsoft’s stringent criteria and earn these prestigious competencies. Contact us to discuss your sales automation requirement, learn about our CRM solutions and receive advice from our consultants.
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