December, 2018
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) empowers an organization's sales team to easily manage leads, schedule reminders, follow ups, keep a track on status, communications and much more in an authentic way. The practical purpose of a CRM is to eliminate any activity from a sales representative’s day that doesn’t involve generating new leads, interacting with prospects, sharing proposals, ensuring follow ups etc as much as possible while reducing the amount of effort an organization spends on managing their sales process.
According to a recent survey, sales executives only spend about 35% of their time actually selling, with the majority of their day spent on administrative tasks, research, and other non-selling obligations. These obligations can be things like:
- Creating and updating lead records in an excel sheet
- Looking up prospects’ phone numbers before a call and writing up call status afterwards
- Researching a prospect online i.e., finding their location, job title, and social media accounts and updating the same in different excel sheets.
- Follow Ups
An effective CRM allows sales representatives to focus more time and attention on the core activities, such as qualifying and working on leads, improving their sales process, and giving their best prospects more personal attention.
Here are 6 compelling reasons why you should switch to a CRM:
- 1.
Your Team Does More Admin Work than Engagement: As you objectively examine your sales process, you may possibly notice that your team is working on more administrative tasks at the expense of customer acquisition. A major chunk of your sales team’s day gets wasted in tracking and maintaining Excel records. If you use Google Sheets to share them across, any disruption to internet connectivity can lead to unnecessary wastage of time.
- 2.
Your Contact Lists are Scattered Everywhere: At the commencement of a business, it is easier to manage prospects in Google/Excel sheets as the leads are less as compared to an established firm. As you move towards a steady growth, tracking and updating data in scattered excel sheets become a task. Therefore, contacts that are currently scattered in spreadsheets, business cards, sticky notes, vCards, mobile devices and social accounts can be merged and imported into one location through a CRM including their job title, company name, phone number, email id, location, status, follow ups etc.
- 3.
Inaccurate Records: It becomes difficult for the sales team to close a deal when they have inaccurate contact information such as phone number or email id which maybe mistyped while feeding the information in an excel sheet after qualifying a lead. This can be true specially while using Google sheets as the file is available with anyone it is shared with which exposes the sheet for accidental overwriting and deletions.
- 4.
You Have No Idea What Some Sales Executives Do All Day: It is a possibility that your sales executives are spending a major chunk of their time in updating current records, chasing dead leads, following up but still getting no response etc. It is also possible that due to a large number of leads, they spend most of their chasing various prospects and forget to fill up sheets. Also when we talk about on-field executives, it is not possible for them to update excel sheets on the go due to various issues such as internet connectivity, lack of app support etc. In these cases, you are bound to think that your team is not working as there is a lack of evidence of the same.
- 5.
Disorganized Data: Most likely, you’ve created various shared drive folders and inbox folder tags to organize different type of information such as proposals, quotes, invoices, etc. The sales team then manually sends these documents to prospects according to their stage in sales cycle. Moreover, it is difficult to keep a track on all the communication activities. With Eazy CRM, you’ll be able to get a full picture of how the relationship has progressed without the need to dig through countless folders and inboxes. You can remotely keep a track on all the active leads and all the activities being initiated to convert the prospect into client anytime according to your convenience.
- 6.
Your salespersons get perplexed when asked about a particular customer: As a entrepreneur, you might have encountered cases where your sales team has no idea about a prospect or lead status due to huge database of prospects. Eazy CRM can help you in this case by putting all your database in one place. Its effective reporting system can enable the sales team to keep a record of lead status on their fingertips. It will also enable them to focus on prospects according to their position in sales cycle.
Above mentioned are some of the major early warning signs which indicate a compulsion to start gathering knowledge about CRM technology. CRM technology is easy to learn and can provide tangible results for your organization. Eazy CRM creates the consistency that’s necessary for your sales team to accurately measure the health of their sales funnel and the impact of their efforts to make decisions accordingly.