Did you know? According to in-house research by Forbes, there only 27% of leads ever get contacted by businesses. They run a test on 10,000 companies and found that companies take almost 46 hours and 53 minutes to contact a lead, which is quite slow!
Now imagine in this fast-moving world where people want everything over their fingertips, how would your potential customer feel about waiting this long for a response? The answer is pretty simple, this will frustrate your potential customer.
You must be wondering what’s the solution and how can you prevent your business from losing valuable leads. The answer is a sales management system, popularly known as sales CRM.
But before we jump on to how CRM can boost your sales, let’s first understand the shortfalls of the traditional sales process.
Currently, the traditional sales process that most organizations have in place has many shortcomings. Some of the crucial ones are:
1. Improper Utilization Of Time
“Time is money”, but following the traditional sales process, you can waste both your time and money. The traditional sales process involves manual data entry of all the important data of prospects and leads in the company’s database. This is definitely a tedious task draining lots of time and energy of your sales team.
2. Too Many Leaks In The Sales Pipeline
Manual data entry can open the doors for errors, which can lead to losing potential customers from your sales pipelines. Any error in data entries can cause confusion about the position of your prospect in the sales funnel and your sales pipeline. This might ultimately lead to many prospects getting dropped from your funnel due to the lack of proper follow-ups.
3. Extremely Time Consuming
The traditional sales process involves keeping tabs on each one of your leads, tracking their journey against the sales funnel, sending customized messages at each step, etc. Doing all of these things manually can eat up a lot of time for your sales team, decrease their efficiency and end up losing many potential customers. So what’s the solution to these problems faced by companies trying to sell traditionally? By automating manual, time-consuming processes like data entry, businesses can increase efficiency. A customer management system or a CRM is one such automation tool that can help your sales team sell better.
Here’s everything you need to know about a CRM:
Businesses believe in the motto “customer is kind.” However, making your potential customers feel important is actually easier said than done. Customer relationship management software is an essential tool that manages all the activities and strategies used by businesses while interacting with their current and potential customers.
Often referred to as sales management software, the core function of a CRM is to help your sales team better manage the customer data, track their position on the sales funnel, and effectively communicate with them to bring better conversions.
According to Statista, the CRM market is constantly growing at a rapid pace and will grow up to 49.6 billion U.S. dollars in size in the year 2025. With its multiple benefits, CRM can transform how your sales team interacts with your potential customers to sell your products/services. Here are some of the reasons why a CRM is important for your sales team:
Here are the following reasons why CRM is important to automate sales and increase overall efficiency:
Lead management is one of the biggest challenges faced by your sales reps. Whether it’s identifying leads from different sources and gathering them in one place, classifying leads based on demographics, likes & preferences, and behavior, identifying their position in the sales funnel, etc., is possible swiftly with CRM software.
Having a CRM for your sales team helps in reducing the time spent in manually arranging the lead’s data in excel sheets and enhances the lead management process.
Imagine how much time and energy it consumes when your sales reps have to refer to 100s of different files & documents, refer to various software, etc., to access the client’s data.
With CRM software, your sales reps can have all the data they need at their fingertips like the demographics of the customer, and what products they like even before they hop on a call with them. This will make the communication between your potential customers and your sales reps much more effective and they will be able to bring more conversions.
Communication with potential customers and a business is an absolute must in order for conversion. Your sales reps are at the forefront of customer interactions that happen through phone calls, chat support, chatbots, emails, etc.
With the help of a sales management system or CRM, your sales team can integrate all these different channels in a single place and interact with your potential customers more effectively. A CRM can track & log all the phone calls, track email communication, analyze social media interactions & engagement, etc.
To provide top-notch customer service, it is important that your sales & marketing efforts are aligned and in sync. Both marketing & sales are customer-facing departments where marketing work on bringing the leads to your business and sales take it over from there and convert these leads into customers.
With the help of CRM, you can easily integrate your marketing & sales efforts. Sales CRM software enables both departments to stay updated with real-time customer data, their movement through the sales funnel, their stage in the customer journey, interactions, etc. The marketing team can easily send the leads to the sales team & the sales team can then begin the process of conversion.
These are the four major ways through which a CRM can help in automating your sales and bring more revenue.
The world is changing rapidly and for business to stay relevant, it is important to adapt to these changes before the competitors. Automation through CRMs is a part of global digital transformation invented to enhance the ease of doing business.
CRM not only has multiple benefits for handling your current and potential customers but it also works as an elixir for your teams like sales, marketing, customer service, etc. It makes the day-to-day operations less complicated and your teams can take more time for creating strategies to serve your customers better.
That being said, CRM software is truly a win-win for everyone!
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