Friday, May 30, 2014

How to Achieve More Sales Accountability With Your CRM



CRM solutions have many uses, one of the most profitable is turning your prospects into long-lasting clients. When used correctly, the CRM solutions you utilize will make the entire sales process much easier. However, your CRM should be doing much more for you than simply improving customer service. What can you do with your CRM solution to improve sales accountability?

1.  Collaborate
If you’re not collaborating by sharing documents and other data across the enterprise, you’re missing out on a valuable asset within your CRM. When you are collaborating with information, everyone is on the same page, including sales managers who have a better view of what’s happening in the field. If it’s the bigger picture that everyone is missing, collaboration can provide clarity.

2.  Update Contact Info
This might seem like a given for many business professionals who use CRM to build a list of contacts and manage it completely. However, for small business owners who have too many tasks on their plate at any given moment, the ability to efficiently keep track of contact information is invaluable. Bridging the calendar into this process also helps sales departments keep track of follow-ups and offer more sales accountability.

3. Partnering
Your contacts are one of your most valuable assets. They could be your future partner’s most valuable assets too, which is why CRM is so important when it comes to the partner selling process. You could be seeing much larger sales as a result.

4. Empower Your Sales Managers
Coaching, good coaching, is valuable in any sales department. However, without the proper information, sales managers don’t have what they need to offer a good coaching experience. Sales managers need to know how their sales reps are performing, where their strengths shine and their weaknesses lie. CRM reporting can provide them with this information.

5.  Sharing Among the Salesforce
Much like collaboration helps the entire enterprise, sharing information across the salesforce helps them do their jobs more efficiently. For instance, when two different
sales reps on your staff contact a prospect about the same product, it reflects poorly on your brand. Keep everyone on the salesforce in tune with one another with your CRM to ensure that you’re not duplicating.

6. Notification
Your CRM should have tools that let you know when you need to follow up with a prospect. These reminders keep your sales staff accountable for the work they’ve done previously. Timing is everything in sales, so stop missing appointments by utilizing your CRM’s notification tools.

7.  Progress Reports
Your sales managers can’t give one-on-one attention everyday. However, using automated tools in your CRM, you can give your sales reps a quick look at where they stand with their current performance in the field. It’s sometimes the push they need to motivate some self-improvement.

Not all CRM solutions come with the type of reporting tools your salesforce needs to effectively report their sales progress. However,
Front Row Solutions has developed the fastest and most efficient mobile CRM app for sales reporting. If you’ve had trouble getting your salesforce to report back to you, you’ll find an excellent sales accountability tool in our solution.