With the rise of digital sales platforms and expanding enterprises, the landscape of sales technology is more varied and overwhelming than ever before. Unfortunately for the Luddites, it’s also more necessary.
According to Nucleus Research, in 2014 the average ROI on CRM software was $8.71 for each dollar spent. In 2021, Dynamic Consultants speculated that this number rose to $30.48 for every dollar spent. That’s a radical jump in impact for a piece of sales software.
In this guide, we’ll cover what a sales CRM is and how integrating a sales CRM into your business can optimize every step of your sales process. By eliminating busy work and solving the most frequent (and painful) process issues, the right sales CRM can dramatically improve your company’s success.
What is a sales CRM?
A sales CRM (customer relationship management) tool is software that enables a company to manage and improve its relationships with prospects and customers.
However, customer relationship management itself varies depending on what department you’re talking to. A support team might use a CRM to manage customer tickets, while marketing teams may use the same tool to analyze how consumers respond to online campaigns.
When it comes to sales, a CRM is primarily used to streamline pipeline management. With sales CRM tools, you can safely store customer information, track and optimize your pipeline to drive more sales, and ultimately generate more revenue.
Wondering exactly how a sales CRM can benefit your sales team? Let’s take a look.
How a sales CRM can impact the sales process
By automating repetitive and error-prone tasks, sales CRMs enable your team to put in more face time with prospects and eliminate mistakes. With a strong CRM, your reps aren’t busy with busy work—they’re busy closing deals.
Here’s how CRMs impact a few key sales activities.
Prospecting stage
Every sales process starts with discovery. You have a product or service to sell, but you need someone to buy it. How do you find the people who need what you’re selling? It’s not easy—even when companies identify leads, recent studies show that 50 percent of those leads aren’t a good fit for the product or service.
Challenges + how a sales CRM helps
Prospecting comes with a slew of challenges, including:
- Finding high-quality prospects among numerous leads
- Getting in touch with prospects
- Scheduling and confirming meetings with prospects
When you incorporate a sales CRM into your process, the above problems are diminished and/or eliminated. With a centralized database of customer information, marketing and sales teams can stay on the same page about prospects.
In the prospecting stage, a CRM will:
- Align your lead-scoring parameters.
- Ensure that leads passed from marketing to sales are high-quality and worth pursuing.
- Create a central hub for prospect data that’s accessible to all team members at all times.
- Help you establish credibility and trust with your future customers.
- Enable a smoother communication process and consistent messaging.
- Allow you to personalize content and automate follow-ups.
- Encourage prospects to move steadily down the sales funnel.
Lead management stage
According to Forbes, only 27 percent of leads are ever contacted. Lead management helps sales reps easily see where leads are in the sales pipeline and prevents good opportunities from slipping through the cracks.
Challenges + how a sales CRM helps
Managing every lead that comes your way is just plain tricky. You may have a hard time:
- Tracking all your contacts.
- Organizing and finding customer data.
- Generating quick and accurate insights about leads.
But by using a sales force automation (SFA) system, CRMs automate numerous steps in the lead management process. With SFA:
- Leads are automatically tracked, scored, and assigned to sales reps.
- Leads have a responsible, dedicated rep who can guide and nurture them through the pipeline.
Additionally, when you integrate your sales force automation with your CRM, you’re able to:
- Build a sales process around the customer experience.
- Prioritize follow-up messages and tasks according to where leads are in the pipeline.
- Facilitate personal and timely interactions.
Contact management stage
The days of the Rolodex are well and truly over. In our digital-first world, most businesses track contacts with contact management software. This software keeps your contacts organized, up-to-date, and accessible while also providing a central contact database for all reps.
Challenges + how a sales CRM helps
Contact management systems only store and organize contacts. They lack some of the bells and whistles of a sales CRM platform and don’t always measure up on the productivity scale.
But when you integrate your contact management software with a CRM, you can:
- Manage the relationships you have with those contacts.
- Track your interactions with prospects and use sales automation to enhance individual sales and marketing strategies.
- Ensure perfectly timed and personalized communication with all your contacts—no matter what stage of the pipeline they’re in.
Sales presenting and pitching stage
Even the most experienced sales reps can feel the pressure when it comes to presentations. For complex cases, a quality demo is crucial to proving why your product or service is the best investment. Getting that presentation right matters.
Challenges + how a sales CRM helps
Sales reps can easily flub a presentation if they’re underprepared or disorganized. Not having the right information at their fingertips can make them feel flustered or frustrated, especially when prospects have questions or objections. Even worse, if a sales rep doesn’t have the latest details on the prospect, they may very well be wasting their pitch on someone who’s not ready to convert.
This is where a sales CRM comes to the rescue. With a CRM:
- Reps can stay organized when scheduling and conducting meetings during this stage.
- Reps can readily access their notes during a presentation, enabling them to answer questions right away and recall exactly what information they need to track down for a prospect.
- Detailed agendas and scripts are on hand to help reps deliver a solid pitch.
- Customer data is easy to access, giving reps valuable insights into their audience’s pain points, needs, behaviors, and level of interest.
- Reps can personalize their presentations and close more sales.
Closing stage
In this final stage, sales reps either seal the deal or lose out on hours of work. Reps need to know when a prospect is ready to close. No rep wants to miss a window of opportunity or push for a close too early.
Challenges + how a sales CRM helps
Timing is key. It’s alarmingly common for a sales rep to drop the ball in the final stretch because they’re focused on other leads and tasks at the same time. It’s also easy to forget how important existing customers are to a sales strategy.
New customers are necessary to the success of any business, but it’s a lot less expensive to retain customers than to convert new ones. The probability of selling to a current customer is between 60 and 70 percent, while the chances of selling to a new prospect are a chilling 5 to 20 percent. Ensuring sales reps stay on top of different types of deals is a hefty challenge.
CRM sales software serves as a sales rep’s personalized coach, keeping them focused all the way to the finish line. CRMs are there to:
- Help reps keep track of timing and tasks that must be completed during closing.
- Send reminders about documents that still need to be signed or handled.
- Create opportunities for upselling and cross-selling by reminding reps to stay in touch about new products and features that fit a client’s needs.
Reporting and analytics
Working in sales means accumulating massive amounts of data. But data doesn’t mean much unless you’re able to organize and analyze it in a way that benefits your business.
Challenges + how a sales CRM helps
For companies that don’t use a sales CRM, analyzing performance issues can be a big challenge. Their teams waste valuable time compiling data into spreadsheets and wrestling with Excel formulas just to make sense of a few numbers.
The beauty of a sales CRM is that it handles data analysis for you. The best CRM automatically compiles customer information into real-time reports, which provide insights into how your sales department is functioning as a whole.
Zendesk Sell’s reporting capabilities, for example, include the following:
- Sales funnel analysis
This report shows you where prospects are currently sitting in the sales pipeline and how many are dropping out of the pipeline. - Conversion reports
These reports assess how well individual reps are moving prospects through the pipeline. They can also reveal general conversion rates across your sales team. - Forecasted sales
This report predicts expected revenues by analyzing the value, estimated close date, and win-likelihood of sales in your pipeline. - Activity overview reports
These reports provide a breakdown of your team’s activities, including the number of calls made, emails sent, appointments held, and tasks completed. - Goal reports
These reports track your team’s movement toward revenue goals. They can be customized and filtered by pipeline stage, sales activity type, or individual rep.
It’s up to you how granular you want to get with your reports, but one thing’s for certain: If there are any bottlenecks in your sales process or performance issues with reps, your sales CRM will find them.
Performance management and activity tracking
A sales manager’s job isn’t easy. Overseeing a sales team entails onboarding new recruits and coaching experienced reps while also managing sales strategies to make sure the department is aligned, efficient, and productive.
Challenges + how a sales CRM helps
When sales reps are in the weeds, they can lose their objectivity. Meanwhile, managers are forced to rely on their reps’ reports, which can make accurate forecasting difficult.
Managers need to balance the personalities, egos, and morale of their team members, too. The way reps feel about their progress doesn’t always line up with their data, so managers must be able to track their team’s activity accurately to provide the most effective coaching.
CRMs provide:
- A quick and precise snapshot of the sales pipeline, so managers can see how sales are progressing.
- More accurate forecasts to share with higher-ups.
- Customizable reports that are fast and simple to generate.
- Correct data so managers can identify where each rep has room to improve.
Sales management CRM software improves efficiency, engagement, team morale, and productivity—all of which ultimately contribute to higher lead conversion rates.