What is a sales CRM, and how does it help businesses grow?

• What is a sales CRM?
• How a sales CRM can impact the sales process
• Tips on how to choose sales CRM software
• Types of CRMs

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Forecasted sales

   This report predicts expected revenues by analyzing the value, estimated close date, and win-likelihood of sales in your pipeline.

4. 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.

5. 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.

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.