How To Improve Your Team’s Sales Productivity
By Sophia Krich-Brinton
If you manage a sales team, your top priorities include advancing deals that are nearing closing, following up with leads in a timely fashion, managing data that drives forecast accuracy, and engaging with past customers to drive new opportunities. Old school tactics like tracking spreadsheets for pipeline status, reviewing emails for correct contact information, and checking handwritten notes for contact status can be tedious, limit your team’s sales productivity, and are error-prone, but it’s the way your company has always done it.
Once your team finds the data they need, they likely email or call as many leads as possible, trying to pick the highest potential clients from the lot. Most likely, follow up doesn’t happen as quickly as you’d like. There just aren’t enough hours in the day. So precious time is spent on contacts that go nowhere, and your window with the high-potential leads gets smaller and smaller. When calls or emails aren’t happening, you’re logging interactions, taking notes in Excel or perhaps even with paper and pen. If a team member is out sick, you might accidentally duplicate efforts with their customers since their method of note-taking might not match your own. Your team does the best with what they have.
In an ideal world, you would not need to spend your time searching for client information. Instead, you would have everything you needed in a single, organized location, freeing up your days to respond to leads in a timely fashion. But with all the work involved in following up on a single lead, how can you and your team get out of the weeds?
CRM Software As A Sales Productivity Tool
You know the potential answer to your pain points is adopting a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology for your team, but the required training and upfront cost are intimidating. There’s the initial purchase, the need for an admin on your team to manage the technology, get it set up, and train everyone else on how to use it.
But, pretend cost and training aren’t an issue. The truth is, CRM would solve most of your problems. A CRM would provide you with a pipeline framework without any of the pitfalls in your current system. A CRM would include automatic lead and email tracking. It would change weekly reporting from a multi-hour pain point to the click of a button. All your customer data would be housed in a single secure location, improving your team’s communication, not to mention the countless applications available within CRMs such as Salesforce to address other pain points you might have.
Your sales team would thank you, and they’re not the only ones who would benefit. Your marketing team would benefit from all of your data in a single place, and could more easily generate targeted marketing campaigns. Your customer service team would thank you, since a CRM would save them from having to search in multiple locations for client and lead information.
Let Us Handle The Dirty Work
That’s where Rainmaker comes in. Instead of hiring a dedicated Salesforce Admin or taking one of your sales staff off the phone, give the experts at Rainmaker the task of reviewing your current processes and recommending how a CRM like Salesforce could improve your sales efficiency. Instead of taking your staff away from their processes to learn how Salesforce works, set up your pipeline, enter in your contacts, and do all of the other minutiae required to move into a new system, Rainmaker can guide you toward the correct CRM implementation for your unique needs.
Work with Rainmaker’s experts in one of our InnovationLabs to gather information from your team to help you diagnose and solve the challenges you face with your current sales process. The folks at Rainmaker will clarify whether existing versus new technology will help you achieve your company’s objectives. Let your sales team focus on what they do best. With Rainmaker’s help, they can hit the CRM ground running, more efficiently than ever.
