Working as a sales manager is no easy job. As a sales manager, you’re accountable for leading a diverse team of sales associates to success. Doing so often means working long hours, reconciling vastly different opinions, and being the last line of defense against lost deals. In the course of your career, you will face new challenges every day. While a few challenges demand your leadership and managerial skills, a few others can be solved through effective implementation of technology. Below are 3 commonly faced sales challenges that Vtiger CRM solves for sales managers.
Challenge 1: Non-selling activities are eating up my sales associates’ selling time
Recently, The State of Sales Productivity report revealed that sales associates spend a mere 33% of their time on actual selling. Non-selling activities such as browsing emails, attending meetings, data entry, and other administrative tasks consume a huge part of sales associate’s time. Though these activities don’t help in direct selling, they are an indispensable part of the job and must be done.
Solution:
With Vtiger CRM and its powerful automation, your sales associates can save at least one hour every day on the non-selling tasks. Here’s how:
Save 20 minutes when working with emails: A sales associate spends an average of 30 hours per week on checking and replying to emails. However, out of the countless emails that reach their inbox, only a few demand sales associates’ time and require immediate action. Vtiger Sales Inbox’s ownership feature lets your sales associates spend time only on emails that need their attention. If an email comes from a new contact, Vtiger’s mail room automatically creates a contact or opportunity record in Vtiger CRM – saving the time spent on manual creation. Since every email is linked to the sender’s contact record, sales associates can dive deeper into the engagement history to write effective sales replies. Also, sales associates can use Vtiger’s email templates and canned responses to reply, instead of spending time on writing custom emails every time they reach out to a prospect. And once an email is replied, the sales associate can mark it as done to refocus attention on their remaining open conversations.
Save 10 minutes when attending sales calls: When sales associates make prospecting calls, they spend a few minutes to create contacts and opportunities in the CRM manually. When sales associate receive calls, they spend a few minutes pulling up caller’s information. And at the end of every sales call, associates spend a few minutes logging the call details in the CRM.
Vtiger’s Phone calls module allows sales associates to save these minutes. Sales associates can make a call through Vtiger with a single click. And when on a call, sales associates can create contacts, opportunities, and tasks in the CRM with just a click. For an inbound call, Vtiger pulls up caller’s information from the CRM to help the sales associate be prepared before picking the call. All the phone call that go through Vtiger CRM are automatically logged and linked to the respective contact or opportunity.
Save 20 minutes when searching for sales collateral: A recent study notes that 68% of organizations have five or more content repositories to store information that helps sales associates close deals. Customer and deal related information are scattered on shared drives, file servers, emails, spreadsheets, papers, personal devices and even people’s head. As a result, sales associates spend a significant amount of time searching for marketing content and even recreating documents when not located in time.
Vtiger CRM allows your sales associates capture and organize all deal related information in one place. Viger’s Document module acts as a central repository for storing all sales collaterals. Since sales associates are already using Vtiger when talking to prospects, they can pull up sales materials from right within CRM in a few clicks. Sales associates can use folders to organise sales collaterals needed at different stages of prospecting. And because we understand that Google like search has become ingrained in our search behaviour, we’ve designed Vtiger’s global search feature to pull documents too.
Save 10 minutes with effective collaboration: If your sales associates are still using emails or for internal collaboration, then there is a high possibility that they are wasting valuable minutes on delayed responses and probable miscommunications. Vtiger’s collaboration tools – smart reminders, @mentions, and internal chat – makes your team collaboration simpler, faster, and more efficient. Since all deal related information is already present in Vtiger, sales associates can quickly find out if a similar deal was closed earlier and @mention the associate who closed the deal to get suggestions.
Challenge 2: My sales associates are not social selling
More and more customers are turning towards social media before making a purchasing decision. A LinkedIn research notes that 72% of B2B customers turn to social channels before making a purchase and 84% of B2B executives use social channels to make purchase decisions. Another study notes that 78% of salespeople using social outsell their peers. These stats reiterate the fact that social selling is no longer an option but a powerful strategy to sell more.
Solution:
Vtiger puts social media feeds right inside the CRM so your sales associates can build a stronger relationship with prospects on Twitter (and soon Facebook) and be more likely to turn them into customers. With Vtiger’s Twitter integration, your sales associates can filter tweets based on keywords that show interest in your industry, products or services to identify potential buyers. After identifying potential customers, your sales associates can create lead or opportunity record in Vtiger on a click and continue monitoring the prospect’s social behavior. After identifying your prospect’s challenges and goals, sales associates can use this information to nurture a relationship with the prospect and eventually build trust and credibility. Since Vtiger captures every engagement that your sales associates have with the prospects, the associates can use the insights to craft a personalized business solution when they reach out to prospects.
Want to learn boost how to boost your sales with Twitter? Here’s a 6-minute guide to winning social sales with Twitter
Challenge 3: My sales associates look busy, but they are not hitting the quota
When you lack visibility into your sales associates’ daily activities, pipeline, and performance, guiding your sales team to success could be an uphill task. Without monitoring the metrics such as the number of sales calls your associates make every day, numbers meetings scheduled and held, the amount of time spent on each opportunity, you can’t create an efficient sales process to help your sales team hit the monthly goals.
Solution:
Vtiger’s Sales Insights gives you complete visibility into your sales funnel, your sales team’s daily activities, performance and results. Vtiger’s Sales Insights tells you how busy your team is with various sales activities and how well are those sales activities driving conversion rate. You can track if your sales associates are giving right attention to big opportunities and monitor how long it takes for your associates to progress opportunities through each sales stage. Are your sales associates losing too many opportunities? Vtiger provides you with Lost Reason Analysis chart that helps you understand the loopholes in your sales process. Use this analysis to frame your sales strategies and train your sales team to win more deals.
Do you have a sales challenge that we can help you solve? Feel free to comment below or write to us at [email protected]
