Gone are the days when sales managers had to plough through a barrage of spreadsheets to keep track of customers and their purchases. With a CRM in place, you can now access everything you need to know about your customers in one centralized location.
In 2019, it’s all about equipping your sales team with the right tools to delight customers. A CRM enables you to customize experiences that will capture the interest of your customers and captivate them to take a decision that will satisfy their needs.
If you’re a sales manager looking to boost your team’s productivity, keep an eye out for these CRM features that will play an integral part in growing your business.
Quotas and Forecasts
An active sales manager motivates the sales team to close more deals and reach their targets. An apt CRM enables you to plan and predict sales cycles from pipeline to closure by setting quotas for each team member. Sales quotas can be set to an amount in dollars or the currency of your choice. This information can then be used to make forecasts for expected sales per month, quarter or financial year. Based on such forecasts, sales managers can make adjustments to quotas for weaker performing representatives and help them reach their sales target on time.
Group Mailbox
For businesses, a cluttered inbox is a sign of troubled times. A CRM implemented for your business should allow you to create a shared mailbox that gives email access to specific groups or users from your organization. As for sales managers, you will have complete admin authority over the group mailbox with the ability to track open conversations from customers and assign unanswered emails to sales representatives with adequate bandwidth to carry the conversation forward. Your sales team will also have the added advantage of creating leads, contacts, organizations, opportunities and projects, linked to customer emails, directly from the group mailbox.
Mobile CRM
In the era of smartphones and digital tablets, having a mobile CRM app is essential. A mobile CRM app lets your sales team do their job on the fly. It enables your salesforce to quickly create contacts and record customer conversations, even when they’re on the road. For field agents, it should also have a check-in and check-out feature to accurately gauge work hours spent outside the office. Your field agents spend a good chunk of their time away from their desks at customer locations and might need to edit critical data offline such that it can be synced with the CRM system when they have better network coverage.
Collaboration
When you have more than one salesperson engaging with a customer, it might be a challenge to keep everyone up to date with all the information. In such cases, it helps to be able to @mention coworkers on a note, contact or opportunity to lend you a hand. This way, you’ll be able to tag peers and get their expert opinion on customer requests and resolve queries in a jiffy. Another great feature you can use is an internal chat system that can do wonders when you have to collaborate with colleagues from different teams on a particular task. For instance, when you have to get confidential data on your customers conveyed to your coworkers, a private message on chat will help you get the message across without delay.
Data Visualization
A picture is worth more than a thousand words. To put that into context, you have to consider the gigabytes of data you’re likely to receive about your customers from different devices and platforms. It’ll do you good to invest in a full-fledged CRM that can manage to capture that data and convert it into a simple yet strong visualization of sales opportunity and pipeline.Data visualization will make it easier on the eyes to analyze and qualify leads as they start to pour in.
Sales Insights
As a sales manager, your biggest concern is your team’s performance. Fortunately, CRMs today come with an entire gamut of dashboards and activity reports to give you a hawkeye view over your sales pipeline. A good CRM should enable you to measure lead conversions per person and revenue generated per quarter among other key metrics. Take advantage of these sales insights you gain from the CRM to help your team sell smarter and close more deals in less time.
With that said, you shouldn’t get carried away by all the features a CRM has to offer. It’s best to evaluate each CRM based on the requirements of your organization. Hopefully, with a little training and a ton of talent, your sales team will work more efficiently towards exceeding expectations and breaking new business records.
