Inside sales is no longer about client servicing but all about customer relations. The right CRM helps sales representatives to not only automate their process but also streamline it.
Sales representatives are spending more time interacting with technology to identify customers (who are online too), nurture their needs and convert leads into sales targets.
A Hubspot study found that salespeople spend just one-third of their day talking to prospects. They spend 21% of their day writing emails, almost 34% entering data, and prospecting or researching leads. A CRM solution catering to the sales team would help bring marketers, prospects, sales professionals, and customers together.
CRM can help build a great inside sales strategy through five key performance areas:
Prospect Management
A useful CRM tool gives sales reps a detailed and holistic view of a prospective buyer, easily aligning with the companies lead management process. With the customer or prospect profile available, one can easily segment, search, and quantify leads to optimise ROI. SugarCRM’s Lead Management System helps segment leads based on industry, channel, lead source, geography, and other attributes. A good CRM should be able to pull data from various sources like social media, emails, or other channels, thus enabling you to identify prospects in real time and manage sales campaigns accordingly.
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Conversion Management
Once you have segmented profiles of prospective customers, CRM can help funnel out the most probable and not-so probable ones. This reduces the chances of hit-and-miss opportunities, something which is highly likely in the case of traditional sales. Now the inside sales team can focus only on opportunities that have a high chance of conversion and create a sales plan based on specified criteria suited to this funnelled list.
A CRM system can also be programmed to proactively monitor changes in a prospect’s behaviour, variations in their order patterns, and competition mapping. It can even notify or urge the sales team to act on the proposal based on the information available.
Kath Pay, Founder and CEO of Holistic Email Marketing, believes that lead nurturing is at its most powerful when messages to the prospects are triggered based upon their actions. “Thus enabling you to deliver more relevant content to them easily and cost-effectively. Nurturing and nudging is crucial to relationship building as it gives the prospect an opportunity to evaluate your expertise as a company.”
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Customer Management
No company or sales team is interested in a one-time buyer. We all love loyal, returning customers and for that, it is essential to have a strong and lasting relationship. Marketing experts have repeatedly spoken about the 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer versus a 5-20% chance of converting a completely new prospect.
Here the role of CRM is to provide insights about how your existing customers feel about your brand, how they engage with or even speak about it. This motivates your inside sales team to deliver quality service and meaningful experiences so that existing customers, who in turn, become brand advocates.
CRM can be programmed in a way that it facilitates the entire sales team to be ready to take appropriate actions on customer requests and queries. Feel-good initiatives like a Thank You email with an exclusive offer on a purchase. Assisting the sales team in creating personalised messages based on a customer’s preferences. Or scheduled and automated follow-up system to always remain top-of-mind with your customer.
Time Management
According to AgileCRM, odds of reaching a new sales lead drop over ten times if you wait longer than the first hour of shown interest, and the odds of sales qualifying that lead decrease six times after the first 60 minutes. A CRM helps sales personnel save much time through optimising schedules, prioritising tasks, data sharing, shared calendars and documents so they can collaborate as a team and reduce repetitive tasks. Logging all interactions and gathering them in one place for easy future reference.
Also Read: How CMOs Can Lead Customer Experience
Data Analysis and Reports
The most important feature of a good CRM is its ability to collect and store all customer data, then convert it into insightful reports. Knowing what your customer wants is the key to making a good sales strategy and understanding your customer requires access to analysed data. Originally CRM may not have been designed for an inside sales campaign, but with the current digital trends, inside sales teams can use their CRM to understand customers better, be more mobile and efficient, and achieve sales targets.
