One of the reasons for using a CRM to manage your sales desks' day-to-day operations is the tremendous savings in time and resources you can achieve.
The main goal of any sales operation is, of course, to make sales. Unfortunately, a big part of any sales manager's daily work schedule has to do with time and resource management. As the number of tasks increase, the time and resource management start to take up more and more of the working day.
However, any professional sales manager will agree that these side-tasks are absolutely essential to the smooth running of their sales operation. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is to manage daily tasks as efficiently and accurately as possible.
That's where your CRM comes into its own. A properly configured CRM system is designed to take the daily grind out of managing your sales team and make the whole process run efficiently. Nobody likes to dredge their way through endless spreadsheets to manage their sales teams, and a CRM is designed to replace all of that.
If you're looking for ways to streamline your operations and get your sales team running more efficiently, here are our top hacks for all sales managers.
Track Your Productivity
Having a precise breakdown of your team's productivity is essential to spot the areas you need to improve on. You can't fix what you don't know is broken, so having all the productivity data is crucial to the smooth running of your operations. To operate efficiently, you need to know how many emails your sales team is sending. How many calls are they making? How many calls result in a sale, and how many follow-up calls has your team made.
Sales operations run on data, so without a snapshot of all your activities, there is no way to gauge the efficiency of what you're doing.
Using a CRM gives you instant access to all the up-to-date information crucial to your performance. You'll know where your team is excelling and where they are falling short of the mark. Not only will your CRM tell you how you're doing, but it will also tell you where you need to improve, information that can be incorporated into your training and recruitment process as well.
Measure Your Revenue
Let's face it. If you're not making sales at the end of the day, you're not making money, and revenue is the number one goal for any sales operation. To get an accurate picture of your revenue streams, you need to know the performance of all your sales agents with detailed statistics on their results. As with your productivity performance results, you need to know your team's weaknesses as well as their strengths. Your CRM can give you instant feedback on the performance of all your sales reps with revenue stats and areas you need to improve on.
Nurture Your Leads
Inbound marketing plays a big part in any sales operation, and knowing how your leads are progressing through your sales funnel plays a major role in your conversions. Allocating leads to the right sales agent is hugely important to the success of your operation, as is nurturing your leads for the maximum LTV (Life Time Value). Leads are an expensive commodity, so getting the most out of your sales and retention teams will have a significant effect on your bottom line.
Your CRM can tell you exactly where your leads are in your funnel as well as show you any potential choke points in your processes. No more drowning in endless spreadsheets. Run a report on your CRM, and you'll have all the data you need to better allocate and nurture your leads. This is an indispensable part of your process, vital to your performance and profitability.
Assign Tasks
A good sales manager knows the value of assigning tasks to team members. Assigning tasks lightens some of the day-to-day burdens of managing a sales team, builds trust inside the team, and fosters team spirit, which are vital elements in a successful sales operation.
CRMs thrive on data and data analysis, allowing you to generate a task list and assign these to team members. This optimization frees up time and resources for lead generation and nurturing.
Create Custom Reports
Reports flow in both directions, up to your management and down to your sales teams. The worst possible answer any sales manager can give is "I don't know", and with the reporting capabilities of CRMs, you should be able to avoid ever having to resort to that particular answer.
Your CRM will allow you to create custom reports based on the metrics that are important to your organization, all presented in an easy to follow format with precise, concise and actionable statistics.
Is your CRM covering all these hacks for your sales operations? If it isn't, you owe it to yourself to upgrade to a better system. Get in touch with Antelope Systems today for a no-obligation consultation with one of our success managers and see what our suite of intelligent applications can do for you.
