5 Ways a CRM Can Improve Your Sales Process

A Customer Relationship Manager, also known as a CRM, can be a powerful tool. It can help to streamline your sales process and provide benefits to complete sales teams.

Here are five ways using a CRM efficiently can help improve your sales process.

1. Keep Track of Prospects and Clients

A CRM not only stores contact information and the history of your prospects and clients but also allows you to create alerts to make sure your follow-up isn’t missed.

So often, sales will stall due to a lack of or infrequent follow-up. It is impossible to remember everything all the time, so having a tool that can help remind you when to follow up can be key to moving accounts forward in the sales process.

Having the same tool be the resource where you can easily refer back to the notes on your last conversation is an extra added bonus!

2. Automated Sequences for Prospects

Sellers can create automated outreach sequences that they can enroll a prospect in that is consistent with your sales process. This simple process creates efficiencies for salespeople – instead of having to recreate the wheel and remember when they need to reach out, the CRM will execute the step-by-step process they create.

It will send email templates developed within the sequence as well as alerts for steps of the process outside of email. These alerts act as reminders for things like phone calls or sending an invite to connect on LinkedIn. This simple process saves time and allows sellers to do more in less time.

3. Reinforcement of Your Sales Process

A strong sales process provides an efficient roadmap to help you close deals consistently. Your CRM should match up to the stages of your sales process and will reinforce the process as you move each account through your pipeline.

4. Identify Bottlenecks in the Sales Process

The answer to more revenue is not always to have more pending. Instead, identifying where accounts stall in the sales process can help you figure out where you need to put your focus to improve results.

Because a CRM tracks accounts as they move through the sales process, you can easily examine conversion rates in the sales process to help you identify where accounts stall out. Once you have identified the weakest point in the sales process, you can begin to address the underlying problem, which will have an overall impact on performance.  

5. Better Pipeline Management

A CRM allows you to easily examine the number of deals in your pipeline, where they are in the sales process, how long they have been in a single stage, and the dollars pending.

Understanding these four numbers, combined with your conversion rates (initial meeting to close and proposal to close) can help you determine if you have enough activity to achieve your revenue goals.

Conclusion 

From tracking prospect interactions to logging data and leveraging information, CRMs are capable of helping sales teams work faster and more efficiently. 

Sales statistics show that the CRM has already made a lasting impact on many organizations, and it shows no sign of slowing down. However, it takes the adaptation of the sales team and sales enablement tools to make it work.