How a Sales CRM Can Help Salespeople Win More Work and Sell Faster

Is your salesperson or sales team running their work-life through your CRM? If not, your competitors are probably killing it and you’re not.

Fact – CRM helps close more sales faster. This means that not using a modern day CRM well, or at all, is putting you at a significant disadvantage to your competitors.

Sales CRMs used to be really expensive, but they’re not anymore. Along with being more affordable, most are now highly secure, cloud based systems that allow you to pay month-by-month without a lock-in fee, while others are totally free.

In fact, one of the best ones on the market Hubspot CRM is free forever.

What is a CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Sales Force’s definition is a pretty good one – “Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with your customers and potential customers. It helps you improve your profitability.”

What’s a CRM System?

What people are referring to when they say ‘CRM’ is actually ‘CRM system software’ that helps a sales team manage contacts, sales and deals, as well as the sales teams’ work processes and productivity and more.

The top level purpose of the CRM is to help you sell more efficiently to the customers that are most likely to buy your product. The top ones are Salesforce, Hubspot and Pipedrive. We use Hubspot because it’s great and it’s free!

So how do CRM helps salespeople and sales teams sell more and sell faster?

1. They allow you to visualise your opportunities sales pipeline

Getting a CRM to help salespeople and sales managers means they can quickly and easily see where their leads and opportunities are at. It helps them quickly visualise the sales pipeline and shows where you need to insert effort and what action needs to be taken.

For example, if you’re heavy on first appointments and your proposal submission is low you might need to get your team to focus on the middle of the funnel to help turn those appointments into proposals.

Alternatively, if you’re heavy on proposals and presentation, and there’s not enough first appointments happening, this may point out a need to get the sales team to start making appointments so the funnel doesn’t dry up down the track.

2. They allow you to track and record interactions so you can be more responsive

Modern CRM systems allow you to integrate your CRM with contact records so that all interactions are captured on a customer timeline. This way you have a complete record of the prospect’s interactions with you and your company.

For example, we use Hubspot’s free website tracking code snippet on our website, so that we can track visits to our website pages by a prospect in our database.

This gives us insight into what that prospect is interested in – do they want Sales CRM enablement? Inbound Marketing Assistance? Assistance with SEO? Are they looking for help with lead generation or maybe they just want an agency to help them run their Hubspot Portal?

Want to see when your prospects are opening your email? Email notifications have become a big part of getting a CRM to help sales people. This is important to sales teams, because they can respond just after or when a prospect is reading an email sent.

Being able to connect with customers quickly is critical to success according to Inside Sale Research. InsideSales.com research has found that when sales reps respond within 5 minutes of an inquiry versus 30 minutes, they get a 21x uplift in qualifications.

3. CRMs automate tasks

Salespeople only spend around 21% of their time selling and a whopping 79% of their time on tasks like writing emails, data entry of prospects, researching leads and/or attending and scheduling meetings – all of which can to a large extent be automated.

Getting more tasks automated means more time selling. More time selling means more sales, faster growth and better outcomes for everyone.

4. Segment customers based on activity

Selling to one massive database is not efficient. Neither is running your sales team off a spreadsheet. Yes, you can manipulate data but it’s cumbersome.

CRMs allow you to segment your data any number of ways to suit your sales team so they’re focusing their efforts on the right people. This means more meaningful conversations with the right prospects, more often. So yes, I’ll say it again – more sales, quicker.

The great thing is, this is far from an exhaustive list of how a modern CRM system can help supercharge the efforts and success of your sales team.

Enabling salespeople to sell more, more often is a product of a lot of things. But at the very least getting a CRM to help sales people that is either free or affordable, is a quick and necessary way to grow your sales fast and get your selling back on track.

Want to get started the free and easy way?

If you want to dip your toe in the water you can try the Hubspot Free CRM and if that doesn’t work for you, try one of the others that you can check out on sites like G2Crowd.com which will help you decide what is best for you.