7 Reasons Why a CRM is Important for Sales Teams
Here at Rocket, we’re huge fans of the idea that your Sales and Marketing teams should be BFFs.
A simple way to make that relationship more visible is to use a great Customer Relationship Management platform.
CRMs have come a long way in the past 10 years. No longer just a dated repository for client names and phone numbers, today’s agile CRMs fill several essential roles. Our own Hubspot CRM helped us to manage all of our client contacts and leads in all stages of the pipeline through a really tricky year.
So, why should you use a CRM in your business?
1. Close More Deals and in Less Time.
When they’re set up and working properly, CRMs mean less time documenting your conversations and more time engaging with potential and current clients. Ultimately a CRM should help improve the sales process, not add additional work. The points below go into more detail in how a CRM can do that.
2. Get Insights into Leads Before you Call
A good CRM should be able to tell the salesperson which source or digital marketing campaign the lead came from. Whether the prospective customer clicked on a Facebook ad two years ago and have been reading your email newsletters ever since, or if they Googled a particular phrase yesterday - it’s a great starting point for the conversation.
3. Automate Outreach
Ideally, leads should be called quickly, but if they don’t answer or you are unable to make a call, a CRM can help automate your follow up emails and even alert you when a lead revisits the website or opens one of your follow up emails.
4. Book More Meetings
Tools like the HubSpot Meeting Tool (it’s free!) allow prospects to book time with sales reps quickly and easily without the back and forth or finding a time that works for both.
If you’re running a softphone system or video conference app, you can also integrate them with your CRM for one-click calling directly within either platform.
5. Prioritise Your Pipeline
Get a unified view of all of the deals in your sales pipeline. This is super effective when you’ve got sales teams working out of different offices who may not be in close contact. Setting up smart dashboards also allows sales managers to see where the deals are and get a birds-eye view of all deals the team is working on.
6. Target Accounts
If you work in complex B2B environments, collate all of the decision-makers and influencers of larger companies in a single platform so you can spend time talking to the people who matter most. It’s a smart way to make sure that you’re not sending any conflicting information to different people from one target account.
7. Professionalise Your Proposals
Forget scanning print-outs or clumsily editing PDF proposals and digitise your sales sign off with integrations on e-sign platforms like PandaDoc. These can also be fully customised to match your branding and sales decks. An absolute time-saver!
