CRMs for Sales Reps 2022: Transform the Way Your Team Sells!

Businesses are all about creating and sustaining relationships, especially with customers more than it is about generating revenue.

The better your team nourishes its customer relationships, the faster is the organization's growth.

This is where a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) comes in handy. CRMs have become an indispensable part of high-functioning sales teams of all sizes. 

So, why is CRM an indispensable tool in the sales tech stack?

Let's deep dive to find out more!

What is a CRM?

Customer relationship management or CRM is a technology that helps sales teams manage their customer relationships and interactions easily.

The goal of leveraging a CRM is simple: improve business relationships and close deals quickly.

CRMs help businesses stay up to date with their deal stages and stay connected with their customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

A CRM solution helps you focus on your organization's individual relationship with people - including clients, vendors, suppliers, and more throughout the entire lifecycle.

Who Should Leverage a CRM?

A CRM system provides everyone, including sales reps, customer success teams, business development, or any other niche - an enhanced way to manage external relationships that drive actual success.

A CRM tool lets you store customer contact numbers, identify sales opportunities, sync data from third-party apps, record service requests, and more, all in a central storage system and make it easily accessible to anyone who might need it.

Here's Why CRM Should Matter to your Business

According to Gartner, by 2021, CRM will be the single largest revenue area of spending in enterprise software.

All businesses need a stellar strategy to keep the organization and revenue thriving. Hitting quarterly sales and revenue goals, tackling business objectives, and working towards profitability requires a strategy.

A CRM can help businesses have a clear overview of their customers. Sales reps can track all important sales data in a simple, customizable dashboard that can help you analyze data and have an overview of your sales pipeline.

Though CRM systems have been traditionally used by sales and marketing teams, customer service teams can highly benefit from the tool as well. 

A CRM platform lets you manage, track, and analyze the entire sales cycle across various channels without losing track and gives sales, service, and marketing a single view of the pipeline.

4 Benefits of Using CRM for Sales Reps

Sales CRM is a tool that simplifies the process of qualifying leads, retrieves actionable data from sales calls, and ensures you do not miss following up on leads.

4 Reasons why organizations should adopt a CRM

1. Capture the right leads to maximize conversions
2. Stay up-to-date with past customer communication and set alerts for next steps
3. Improved customer service
4. Detailed Business analytics

#1 Capture the Right Leads to Maximize Conversions

Did you know that without CRM systems, 79% of all marketing leads are not converted to sales?

In addition, the lead management system benefits sales reps and sales managers to get a 360-degree view of all prospects in the sales pipeline.

With the aid of CRM software, salespeople can automatically capture leads from various sources and categorize them according to their characteristics such as location, buying behavior, and preferences.

This sales tool can help businesses determine which leads to focus on so salespeople do not waste their time chasing the wrong leads.

The sales analysis data also enables your team to track all prospects' interactions and arms your team with real-time data to make key decisions and move them down the sales funnel to boost sales.

#2 Stay Up to Date with Past Customer Communication and Set Alerts for Next Steps

For decades, salespeople have been asked to store all vital information regarding their customer communication on spreadsheets or in manually written notes. But, as the organization grows, pipelines and deals are meant to become larger and it becomes impossible for teams to maintain and track data on spreadsheets.

This is where CRMs can come in handy.

With CRMs, maintaining a comprehensive account history can be extremely helpful, especially when other team members are also involved to build solutions and brainstorming ideas for closing deals.

The system can also help manage workflows, set alerts, and receive intuitive signals to be sure of the next step with a prospect.

#3 Improved Customer Service

In today's world, customer satisfaction is a key component of your brand.

Customer satisfaction can make or break your reputation in the business world. Studies show that organizations with efficient customer service tend to attract more clients and make more sales.

CRMs can be used to provide improved customer service by enabling your sales reps to stay in touch with their customers regularly. In addition, it allows you to collect customers' data based on their past interactions on your website.

CRMs leverage artificial intelligence to improve the customer's experience. The collected customer data creates a base for providing improved customer service and makes them want to come back.

Not just that, a CRM helps you deliver quick responses in human-like language to mimic a sales rep to customer queries for a greater customer experience.

#4 Detailed Business Analytics

Data related to sales activities like social media posts, product reviews, customer communication, and transactions - it's everywhere!

However, accumulating raw data without any actionable insights is of no use if it is not organized and structured correctly.

With CRMs having wide capabilities such as robust reporting and analytics can help you to dive deep into your sales pipeline and help you improve performance to meet sales goals.

CRM dashboards can help you gain important insights and understand vital metrics to make proactive decisions, respond to changes in the external environment, and achieve revenue goals.

Some of the most useful functions of a CRM tool that can guide sales managers to gain a deeper understanding of their potential customers are:

1. Sales cycle reports
2. Profitability reports
3. Customer data platform and buying pattern report
4. Sales forecasting
5. Goal progress reports
6. Sales coaching and training

Sales reps can make and receive calls from the web and mobile CRM app, keep track of multiple sales pipelines at once, sales activities, and more to never miss an opportunity to reach out to potential customers.

How to Choose the Best CRM for your Organization to Help your Sales Process

While business intelligence features are extremely helpful for sales teams, not every information received is relevant to sales reps.

Sales reps need to focus on various key features - contact management, lead and pipeline tracking, seamless customer communication, and deal management.

Here's how your sales team can pick the best CRM software -

#1 Ease of Use

One of the primary challenges for most businesses before embracing a CRM is user adoption.

The expectations from CRMs are changing, and with the consumer behavior changing rapidly in these modern times, choosing a CRM that caters to their needs is vital.

A CRM software should be easy to use, intuitive in nature, straightforward to integrate, and be a breeze, so salespeople can quickly adapt.

Tip - Before choosing a CRM, make sure the implementation process is quick and easy. Be sure to pick a CRM which provides a freemium, or a free trial to understand and experience the software first-hand.

#2 Ease of Integration and Current Capabilities

The goal of leveraging a CRM in addition to improving productivity is its integration capabilities.

An organization employing a modern CRM solution must cater to their needs and requirements without a hassle, including easy integration to their existing software and avoiding manual data importing.

The ease at which you can export your important files and information regarding sales activities carries high importance.

Tip - Reach out to the customer service team prior to purchasing the software and get a list of tools and software their CRM can integrate with.

#3 Growth Plans of your organization

Pick a solution that aligns with the medium to the long-term vision of your organization. There is no point in picking a solution that is lower priced and with limited features, and you outgrow them within a short span of time. The time it takes to migrate and change your process would negate any savings made from picking a lower-priced solution. 

Also, if you pick the solution with the maximum features, and higher price, you may end up paying for features that you don’t need or use in the medium term.

Striking a perfect balance and picking a solution that can grow along with your organization’s long-term plans is important to ensure the viability of the solution adopted.

Tip - Take into account the medium to long-term needs of all the teams(sales, marketing, customer support) who will be using the CRM, and pick a solution that aligns with all their needs. 

Apart from this, it is also important to pick a vendor that offers good customer support. 

And depending on your requirements, you need to decide if you want an on-premise or cloud service.

A simpler way to decide would be to research the solutions that your competitors and other players in the industry use, and adopt similar solutions to ensure maximum efficiency.

Leverage Salesken for your Sales Reps

Here's how Salesken can guide your sales reps and sales team with their everyday sales activities to improve their sales performance and close more deals -

In-Call Sales Assistance

Salesken leverages the latest conversation intelligence capabilities to provide real-time assistance to reps. The reps can know how top reps handle difficult customers and adopt successful behaviors to win more deals. Salesken’s state-of-the-art emotion detection can help detect the prospect’s mood, and the reps can tailor the pitch accordingly.

(Real-Time Assistance Feature Image)

Effortless Automation of Sales Process

An intuitive sales tool such as Salesken can easily automate all your sales-related data with easy workflows.

Right from sending a follow-up email, onboarding process, sales activities such as welcome messages, respond to frequently asked questions - sales CRM does it all.

Salesken automates all mundane tasks performed by sales reps on a daily basis and simplifies the sales process so your team can spend time focusing on making more sales.

Always Stay on Top of All Sales Activities

Salesken allows you to easily track warm deals, analyze sales pipeline data, and organize your sales pipeline.

The sales representative can automate, track, and streamline their sales activities in a unified platform such as Salesken resulting in high productivity.

Not just that, your sales team can also automate sales assignments by setting easy workflows and tracking them using our reports via Salesken's mobile app.

Gauge which deal has a better chance of closing vs which deal needs more attention by leveraging our easy analysis reports, and sentiment analysis to help you understand the tendency to convert and provide necessary collateral to close the deal.

Seamless Integration with Third-Party Apps

Salesken's easy integration option with third-party apps such as Salesforce, Twilio, Pipedrive, and more is a testament to how businesses of all sizes can thrive in their respective sectors.

Integrate your favorite tool with Salesken without any interference with outside members, or technical support so you never lose data and do not lose focus on your deal pipeline.

Say goodbye to manual data feed with Salesken's easy integration.

Wrapping Up

With a myriad of CRM for sales reps in the market, it can get daunting to select the right CRM for your sales teams and want to try every single software.

Every CRM software in the market offers its own set of modules and features, but these factors outweigh when sales teams have to choose the features that are the most relevant to them.

Consider key factors vital to your decision-making process to choose the best CRM for sales in the market to get a better idea of how these platforms perform as opposed to others in the ecosystem.

What features and modules are the most important to your sales team and how do they impact your decision-making process?

If you're looking to switch to a sales intelligence tool like Salesken to help your sales team ease their sales process, stay on top of their sales activities, and close deals, book a demo with our expert now.