Finding it difficult to achieve high sales team productivity? There are many businesses who have similar issues and looking for a concrete solution to gain maximum sales team productivity. Experts have observed that from the total time spent, more than half of the time, the sales team is spent on repetitive activities than on core selling.
Actual Issues That a Sales Team Faces
Before you think of a solution to fix this issue, let us have a look at what are the actual issues that a sales team faces and what activities consume most of their productive time:
1] Data entry, capturing entering leads through different marketing channels and recording them.
2] Assignment of all the captured leads between the team members.
3] Following-up with all the prospects.
4] Keeping a track of communications with prospects.
5] Tasks management.
6] Bulk communication.
So now when you see the actual time-sapping activities, let’s see how you can manage all this in no time using a sales CRM and invest more time in core selling:
1] Data entry, capturing entering leads through different marketing channels and recording them.
Being in digital era and the world of internet we are certain that you must be using various marketing channels like your own website/contact us form, social media, google ads and also offline channels of marketing, however, the most difficult part starts after you have a handful leads which is recording all these leads in an excel sheet or your CRM.
With integrations that are now available in CRM’s enabled with automation, you can link all your marketing channels with the CRM and skip manual data entry. The time that a sales team spends on capturing all this data can be completely transformed on focusing more on the communication and relationship building with the prospects.
2] Assignment of all the captured leads between the team members:
The way CRM helped you capture leads, assignment of leads among the team members can also be automated and will save sales managers time. Manual methodologies of lead assignment can become a huge task once the team size starts increasing and can consume the productive time of the sales manager.
A smart and automated CRM can help you have auto assignment of leads which will help your sales manager to focus on other activities.
3] Following-up with all the prospects:
Sales growth happens only when you have maintained healthy relationships with your prospects or customers. Following up is the core to growing sales and most salespeople are not good at following up. This happens when they have to keep a track of all follow-ups manually and there is no automation involved. There can be several reasons why sales team members miss to follow up with prospects and as the volume of leads increases the possibility of sales team missing up on follow-ups.
By taking help of an automated sales CRM, you can send automated and personalized emails to your prospects which frees you up from drafting personalized emails and sending them manually.
4] Keeping a track of communications with prospects:
Another big time-consuming aspect is keeping a track of communication that happens with deals and prospects. No matter how anyone tries, there are huge chances to miss up on keeping a track of communication and this can lead to a loss of sale.
To avoid such situations go ahead with a CRM that automatically syncs your email communication and allows you to add call communication.
5] Tasks management:
Task management absolutely must factor of lead management due to lack of automated task alerts, the sales team can forget to complete a particular task. It can be meeting with a prospect or sending an email. If the task management is automated, you can actually close 2x more deals which increases the productivity of sales team members. For example :
You can create an automated task right when the task or deal is created and your team will never miss a follow-up.
6] Bulk communication:
It consumes a lot of hours to send bulk email campaigns and other bulk communication. Plus sales team need to use different tools to send these bulk emails and a simple activity takes hours to finish. Using email automation features that are available in CRM, you can send personalized bulk emails in minutes with no hassles.
About the Author: Abhishek Agrawal is the Founder & CEO at CompanyHub CRM. A technology lover and a writer who loves to give simple solutions on making sales teams lives easier. You can get in touch with him on Linkedin.
