5 Ways to Boost CRM Effectiveness
By Chanin Ballance, MobilePaks
Sales teams in large organizations rely heavily on CRM to manage their prospect and customer activities. But can you increase the value of the CRM for your salespeople even more?
To keep up with fast-paced changes in large organizations, a growing number of companies are relying on sales enablement tools. Sales asset management, just-in-time training and guided selling are among the functions of these tools. They basically act as a coach to match prospect information — whether a contact, lead or opportunity — and prompt relevant sales conversations along with customer-facing content crucial to making a sale.
An advantage of using sales content applications in the CRM is the ability to keep information centrally located and easy to find. According to a Gartner study, 66 percent of corporations have six or more content repositories. Various studies report sellers wasting up to 30 percent of their week searching for and creating content. Sales content management tools can make the task of finding pertinent marketing and accurate product information for prospects less chaotic or tedious.
From the management perspective, the marketing campaigns and product information retain the original integrity and consistency for all salespeople.
Inability to connect product offerings to client business issues and spending too much time on non-selling activities are the two top issues hindering salespeople, according to research by Sirius Decisions.
Here are five tips to help address these challenges:
Use a content asset tool for the CRM to improve information searches for your salespeople. Make information easy to get to, searchable and fast.
Add relevant marketing collateral based on sales stages. Map the sales stages to your buyer's journey.
Add short module training bursts. Marketing collateral helps sales engage with the prospect, but show salespeople how to position, qualify or sell. Give them relevant examples of how to say it.
Add prompts to the CRM. Especially effective for inside sales reps, prompts and recommendations of content in context help salespeople call on accounts and lead a prospect through the buying process.
Monitor and track for continuous improvement. Correlate usage of sales assets by sales stage, deals won and ramp-up time of new hires. Learning what sales people are using and what they need more of empowers the marketing and training teams to better support sales.
Chanin Balance, CEO of MobilePaks, brings years of technology, business management and marketing experience to the sales enablement software solution provider. Chanin is a frequent speaker on the topics of learning, brain science, mobile engagement and sales enablement solutions.
Public relations, digital marketing, journalism, copywriting. I have done it all so I am able to communicate any information in a professional manner. Recent work includes creating compelling digital content, and applying SEO strategies to increase website performance. I am a skilled copy editor who can manage budgets and people.
