I don’t like generalizations, but let me say it: every business, no matter how big and mature, arrives at the necessity of using customer relationship management software, or CRM, as we’re all used to naming it.
It’s like your personal underground line that enables your company to move from point A to point B as quickly as possible, avoiding all traffic jams, up towards your business growth.
One of the key benefits of a CRM platform is that it can tremendously improve your sales productivity. If you know how to get the most out of it, of course 😉.
In this post, I’ll share practical tips on how you can become more productive as soon as you start using a CRM and prove it by using the example of Snov.io.
Outline:
How does CRM enhance sales productivity?
Numbers say that СRM software can help your company increase sales productivity by a whopping 34%. But how does it happen? Let’s dive deeper.
СRM is your central repository for all data and tasks
Remember using different apps and tabs to find prospects, gather contact information, manage your salespeople, etc.? You had to invest tons of time in switching among these activities.
With a CRM, however, you can operate on a single platform to fulfill all these tasks. It saves you much time and budget, which you can contribute to customer support and sales team coaching.
According to Resco.net, a sales CRM can provide several benefits that are closely tied to productivity. Here are the main ones:
CRM helps you get more qualified leads
No matter how often you’ve heard about ‘sales growth,’ you should understand that reaching it by just increasing the number of leads is impossible. You should care about quality, not quantity.
With CRM, you can generate high-quality leads and get more conversions, so you won’t have to spend your precious time on unwilling customers.
CRM automates your tasks
The sales job is always associated with multitasking. You need to look for prospects, track how they move through the sales pipeline, make calls, send emails, and chat on social media. I can imagine you doing it all manually – it’s really tough.
Now imagine how much time you’ll save if there’s software that will automate these processes? It will segment your prospects, categorize them into groups, care about your timely cold outreach and follow-ups, and track all your activities so that you’ll never miss a detail.
CRM enhances team collaboration
The more sales reps your company has and your customer base grows, the more difficult it is to ensure consistency and synergy within the sales team. CRM enables you to always stay aligned, offering transparency of all your sales activities.
For instance, you can always see who of your colleagues contacted a particular customer, when it was, and what the results were. This way, you can be sure you’ll never reach the same prospect twice, or vice versa, leave any potential customer without attention.
CRM tracks sales activities
In sales management, you know that optimizing your sales depends on how efficiently your sales team does its job. To keep the performance of your salespeople under control, you should have a tool that will regularly show you what has been done.
In other words, CRM greatly helps with team reporting and saves you much time that you’ll better spend on more strategic tasks, e.g., thinking of effective ways to improve the performance of your sales department altogether.
Must-have CRM features to boost productivity
But what makes CRM work miracles in enhancing your sales productivity? It’s a set of features tailored specifically for improving your sales efforts. Let’s figure them out.
Workflow automation
CRM can automate your manual activities considerably. Its possibilities are countless! For instance, CRM software can automatically:
- Track your deals from the moment of creation up to the closing
- Send emails to leads based on triggers (e.g., reaching the needed qualification score or following up after a certain amount of time)
- Сreate notes when the status changes
- Assign leads to a particular sales rep
- Qualify leads
- Report to sales management as soon as the sales rep completes the task
Lead generation and management
CRM lets you quickly gather data about your leads from websites and social media, further identifying their actions in the sales cycle. In addition, you can qualify your leads, segment them accordingly, and distribute them to the sales reps in charge. This helps you detect inactive leads you should contact with your re-engagement campaigns.
Communication tools
CRMs often contain one or several embedded communication sources, such as email, calls, and live chat, so you can reach out to your prospects and track the results of your outreach in a single system.
The history of all touchpoints with prospects is transparent to everyone in the team, so sales reps don’t have to waste time trying to find out about the outcomes of the previous call or email.
Built-in social media monitoring
CRMs with this feature allow you to spare time as you don’t need to switch platforms each time you look at your prospect’s activity on your social media page. For instance, your CRM can keep information on the number of comments, shares, and company mentions or help you manage your posting to your social media accounts.
Employee tracking
Apart from tracking your leads through the pipeline, CRM helps sales managers to monitor the performance of each of their employees (tasks, goals, meetings, sales numbers). This helps get an overview of their team, identify those sales reps who’re struggling and thus should be better motivated or trained, and reward their best employees.
Reporting
CRM brings the results of your sales efforts together, allowing you to analyze the team’s performance and come up with strategies to improve it – without wasting time picking up this data bit by bit.
Here are some of the reports your CRM can generate for you:
- The number of leads that have come in during a specific period
- The number of sales generated during a certain period
- The number of emails sent or calls made
- The number of emails responded to
- The stages at which your leads were converted
Integrations
Plenty of CRMs today can connect to the solutions you already use. Integrating a CRM with tools like Zoom, for instance, will help you hold quality meetings with prospects. Integration with Calendly will help you schedule all your tasks more easily and efficiently. Meanwhile, Xero can be your nice assistant in invoicing in case your CRM doesn’t have these features.
8 ways to boost your sales productivity with a CRM
Now that you understand why CRM is your best friend in boosting your sales team productivity, let’s go through the tactics that will allow you to use the CRM software to its biggest potential. I’ll use the example of Snov.io – an absolutely free sales CRM with user-friendly functionality for sales automation and productivity growth.
So, what can you do to streamline your CRM capacity to the extent that your team becomes more productive?
1. Automate at all possible levels
If you’re only planning to use CRM, think about what processes you want to automate. This way, you’ll have a clear picture of all the areas that should be simplified and make your CRM features smoothly synced with one another.
For example, the Snov.io Email Drip Campaigns tool has built-in LinkedIn automation software, where you can set up omnichannel campaigns and contact your leads via email and LinkedIn simultaneously.
Track prospects’ responses
With Snov.io Email Tracker, you’ll never miss a chance to follow up with prospects.
You can easily monitor prospects’ engagement with your campaigns by tracking email opens in Gmail and receiving automatic reminder notifications when a recipient doesn’t open or click your email within a set time.
2. Search for contacts with minimal efforts
You can download the Snov.io Email Finder extension, and it will grab the contact details of potential customers from any website with a click of a button, which you can further add to your personal prospect list.
For LinkedIn email search, use the Snov.io Li Prospect Finder extension.
3. Use customization opportunities
Apart from working on automating your processes with CRM, think about its customization. Your company business is unique, so to stay more productive, you’ll obviously need to tailor your CRM features to your specific needs.
For instance, in Snov.io CRM, you can create customizable pipelines and add up to 200 custom fields to each deal card, which will help you add extra required data to your deal, e.g., shipping preferences, product weight, addresses, etc.
4. Organize your activity
It goes without saying that your productivity directly depends on how you can manage your time. Not a surprise you probably see thousands of workshops about time management best practices daily. With your CRM, you can focus on more important tasks by scheduling your activity in the right way.
Recently Snov.io has launched a new Calendar Sync feature, which allows you to automatically see your tasks in your Google Calendar. With it, you can track all upcoming tasks related to your sales processes in Tasks within your Snov.io CRM.
5. Use filters and tags to access information easily
To save precious time, you should never forget about the ways that will simplify access to the data you’re looking for. These can be search filters, labels, and tags that help quickly jump to the required sales deal and see a sales rep responsible for it or filter the deals to see only those that have been successful.
In Snov.io CRM, you can use the status filter to view only active, lost, or won deals or simply find the deal by typing its name in the search bar:
And for better organization and easier search of deals within your pipeline, you can also tag them:
6. Work on deals together
As I’ve said above, team collaboration highly improves your overall productivity, and CRM is your good helping hand as it allows you to make all tasks transparent, share data, and sync your efforts for better results.
For example, Snov.io CRM offers you compelling opportunities for working on sales tasks collaboratively. You can assign a sales rep who will be responsible for the deal:
You can adjust permission settings so that your sales reps see team records:
And while working with a prospect, each sales rep can leave notes to keep colleagues updated on the following steps to close a deal:
7. Use notes effectively
Notes are a wonderful way to exchange information among sales reps and avoid misunderstandings (say, when the prospect reached out twice or, vice versa, was abandoned).
Make sure the notes you leave are clear and highlight the most important sales activities. If this was a sales call, state whether it was the first call and mention the reaction (prospect answered/not answered). Use bullet points for better readability.
8. Browse statistics for valuable insights
Reporting is one of the key CRM features that help you accelerate your efforts and bring better results. So if you want to grow your sales productivity, you should take it as a habit to check the analytics your CRM provides.
For instance, Snov.io CRM allows you to review the statistics of your deals, showing you the following data:
- The number of deals created over some time
- The number of deals won over some time
- The total value of won deals
- Performance of each team member
- Deal loss reasons
By analyzing this data regularly, you can develop new strategies to grow your productivity and improve your overall performance.
Wrapping up
Your sales growth needs a CRM just like a car needs petrol because a good CRM can equip you with the tools that help you boost your productivity.
I’ve shared some basic solutions for gaining more power with sales CRM by using the example of Snov.io.
But why not squeeze more juice out of this service? Snov.io will look after your sales process from the beginning to the end while you’re coming up with your own tricks for boosting sales productivity. Got any yet? Feel free to share in the comments.
