According to this blog article by Brian Tracy, a certified sales trainer, there are 7 key areas you must focus on in order to ensure the success of a sale. These 7 areas are: Prospecting Power, Relationship Selling, Identifying Needs Accurately, Making Persuasive Presentations, Overcoming Objections, Closing the Sale, and Getting Repeat Sales and Referrals. But doing all these manually can prove to be a Herculean task, as it requires constant customer data analysis, which can be very time-consuming. And this is exactly the reason why you need a CRM system — to help you do all these things and increase your sales exponentially with minimal effort. Let’s talk about how a CRM like Salesforce can do all these and how it can help your sales and marketing teams create effective strategies to boost your business’ sales.
1. Gaining and Maintaining Customers
Every successful sale begins with an effective lead generation system. With the use of a CRM system, all your customer data and leads can be stored in one central place, allowing your sales team to have a full view of the lead statuses, deal progress, current customer data and upcoming opportunities. A CRM can also be integrated with other systems to allow your team to access all of the different essential bits of information they need in order to make a successful sale. Through this system, your team can pursue leads, get in touch with current customers, and send promotions and new offers in a timely manner. A CRM plays a huge role in helping your sales team with the process of converting leads to full-fledged customers and ensuring a continued business relationship with customers.
2. Nurturing Your Business Relationship with Your Customers
A CRM helps your sales team keep track of the status of customer accounts throughout an entire cycle. The biggest benefit of this is that it allows them to reach out to a customer in a timely manner and keep them engaged with your business. With this system in place, you can be sure that every member of your sales team is always on top of their game. The right CRM system can help them reach out to customers at the right time and with the right strategy. Communicating with your customers, without bombarding them with email messages or text messages, nurtures your business relationship with them. This is key to retaining your customers and building trust and loyalty through a more personalised approach to customer service. And when your customers trust your brand, they’re more likely to refer you to their family and friends. This translates into new sales and an increase in your customer base.
3. Analysing Purchasing Behaviour Based on Historical Transactions
A CRM system can provide information that is useful to both the Sales and Marketing teams in your organisation, allowing them to effectively sync their timelines and work together effectively toward their shared goals. One of the features of a CRM system is the ability to help the sales team prioritise upcoming renewal opportunities and who to reach out to for new products and service offers, to maintain customer engagement and gain new customers in the process. It helps them to interact with customers at the right time, so they never miss a sales opportunity.
Another important feature of a CRM, when integrated with a marketing tool, is that it allows your marketing team to get complete insights into how customers respond to their marketing strategies and campaigns. This helps them see what is effective and what needs improvement, so that they can work on initiatives that attract customers and position your products to effectively target your customers’ needs, which eventually leads to sales. This way, the marketing team can provide the sales team with better ways to guide a customer to re-enter a purchase cycle and ensure continuous growth in sales.
4. Reaching Out at the Right Time
One of the best things about using a CRM for your business is how it makes it easy for you and your team members to track historical purchase information: items bought, time in between purchases, amount spent on purchases, etc. This gives you an idea of what products and services your customers like, which helps you manage your inventory more effectively. You can also plan out a timeline to help your sales team reach out to your customers at the right moments in the customer journey, prompting them to renew a service, repurchase a product, or offering them new products.
A CRM system is also capable of providing real-time reporting, which allows your team to stay on track with their goals and accomplish them within their target dates. Contact management allows the sales team to get in touch with customers efficiently, by being able to respond to customers in a timely manner. The Customer Service Console feature in Salesforce, for example, allows your team to quickly respond to messages from any of your customers, through the same channels that they were received from. Not only does this improve customer satisfaction, it also improves your team’s efficiency and service level delivery.
There are plenty of businesses that have started using Salesforce as a CRM, and as a result, they’ve seen a dramatic increase in sales and their team’s work output. Here’s a story from a marketing director who implemented the use of a CRM system for their sales and marketing departments. In the video, he talks about how they first started using a CRM, the challenges that they had to overcome while doing their tasks the old way, how a CRM changed the way they work, and how it helped skyrocket their sales from the time they started using the new CRM.
Suffice it to say, a CRM can increase your business sales by automating your standard operating procedures, thereby optimising the way your team operates — leads are tracked more reliably, current customers are nurtured through effective communication and offered products and services they actually need.
It also provides your marketing team with essential information they need to create strategies designed to keep your customers happy and attract new ones along the way.
And here is a complete list of features and functionalities the Salesforce CRM has to offer and how they can help increase your sales.
