Top 3 Social CRM Hacks Your Sales Team Must Use
Ensuring the happiness of your customers, the lifeblood of any business, is imperative if your organization is to survive and thrive. As part of your organization’s sales team, you want to continue attracting leads, nurturing them and onboarding them as new customers. When the business has flourished to the point where its data has outgrown simple Excel spreadsheets, implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system is extremely important. As the central database where all important customer information lives, it’s really a wonder how we ever lived without it (it wasn’t until the early 90s that true CRM was born).
Having a powerful system that allows you to find what you need to know about any customer is one thing, knowing how to get the absolute most out of it is another. Perhaps you’re already using CRM and it’s working well for you. You can easily locate information about prospects and customers.You schedule your time like a pro. You can see exactly where a lead is in the sales funnel. But that’s just the basics. Not that the basics aren’t important, they make up the foundation upon which everything is built. However, why not take it even further? As with anything in life, there’s hardly anything that can’t be improved.
1. Go Mobile
As part of a sales team, you won’t always have access to a laptop or desktop computer. You’re more likely than not to be on the road or out of the office prospecting and closing. It’s only logical that if you’re mobile, your CRM should be too. With the system on your phone or tablet, you’ll have what you need in the palm of your hand no matter where you go.
With a mobile CRM, you can update, add and check information immediately. Instead of making a call that may or may not get answered to get the necessary information, you can simply check your phone. Have you gotten new details about the prospect you’re about to close? Quickly add it into the system so you don’t have to worry about forgetting it.
Let’s say that you have five prospects that you want to meet on the same day. Instead of arbitrarily picking who to meet and in which order, you can use your mobile CRM to map out an itinerary that will save you the most time while traveling.
The benefits of going mobile with a CRM are endless.
2. Get Personal
The fact of the matter is people hate feeling like they’re being sold to. Think of browsing items in a store, picking up the phone with a telemarketer on the other end, or receiving a sales-y email with empty buzzwords. When a salesperson is just trying to close you and fails to treat you like a human being, it spoils the entire buying experience. So why do so many businesses continue selling in the same way? Prospects are more than just numbers and quotas.
Use your CRM to record characteristics and interests that are unique to a particular customer or lead. These simple notes will help you build a rapport with people. Have they mentioned playing golf on weekends with their friends? Do they prefer to be addressed as “Patt” rather than “Patricia?” Did they just come back from a family vacation in Bora Bora? It’s not about trying to become their friend or getting overly interested in their personal life, you’re simply treating them like a human being.
3. Cut the Fat
Fat = the unnecessary. Use your CRM to examine the data. Is a customer constantly asking for discounts without justifiable reasons? Have you noticed a pattern of hard-to- close customers coming from a certain industry? Once you notice these patterns, you’ll know which deals to focus on: the ones that are most likely to close. Don’t spread yourself thin over deals that are tough to win and don’t be afraid to cut a customer loose if they’re not worth the trouble.
Salespeople enjoy challenges — why else would someone choose a career that consists of hearing “no” all the time? Cutting the fat will save time, energy and resources that can be better used towards highly qualified leads.
Having access to accurate and timely data is essential for hunting new business, building relationships and closing deals. While a CRM isn’t going to magically make a sales team great, it’s a tool that will help enhance their selling abilities and meet targets if used with the right approach.
