Every team is important, but your sales reps are under a lot of pressure to convert your leads into customers. Without your sales reps, your business is in real trouble. So it’s important to make sure they’re operating at the peak of their potential by monitoring their performance.

There are many articles out there that focus on monitoring the performance of your sales reps, but we believe that employees are entitled to trust and privacy from their employer.

How do you balance their need for privacy while collecting the necessary data to analyze performance?

Introduction to workplace privacy

You’ve hired your staff because you believe they’re the best people for the job. Don’t insult them by monitoring every single interaction they have with your clients or customers.

In some instances, such as for legal reasons, strict monitoring of all employee communications is advised. But for the purposes of improving sales performance, you should focus on the sales data rather than private correspondence.

Effective monitoring yields result for both employees and employers. It’s motivating for staff because it highlights the areas where your reps are doing well, and also shows them objectively where they can improve.

Firsthand experience

As the CEO of your company, it’s essential for you to know what your staff is up to, without infringing on their privacy.

With the best of intentions, staying in the ivory tower can’t provide you with reliable insight into your team’s performance. Data should be combined with personal observation to generate well-rounded results. Spending a day with your team gives you a direct experience of their frontline work, and also makes them feel valued.

Sales Reps Performance vs Privacy Tracking

For example, you may have one team member who isn’t performing as well as the others. If you only look at the data, you might see them as the underdog. Direct observation shows you they’re picking up the slack for the rest of the team by providing day-to-day customer service.

This kind of insight can suggest that you may need to hire a receptionist or an admin assistant to deal with your clients’ general inquiries. You’re using data and observation to support your sales reps.

Using a sales CRM for your team

Monitoring your employees with analytics is not about singling out individual team members but viewing their performance in light of the whole team. Rather than spying on your staff, you can use a CRM tool to work for your team by providing a 3D picture of their sales.

A sales CRM is a valuable tool for collecting the necessary data about your team’s activities. All sales activities are recorded in the CRM for anyone to refer back to.

More than just a CRM, Teamgate is a complete sales stack for your team. It offers the capability for you to generate objective data to improve your future sales strategy. It also helps you forecast your future sales income, over the next month and for all-time. It’s easier to turn leads into customers with a handy sales funnel.

Monitoring sales insights

No one wants to trawl through boring reports, especially high-pressure sales reps who have their eye on making their next commission.

With a CRM like Teamgate to manage your sales activities, your reps are relieved of the need to keep manual records. All of your data is centralized in one place and can be easily imported or exported.

Sales Reps Performance vs Privacy Teamgate Analytics

Teamgate CRM offers intelligent, actionable insights into your sales activity that can tell you where you could improve your operations. For example, Pipeline Trajectory tells your reps when they should reach out to leads with a specific action, meaning no more guesswork.

The goal is to accurately monitor your sales insights without targeting individual employees. You’ll uncover problems with your sales strategy if it turns out lots of reps are having difficulties in the same area.

Using your data to reward sales reps

It’s not about punishing your employees when things go wrong, but rewarding their efforts when they do well.

Highlight the achievements of your reps with a monthly ‘Sales Star’ award. This positively reinforces your employees’ behaviour and motivates them to continue.

You can even set up sales goals in Teamgate so that your team is automatically motivated every day. They can even compare their results with their colleagues in friendly competition.

Making the most of the sales calls

Phone calls are a channel that is especially prone to losing valuable data. If no one records interaction with your potential customer, you may lose them at a critical point in their journey.

Teamgate SmartDialer is the dialling system you’ve been waiting for to take a headache out of calls.

Teamgate SmartDialer features:

  • Integrates with our sales CRM so you can access your customer data and easily manage relationships.
  • Enables you to make calls directly from Teamgate in the browser for maximum efficiency and user experience.
  • Records conversations so reps can review their calls at a later date. This ensures that nothing valuable is lost in the unpredictable environment of a busy modern workplace.
  • Connects your sales reps with their prospects so incoming phone calls are routed to the right person, every time. Your prospects will be impressed with their personalized experience and pleased that they weren’t accidentally passed between team members like a hockey puck.

Takeaways

Sales reps use their personalities and powers of persuasion to demonstrate to prospective customers exactly why your products would benefit them. They work on the frontline in a stressful environment and face constant rejection. Don’t make their jobs harder for them by monitoring your staff like Big Brother.

Sales Reps Performance vs Privacy Goal Setting

Always assume your sales people are doing the best they can with the resources you’ve given them. If there’s room for improvement, and there always is, smart CEOs know they can usually change their processes to empower their staff.

As a CEO, you can work together with your reps to make their lives easier. Provide them with actionable insights on their performance based on real data. Teamgate offers the perfect blend of sales metrics and automates mundane tasks, without compromising the privacy and independence of your sales team.

We come across articles discussing the SaaS sales leaders ranging from Jim Herbold to Sam Blond, about how they have driven a stellar revenue growth for their companies. It can easily be concluded that behind every successful and ravaging SaaS is an amazing VP of sales. However, before you can leap up to the SaaS unicorn, you first have to move forward from where you are to the SaaS VP of sales, and to tell you the truth, it is going to be more of a jump than just a step forward.

So, the question you would be asking yourself is how one can become the SaaS VP of sales. There are two crucial components that can get you there, and these components are no piece of cake.

  1. Make sure you have the ability to identify a great opportunity before anyone else can
  2. Understand the SaaS metrics

Identify a Great Opportunity before Anyone Else

Getting to know how to accomplish this can be difficult, but it isn’t that difficult if you know what you are looking for. To know whether a SaaS company can rocket under your leadership or not, is by having some strong answers for the following questions.

  1. Does the company have an ARR between $1 million and $5 million?
  2. Is the average ACV greater than $3,000 and less than $10,000?
  3. Is the Churn less than 30%?
  4. Product Market Fit: The Product Market Fit should be kept 100% contingent to the answers of the above three questions.
  5. Are there any profits pouring in?
  6. Do they have a strong product team?

When evaluating a SaaS opportunity based on the question mentioned above, then there are just two distractions that can lead you astray:

  1. No leads
  2. Bad Website

Related: 6 Entrepreneurial Lessons You Can Learn From an Olympian and Ways a New Sales Leader Can Rapidly Add Value

Understand the SaaS Metrics

Once the criterion has been determined based on the questioned mentioned above, and then your next goal is to aim for the position of the VP of Sales.

Therefore, there are only two goals left for you:

  1. Master the SaaS Metric
  2. Determine how you can show it

To be able to master the SaaS metric, all that you have to do is to go through all the blog post, twice, that have ever been written about the SaaS. Becoming the SaaS VP of Sales means that you will be the highest paid employee in the company, then you should have a plan, and to become one, you need your playbook. All you have to do is master that playbook.

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There are a few key metrics that you should stick to for the purpose of getting a better chance to be a VP of sales.

  1. Monthly Recurring Revenue

For any SaaS business, all the payments made are upfront. Here before getting the customers you have to build the product by spending on it earlier, and the downside of it is that customers do no pay upfront. However, to build a sustainable business, you will have to survive this far. To do so, you will have to track the monthly recurring revenue. This is the amount of revenue that you are adding or losing of what you expect to receive every month. To achieve this, you will have to dive deep into the financials to get that number. Monthly Recurring Revenue is one the most important metrics that a SaaS business should track.

  1. Churn

Churn is a metric that measures the percentage of the people who leave your product every month. Retaining the customers is what determines whether your business can survive or not. For SaaS, churns are easy as the customer purchase every month; therefore, you will have to build the churn around that.

  1. Cost Per Acquisition

Marketing is an expensive feat, and utilizing wrong channels for the marketing can leave a huge hole in the profit margins. To avoid this, the VP of Sales can go for the tracking of the cost per acquisition of the campaign. If you are spending more money for the acquisition of the customers than what you are receiving, then there is a problem. As a VP of Sales, you will have to find the best solution for it.

  1. Average Revenue per Customer

This metric is straightforward. This is the average revenue that you are already receiving from your customers. Once the churn rate is brought under control, you get a sure way to acquire the customers. The basic keys for increasing the revenue are the up-sells and cross-sells. Up-sells are when you compel the customer to move to the expensive version of the product. Cross-sells are the extra features that you sell along with your product. Here the goal of the VP of Sales is to build the system that increases the revenue steadily, that you receive from the customers.

Understanding these metrics and the way to move around them along with your team members, you get the sure shot of being the VP of Sales. Since none of these metrics can be accomplished with only a single person, it becomes your duty to take the team with you and climb the ladder as you go.

Summary

Your sales pitch matters in order to implement the metrics; hence, it has to be compelling enough to show your scholarly understandings of the problems at some million dollars in ARR and a vision of how the revenue can be grown 2x, 3x, or 4x. Using the defined metrics in the SaaS business, you can determine how the metrics will give you the desired result.

When you first learn to drive a car, the first thing to do is to watch someone else. Only then can you be sure of yourself when it comes time to get behind the wheel. CRM is the same. We can learn what we need to get started by simply observing. We have take a look at three major case studies, published this year, and extracted what we think could benefit you the most. Here’s what we found, from a hotel chain, a bank, and retail outlets across the globe. What you will learn can be applied to any industry.

UK Chain Hotel Reveals the Impact of Organizational Culture on CRM

The Department of Marketing, Innovation, Leisure and Enterprise at the University of Wolverhampton administered a survey of 346 managers from a hotel chain in the UK to find the impact of organizational culture on implementing CRM in the hotel industry. What they found was that adaptability, consistency, staff involvement, and mission play a significantly positive role on the implementation of CRM. Success, although it correlates strongly with each of the above factors, does not depend on all of them. This is useful for every strategist.

Here’s how you can apply the findings to your planning:

  • Adaptability – All CRM strategies should include room for growth and transformation. When you can, write and create a calendar for analysis and changes directly into your plan. This ensures that you have a flexible plan that will evolve with your consumers and your brand.
  • Consistency – Across all platforms, your tactics should be consistent. This means that the sales team, customer service, and anyone else who will be in communication with customers (even offline), should have the same methods of resolving issues and helping people. By making sure that you brief everyone in your organization of your service guidelines, you create consistency across the board.
  • Staff Involvement – Who better to help create a CRM plan than the staff that is regularly in communication with clients and customers? When you are ready to start strategizing, involve everyone in your collaboration. If you have a large organization, it can be a good idea to create a survey asking pertinent questions about how to approach topics. Include a place in the survey for additional suggestions, as you never know what you could be overlooking. Not only will you be able to cover all of your bases, but your staff will be happy to feel involved.
  • Mission – When setting your CRM mission, keep in mind company goals as well as smaller “department level” sales goals. When an objective is present, you can measure success and make changes to a plan as needed.

If you’re able to implement at least one of the actions above, you know that you are on the right track. If you can integrate all of them, you are on your way to superstar growth. Your company will reap great benefits.

Can You Render Better Services to Customers by Reaching Out Like This Bank?

SBI is the largest bank in India. They are applying CRM technology to bring banks and customers together into immediate and close relationships. A case study conducted by Rayalaseema University and ICBM, shows that the SBI treats their customer relations as more than technology, and more of an attitude and concentrated behavior. By reaching out to all bank members and other consumers, not just those with the most return on investment, this bank has seen large, measurable growth in their income as well as membership numbers. They used the word “democracy” to describe their set of tactics.

You can follow their lead by making sure that your strategy includes and is influenced by all consumers – both hot and cold leads, those who have purchased your products and services as well as those who haven’t yet. Facilitating a unified relationship between members of an organization and consumers one of the most highly beneficial assets that technology can bring. In this way, your CRM tactics will enhance your brand image and make your company approachable and enjoyable to be a part of.

teamgate-india-bank (1) (1) (1)

This is How to Use CRM to Boost Sales, According to Retail Outlet Data

The Department. of Management Studies, Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering & Technology took a look at selected organized retail outlets in order to comprehend multiple facets of the CRM frameworks utilized. They found that many of the companies were not leaving their customers with the level of satisfaction that they expected (You didn’t expect that, did you?). These particular stores were not utilizing their technology to it’s full advantage. So, the study included a list of suggestions, based on the information that they had gathered from the outlets.

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The suggestions included items such as responding quickly to clients’ grumblings and maintaining adequate information on hand about available inventory. Here’s what you can learn from this: Don’t wait for a specialist to analyze your customer data. With modern technology, you have access to complaints at your fingertips. Keep an eye on your customer data in your analytics dashboard and take note of any and all issues that arise. If a hurdle or dissatisfaction comes up more than once, that is an indicator that it’s time for you to implement changes in the way you approach the relationships your have with your customers.

Related: 4 Ways CRM Makes Small Business Employees More Productive and An Extensive Sales Stack for Current Business

In Conclusion

The fact that you have access CRM technology is not an isolated indicator that you are going to have improve relationships with your customers and target market; you must leverage the tools in a strategic way. Use CRM platforms in a way that shows what you’re learning from the successes and mistakes of yourself and others. Start applying what you’ve learned today for increased sales success. 

Related: 6 Sure and Simple Ways to Internationalize Your Business

If you are not a salesperson, it can be easy to look at Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and shrug it off as something exclusive to salespeople. Granted, CRM find its popularity in sales since it mimics business workflows and sales pipelines. More importantly, the current “Age of The Customer” requires any business and product to be customer-centric. In the salesperson’s world of leads and clients, CRM usage allows businesses to keep customers at the core of their processes.

But can non-salespeople use CRM as well?
In this article we will talk about:

  • Why CRM Works For Other Professionals
  • Who Else Should Use CRM
  • How to Customize Your CRM

Why CRM Works For Other Professionals

Truth is, almost every professional working in a field requiring frequent contact with customers can benefit from CRM. Take a look at the following graph of the most requested CRM features:

crm-buyerview-report-2013-5

(Graph and study by Softwareadvice)

Access to a centralized platform for contacts (emails, phone calls, meetings etc.), metrics and task management are features that make CRM a powerful toolkit for salespeople and other professionals alike.
Without a CRM, professionals have to resort to building their own ecosystem of apps. Although the choice of great app substitutes is limitless, having a dedicated platform where all the features are easily accessible can be a great boost to productivity –and revenue.

Who Else Should Use CRM

To misquote the bard:

“All the world’s a market, and all the men and women merely salespeople”.

Professionals have services to offer –or sell, they have contacts that require various degrees of engagement and they need data to make informed decisions. If we follow this reasoning, every professional is a salesperson as well.
Let’s explore how other professionals can use CRM:

Online Freelancers:

freelance

Freelancers have to manage their clients, do customer support, manage projects, and prevent old leads from turning cold while doing their own marketing. Without planning and organization, these tasks can be very challenging to manage even for the more seasoned freelancers.

A CRM is the ideal toolkit to manage the complex web that is the freelancer’s contacts. On one platform, you can schedule follow-up emails, visualize your pipeline and receive smart insights on the likelihood that a lead will convert based on previously gathered data.
A pipeline can help you see the steps through which your deals progress. For freelance writers for example, a deal will start with a pitch, then an initial contact, a quote, a negotiation then closure.
The more you populate your CRM with data, the more information you can gather about:

  • Which deals are easier to close?
  • Which clients are more profitable?
  • The pipeline step where deals are most likely to fall through.

Besides freelance writers, any independent contractor who regularly deals with a variety of customers can use a CRM. This includes:

Non-Profits & Fundraising

giving (1)

For a non-profit to stay afloat financially, it has to manage a delicate network of established donors while trying to acquire new ones. Even with the advent of online crowdfunding efforts, fundraising is a field where high-touch engagement with donors is conventional if not required.
With contact management and segmentation strategies, non-profits can afford to easily give their owners the attention they deserve. In addition, the data gathered thanks to frequent CRM use can highlight the particular donor/prospect personas most likely to be generous.
Lastly, task and relationship management through scheduled and well-recorded contacts allow for better-targeted marketing campaigns and as a result, happy email-reading customers.

Related: Customer Success Strategies for Non-SaaS Businesses

Musicians and Promoters

musician (1)

For musicians who do not feature on the Billboard Top40, a great deal of management is needed to land a show. Musicians and promoters have to constantly look for venues (leads), manage their relationships with old customers (agents, music venues, labels, etc.), and send Demos.
Although creatives are typically portrayed as scattered individuals with a distaste for organization, their success will still depend on meticulous planning.

A CRM can help:

  • Manage client contacts for venues, promoters, agents, labels, etc.
  • Track previous and ongoing Deals (a deal can be a show, a gig, or a record contract)
  • Compare Deals based on profitability, geographic location, and other customized variables.

How to customize your CRM

The most important trick to making CRM a versatile tool for any profession is customization. Although the sales jargon can be applicable to many other professions, it’s best to replace it with something you’re more familiar with. Let’s find out how!

Pipeline

freelancepipeline
The sales pipeline consists of all the steps each deal goes through prior to closure. The default Sales Pipeline provided by Teamgate has the following stages:

  • Incoming
  • Contacted
  • Quote
  • Evaluating
  • Closure

You aren’t bound to keep the pipeline as it is. This is my attempt at creating a Freelance Writer Pipeline:

  • You can create your own pipeline by navigating through:
  • Click on your Profile then Settings
  • Pick Deals and Deals settings on the left tab.
  • Then Add New Process
  • Add a new stage for every stage of your ideal pipeline.

If you can’t think of a clearly defined and recognizable stage, it is perfectly fine to keep the original Sales Pipeline and keep tweaking it as you go.

Tags

tags

Our segmentation article talks extensively about how clear and purposeful tagging enriches Customer Relationship Management systems. Make sure to check it out for more information about good segmentation habits.
The above example is my attempt at segmentation as a Freelance writer.

Integration

Allowing your CRM to communicate with your apps of the trade is one of the best ways to customize it to your own liking. Although this can often require some API knowledge or CRM support, we thankfully now have options like Zapier which makes integration a breeze for non-developers.

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Experimenting

To have a CRM tailored for you and your profession, there’s no substitute for practice. Tweaking around your pipeline and implementing different tag subgroups will allow you to learn more about the CRM and your own business practices.

Take Teamgate for a Free Trial today to see if it’s the best fit for your job.
Back to you! Do you use CRM for non-sales-related tasks? How do you use it? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Related: Black Friday: Choose Value Over Discounts

Teamgate is a Google Campus Exchange Program Finalist!

We are pleased to share with you that Teamgate was chosen as a Finalist for the Google Campus Exchange program in Warsaw, Poland.
The Eastern European Campus Exchange is part of Google’s Global Entrepreneurs Initiative aimed at providing logistical support and mentorship for the region’s most exciting tech startups. To learn more about Google for Entrepreneurs, visit google.com/entrepreneurs.
The program has started yesterday and for the next 4 days, Teamgate’s members will be going through a schedule of intensive classes and lectures by industry experts on everything related to global expansion. Topics will include sales techniques, audience building and analytics in addition to access to Google’s renowned lab of “Creative Skills for Innovation”.
Teamgate will get a chance to learn more about Google Products from Googlers themselves, get insights from Facebook, Youtube enterpreneurs and other experts about how we can use them best to serve our customers. Lastly, we are also very excited to network with startups, investors and influencers from the region to showcase our experiences.

What it means for our customers

As a Customer Relationship Management app, Teamgate is fully aware of how elemental customers are to the evolution of any business. This intensive program will help us learn from the most pioneering companies in the world how to help our customers succeed by building the best and most innovative product.
Being chosen as a finalist is a huge achievement for us that we could not have done without our customers’ trust. We will use this experience to make your trust an even worthier investment.

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What it means for Teamgate

We are preparing to embark on a Global journey. We will be learning the art of global scalability from the household name of global renown: Google.
Besides its non-stop forays into technological innovation, Google has managed to quickly scale up while keeping customer experience and satisfaction as core values. By participating in this program, Teamgate will get a close look at the culture of innovation and customer success that has made it all possible for Google, and hopefully will replicate the experience.

To summarize, innovation, creativity, international presence and customer happiness are some of the ideas that Teamgate will learn to think of in new lights over the next couple days.
Want to know more about what we will be learning? Make sure you subscribe to our blog!

Related: Startup company Teamgate takes a leading place in getapp.com ratings

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You’ve probably heard the statistic: “1 million US B2B salespeople will lose their jobs to self-service E-Commerce by the year 2020” according to a 2015 Forrester forecast. Yet, few people can claim they haven’t seen it coming.

In the 1993 classic “Groundhog Day”, Bill Murray is stuck living the same day over and over and over again. It’s no coincidence that the film’s screenwriter chose to include an encounter with Ned Ryerson, an annoying insurance agent, to make the repetitive day even more nightmarish.

Ned Ryerson is everything customers hate about salespeople: Irritating, too pushy, untrustworthy, and incapable of tailoring his pitch and product to each customer.

With E-commerce and the rise of the SaaS sales model, salespeople like Ned Ryerson are in an endangered spot. But before we discuss how to avoid becoming Ned (or how to stop being one), let’s talk about some of the reasons why every traditional salesperson should be worried.

Why Salespeople are on their way out

The same Forrester study found:

  • 75% of B2B buyers now say that buying from a website is more convenient than buying from a sales representative.
  • 93% say that they prefer buying online rather than from a salesperson when they’ve decided what to buy.

The modern customer is one search and a few clicks away from knowing everything they want to know about the product they need.

Traditionally, the salesperson took care of educating the customer. Ned Ryerson approaches you (a dormant lead) and pitches an insurance plan, explains why you need it, and badgers you until you buy it or give him your phone number.

The internet not only has made product information immediate and accessible but has also made buying the product online easier and cheaper while completely bypassing the salesperson.

It also doesn’t help that decades of overly repetitive cold calls and scripted sales interactions have damaged customers’ trust in salespeople beyond repair. In contrast, E-commerce presents a much more pleasant experience and a customer-centric platform.

SaaS Stress SOS: The SaaS Sales Model

saas (1)

Your traditional B2B salesperson would probably find “Groundhog Day” the ideal scenario to land a deal. They get to pitch the same expensive deal (1 yearly software license for thousands of dollars for example) every day using the same sales script until the customer gives up. Then they make a big commission and move on to the next customer using the same strategy.

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SaaS has changed the delivery model of software to a Pay-As-You-Go or subscription-based service. Instead of focusing on securing long-term deals, the pressure for salespeople is now on meeting short-term quotas that are incredibly challenging to maintain. This is mostly because controlling SaaS Sales churn – the rate at which customers cease to use the service they subscribed to—is beyond the salesperson’s scope.

Unfortunately, many salespeople still can’t adjust to this new shift. Even more worrying are the companies that haven’t yet adjusted their overall sales strategy accordingly.

Besides product delivery and sales, SaaS has changed sales-quotas, pricing strategies, and salespeople’s responsibilities. Between finding leads, meeting quotas, lowering churn, and managing accounts, sales are starting to sound like the most stressful career – and justifiably so.

Aaron Ross author of the award-winning, bestselling SaaS bible “Predictable Revenue” calls overtasking sales teams “one of the biggest productivity killers” facing SaaS companies. When too many responsibilities are included in one sales role, he adds, salespeople suffer from a lack of focus, motivation, and appropriate training.

Furthermore, keeping track of relevant metrics is even harder when the salesperson covers so many roles.  More importantly, “lumped responsibilities obscure what’s happening and make it more difficult to isolate and fix issues with accountable follow through” continues Ross.

Companies that fail to implement sales specialization should look inwards when unable to make the revenue they aim for.

Old Sales Habits Die Hard (And Annoy Your Customers)

old habits (1) (1)

Whether the Cold Call is dead or not merits a separate article, but what everyone can agree on is that repetitive cold calling is annoying for customers.

Ineffective cold calls, however, are symptoms of bigger issues. Notably, a disconnection with how customers view salespeople and an inability to replace ineffective strategies with better ones.

“74% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via Email” according to a Merkle study. In addition, The Direct Marketing Association reports that “Email marketing has an ROI of 4,300%”. What do the numbers mean?

Dressing up old sales habits as outbound prospecting when other strategies deliver a much higher ROI should be inexcusable for any salesperson.

Ned-Free Sales: How To Reinvent The Sales Role (When it Doubt, Divide Labor)

CORE SALES ROLES

Aaron Ross, of Predictable Revenue, suggests starting Sale Specialization with the second salesperson hire. Ideally, a core sales team should have the following 4 roles:

  • “Inbound Lead Qualification: Commonly called Market Response Reps, they qualify marketing leads coming inbound through the website or 800 numbers. The sources of these leads are marketing programs, search engine marketing, or organic word-of-mouth.
  • Outbound” Prospecting/Cold Calling 2.0: Commonly called Sales Development Reps or New Business Development Reps, this function prospects into lists of target accounts to develop new sales opportunities from cold or inactive accounts. This is a team dedicated to proactive business development. Highly efficient outbound reps and teams do NOT close deals, but create & qualify new sales opportunities and then pass them to Account Executives to close.
  • Account Executives: They are the quota-carrying reps who close deals. They can be either inside or out in the field. As a best practice, even when a company has an Account Management/Customer Success function, Account Executives should stay in touch with new customers they close past the close until the new customer is deployed and launched.
  • Account Management/Customer Success: Client deployment and success, ongoing client management, and renewals. Someone needs to be dedicated to making customers successful–and that is NOT the salesperson! “

You can read more on “Predictable Revenue” on Aaron Ross’s website.

Sales Automation is the Answer

Does your sales team still not use a CRM? Well, it’s never too late.

A CRM can help you implement more effective cold calling strategies that do not alienate customers. By tracking the history of your sales contacts and response rates, you can tweak outbound prospecting strategies (like messaging schedule) without contacting the same customer multiple times in a short –albeit irritating– window.

Being a customer-centric app, CRMs also help to establish better customer relationships (more profitable even) which leads to more effective targeted prospecting and more data for your sales forecasts and analytics.

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How Teamgate Can Help

Teamgate can help you become a more likable salesperson than Ned Ryerson. How?

By offering an intuitive CRM fully dedicated to customer relationships and the sales pipeline, we make sure that any workflow implementing Teamgate will keep customers at its core.

Likewise, Teamgate’s Segmentation features (we will discuss Segmentation on our next blog ) help salespeople avoid the problem of Information Overload by categorizing customers into appropriate sub-groups. We realize that not all your leads and customers are the same.

Furthermore, Teamgate’s contacts management helps you centralize all your sales contacts in one platform. You can organize, review and schedule contacts with your leads and customers. You can integrate it with third-party applications like Google, LinkedIn, Mac Contacts, and Outlook or craft your own Zapier+Teamgate integration recipes.

Assigning separate teams and salespeople to deals is yet another intuitive task in Teamgate. Additionally, you get to measure the performance of each sales role and identify which areas in particular need improvement.

Check out more of the analytical and forecasting tools available via Teamgate.

Are you tired of being a B2B Ned Ryerson? Start your Free Teamgate Trial Today!