A CRM can centralise information, monitor processes and performance, as well as improve efficiency across an entire business. What does this mean for sales processes? Think about the amount of time spent on each task in your sales process, then factor in that an estimated 53% of a salesperson’s time is spent doing admin work; now, imagine what this would do to your sales figures if that time could be spent of selling instead. CRMs offer the unique ability to streamline sales processes and reduce the time spent on administrative tasks.

Your sales team have many requirements that can be handled by a CRM. Let’s look at three ways where using a CRM can enhance the efficiency of your sales processes.

1. Visibility on prospects in the sales funnel

In order to make the most of your sales funnel, you require total visibility.  One way of doing this is to integrate a computer telephony integration (CTI) with your CRM.  This will dramatically enhance visibility by improving:

• Efficiency: every call taken by your sales team will link to the CRM with customer data being easily accessible.  
• Effectiveness: reps will be able to create and prioritize call lists. By segmenting and targeting contacts that have the most potential, resources will be maximized, providing the best returns.
• Insight: because all data will be highly visible, the volume and quality of the information provided will be increased. Historical reporting can be generated automatically and real-time insights can immediately flag up performance data. This intelligence can be used strategically to make a hugely positive impact upon sales figures.

2. Sales process automation

When sales processes are automated, your team save time and can concentrate on more important tasks. The more you make use of your CRM to automate, the more time sales reps will have to actually sell.  

Following up leads is vital.  80% of sales take up to five phone calls to close; imagine if your CRM could remind your sales team when to make those calls (particularly useful for reps who are juggling lots of clients).  When you make your CRM selection, you need to choose a system that will allow direct calls to be made and emails to be sent. By doing so, everything will be logged and recorded. Your CRM can also prioritize leads by using a lead scoring system, with rules set by the operator, based on conversion probability. Calls can be assigned immediately by the CRM to specific sales reps.  With time being of the essence, the lead is far less likely to go cold. By doing this, revenue can be increased by 10% or more in just a few months.

Finally, do your sales team use Excel, or similar, to store leads and data? The CRM can do it for them. You don’t want your reps wasting time each day on data entry when they could be doing more important tasks. Once customer information is in the CRM, reports can be produced automatically, flagging up progress reminders.

3. Accurate sales forecasting

Sales forecasts need to predict the future of your company’s prospects, enabling you to make sound decisions.  Get it wrong and management may as well be working in the dark. By using the CRM to store key data, it can then be analyzed and compared.  As long as the information is entered accurately into the system by everyone involved in the sales process, the person creating the sales forecast will have everything they need in one place.  By being able to view historical data and produce tailored projections, the insights revealed are going to be far more valuable and benefit the company. The CRM can quickly help to identify trends, show details of sales cycles and even individual team metrics.  With these valuable insights at their fingertips, managers can produce sales forecasts that are far more accurate, enabling them to work with their team to boost overall performance.

It is plain to see that by using your CRM in the right way, sales processes can be far more streamlined and your company performance vastly enhanced.

Having accurate and up-to-date information about your contacts makes it easier to understand their habits. Managing that information effectively is crucial to your sales success, that’s where Teamgate CRM can really help.

Once upon a time good customer contact management was defined by a bulging address book, containing no more than names, addresses, and telephone numbers.

Such was the value of this hard-sourced information, top salespeople were headhunted energetically, based on the contents of that little book.

Thankfully, the sales process has changed dramatically, and so has the technology behind it.

Source tracking, gathering, and management of valuable contact information has become an integral part of the customer sales journey. And, quality Top CRM software – such as Teamgate – are pivotal to effective sales contact management.

Contact gathering and management

The more you have of anything, the harder it is to find exactly what you want.

Closer collaboration between sales and marketing has greatly simplified the gathering of lead contact information. But, with that, comes problems.

More information, requires better management, and that management should offer intuitive filtering of real possibilities from time-wasters.

Smarter gathering; collation; management; segmentation; and filtering of those leads is key to separating the wheat from the chaff. Once the real opportunities have been identified, it’s time to start the sales process.

Common contact management problems

All stages of customer contact management bring their own particular problems. One of the factors which has made Teamgate a multi award-winning sales CRM, is the ability to adapt and foresee the contact relationship management problems of the present, as well as the future – and design with that in mind.

It’s said that hindsight is the twenty-twenty vision. If you look to the past, sales teams barely recognised that they were having sales contact management problems, until someone found a better way of doing things.

Some of the biggest headaches for salespeople in the past, were:

• Constant duplication of contact information
• Time-consuming manual input of information into spreadsheets
• Not having all the necessary information regarding a person or company
• Records of communication history were poorly managed and difficult to access
• Inability to segment and filter companies for smarter search and analysis purposes
• Tedious manual compilation of reports on selected contact groups or people

Sales contact management with your CRM

Teamgate is far more than a contacts book – recording names, numbers and addresses – Teamgate CRM software lets you track and manage all aspects of your customer relationship. Along with the most basic, and necessary, information, Teamgate gives you an overview of your contacts’ interactions; past history; won sales; preferred products; pain-points; and accordingly presents you with a visible and actionable analysis.

Addressing the problems associated with CRM contact management, Teamgate has innovated how salespeople can:

1.    Prevent automatic duplication of imported contacts – Teamgate recognises when imported contacts, from any source are duplicates – CSV or XSLX files, Google contacts, Mac address book, or directly from LinkedIn – the software will request a further instruction on how to proceed.
2.    Allow you to fully customise the information you gather on both people, and companies. Flexible customisable fields – and tags – offer clearer and more in-depth information on your contacts, and allows you search your contact management database more efficiently, using multiple criteria.
3.    Manage all communication history with contacts far more easily. Emails, files, telephone calls, meetings, notes, events, and comments are all stored, and accessible in the contact’s card.
4.    When searching files, the sales person has the ability to view contacts by status, segment, or any of a host of other criteria. All filtering options are fully customisable allowing you to create the necessary tags suitable for you, and your unique sales process.
5.    Teamgate offers you the ability to clearly visualise all deals associated with each contact.
6.    Conversations via Intercom CRM integration are all clearly visible, adding to the value of your contact communication history.
7.    The Teamgate analysis section allows you to prepare and present reports on your relationship with single, or multiple contacts, easily, and with far more clarity.

The real benefits of better contact management

The benefits of CRM contact management – which come with award-winning software like Teamgate – are evident during every stage of your contact interaction.

Here’s how:

• A clean database will simplify every task throughout your sales process. Well organised leads cards, containing all the information you may need, are always easily accessed, searchable, and containing all the knowledge you need to push your sales forward.
• It doesn’t matter which one of your sales team is working with a customer, Teamgate CRM contact management contains all the necessary information, giving the appointed salesperson all the information they need, on the go. This seamless feature allows salespeople to take over exactly where a colleague has left off, armed with all the relevant information.
• Segmentation of contacts allows for the creation of customisable sales categories – industry type, size, location, etc. – and even smarter filtering functionality. Meaning, searching for a contact among thousands can be defined by segment, or any other fully customisable criteria which suits your process.
• Knowing your contact’s past history and relationship is vital for driving that relationship forward. Really great sales contact management abilities – like those available in Teamgate CRM – helps you fully analyse the importance of valued customers, simply and smartly, and react accordingly.
• Location is no longer a barrier to contact management. Teamgate gives your sales team full mobility and access to all communication history, personal information, company information, notes, lead ownership, geographic mapping, in-app contact facility, and all from anywhere with an available internet connection.

Contact management should be uncomplicated, accessible, and burden-free. It should offer the sales team every fragment of customer information, when, and where it’s needed. And, most importantly, great contact management should actively drive the complete sales process forward. 

Managing your sales pipeline is critical to your businesses success. Your sales pipeline maps sales movements across every stage of your sales process. The clearer your sales pipeline picture, the more easily, and quickly you can react to any situation.

Problems with traditional sales pipelines

Individual sales move at different speeds. Some close quickly, while others crawl at a snail’s pace, blocking up your sales pipeline.

With traditional sales pipelines it is difficult to interpret a clear view of all the pipeline’s stages, and map its progress. From a lead, contact, deal, and accounts management perspective, identifying bottlenecks can be difficult. When problems are identified, the traditional pipeline offers little assistance to providing solutions.

Another problem associated with the traditional sales pipeline is the overburdening of salespeople with time-wasting tasks, along with the labour-intensive compilation of sales reports and projections.

Also, traditionally, it took personal knowledge of each individual lead, and the associated interactions, to get an accurate picture of where sales opportunities were causing blockages.

How sales pipeline movement solves these issues

Having a clear, instantly interpretable view of each sales opportunity in the pipeline is imperative to productivity. Additionally, the ability to instantly create a pipeline movement sales report removes once labour-intensive tasks, and frees up time.  

Using an intelligent sales CRM, sales managers can minutely analyse each stage of the sales pipeline. With this holistic view, the sales stage management process has become simplified and clearly illustrates the entire engagement process. Communications, meetings, follow-ups, etc. can all be monitored instantly, and the identification of blockages simplified.

Sales managers, with an overall sales view, have the ability to identify where sales reps are becoming grounded. By analysing sales pipeline movement reports, generated in the sales CRM, the problem is more easily resolved, and the pipeline freed.

Sales pipeline movement reports also offer managers the ability to identify the performance of individual salespersons, and fully understand their strengths, their weaknesses, and also to interpret if goals have been set too high, or too low. The information gathered automatically by your sales software can be visualised instantly, using colour-coded charts and illustrations, it gives you a clear view of each and every stage of the sales pipeline. This visualisation allows sales teams to react quickly, and resolve urgent situations.

The bane of the traditional salesperson’s life was the constant creation of sales reports and attendance at daily, weekly, or monthly progress meetings. While the meetings are still a necessary part of sales, the task has become simplified by your sales CRM. Sales reports are instantly available. All activities are automatically tracked and recorded, building an accurate, up to the minute account of the entire sales pipeline.

What’s the value of clean pipeline movement?

The real values of a clean and fluid sales pipeline are:

• It provides the ability to drastically improve all aspects of sales performance. With a holistic view of the pipeline and the automatic generation of intelligent sales reports, fewer blockages occur.
• Through analysis of past sales cycles, sales managers can design and structure optimum timeframes for each stage of the pipeline. This can shorten the stages and allow salespeople to close deals faster.
• The ability of colleagues to collaborate on multiple sales projects, interacting instantly on matters such as; next-step planning; communications management; meeting scheduling; etc, allows salespeople to cooperate, ultimately saving valuable time.
• Nothing can be left to guesswork when a sales manager is presented with a constant clear picture of the complete sales pipeline. Your CRM software offers such a sales pipeline overview; of every prospect; every lead; every deal; and the progress of each team member in relation to each project.
• Gone are the days when salespeople were chained to their desks writing time-draining sales reports. An intuitive sales CRM now handles this task for everyone, leading to clear, concise, and understandable graphs, illustrations and reports, illustrating every stage of the sales pipeline, and every person involved.

Sales pipelines can be tricky to design and implement, but with a smart CRM system your sales stages become clear and self-explanatory. 

What is a sales pipeline and why do you need one?

In the past salespeople were regarded as being preeminent note-takers. They were evident everywhere you went, sitting in their cars, coffee shops, airports and even by the side of the road, notebook and pen in hand, shuffling a sheaf of papers as they transferred vital sales information from one space to another. That was part of their sales pipeline, and theirs alone. They were the only ones with the key to unlock this magic kingdom.

But what is a sales pipeline?

In a nutshell a sales pipeline is an organised and highly visual means of tracking all your potential and existing clients as they progress through the varying sales pipeline stages.

Even if you don’t yet have access to a sales pipeline management system – a sales CRM – there’s a good chance that you’re already employing some version of a sales pipeline management system, even if you don’t realise it. 

Within the sales process stages already exist (perhaps you don’t call them stages, but that’s what they are). Of course these stages vary from company to company and client to client but they usually contain at least some of the following stages; contact a client, meet a client, call a client, email client, send proposal, agree deal, sign contract, secure payment, or on the negative side, deal lost.

However, having a defined and structured sales pipeline within your sales CRM software – when used correctly – brings a whole new edge to your sales process. From marketing your product or service, gathering leads, converting those leads to sales, to analysing and tracking your efforts through smart, current and informative visuals and sales forecasts, you’ll never get lost in your sales pipeline. Juggle multiple individuals or companies in customised stages, gain insights into time management, track communications and all associated files, and all from the comfort of a fully mobile system.

Best practices of CRM Sales Pipelines

Before you start organising your sales pipeline, you really need to understand the problems you need to solve. The major problems experienced by CRM users is over-complicating their sales process by creating too many stages. It’s true that some areas of sales – like the sale of high-value and custom goods or services – may require more sales stages and may need to be individually customised. But, on the whole, the mantra of keeping the number of stages to a minimum appears to be the best option.

When used in this simplistic, customised manner, your sales pipeline brings visibility and predictability to your workflow. Accurate time management, financial projection and revenue forecasting rids you of the feeling of confusion; a salesperson’s worst nightmare.

What are the sales pipeline stages and how many should you have?

At Teamgate sales facility we use four stages in our pipeline – Interested, Online Meeting, Pending Decision, and Payment. Within these stages we can create all the actions which we need to aid moving the customer to the next stage. But, the number of stages you wish to use is totally up to you.

The stages may vary from industry to industry, but once you have clearly thought out the problems you wish to address, the design of your pipeline is simplified greatly. Additional stages may be added, or removed, depending on the analysis of results from the initial set-up of your pipeline management system.

What goals should you set for each stage of the pipeline?

Within the individual sales stages you’ve created, your goals and targets can be decided by you through continuing analysis of forecasts and results. Teamgate CRM allows you to set sales goals and success probability percentages over pre-designated time-frames. This really useful feature within each stage of your sales pipeline management plan lets you see how many days are left to fulfil – or loose – a particular deal. It also allows you to see the percentage probability of success or failure. This is invaluable when it comes to the analysis of your overall sales team’s performance and the performance of sales individuals.

The values which you set for these forecasts can be entered manually, based on history, expectations, or percentage of deals closed or lost. The results obtained from the parameters which you’ve set for your sales goals, or each individual stage of your sales funnel management, are invaluable for calculating your actual sales plan versus sales results.

However, it is once again important not to raise expectations through inaccurate forecasting. Problems which can occur, in different industries, and for different reasons, can and will affect overall scores. This needs to be taken into account in order to accurately analyse ‘real’ results.

What actions need to be taken to move forward through the pipeline?

In order to answer this important question we need to revert right back to the introduction of the sales pipeline, and the initial planning process. The owner of the sales pipeline needs to be fully aware of the questions and problems which need to be addressed in each stage of the pipeline. Once these have been answered satisfactorily, only then the stage can be moved forward through the pipeline, or marked as lost. These questions must be considered very carefully at the outset and may include actions like; if customer A does X then we need to do Y, how much time elapses before we follow up on a deal, how often do we follow up on a deal, at what point do we realise a deal is lost?

The criteria for moving a deal forward through the sales stages, or being regarded as lost should be determined from the very beginning and/or adjusted as more information is gathered through pipeline analysis.

What if the sales process has multiple pipelines?

A sales CRM such as Teamgate is designed for, and allows easily for a multiple pipeline scenario to be handled with the greatest of ease. Individual pipelines can be created for differing products or ranges of products and the tasks, or individual requirements, associated with each task to be handled differently. These may include varying turn-around times, individual logistical problems, one-off productions, or bulk production, and the individual actions required to reach the sales goals of each one.

The Teamgate sales CRM allows for the creation of new pipelines with only a couple of mouse clicks. These pipelines are then customisable to match each individual processes, no matter how simple or complex they may be.

What are the main pipeline management reports available?

Wow! That’s a big question. To put it simply, the list of reports available cover just about everything you might need to analyse and forecast your whole sales process.

Teamgate CRM allows you access really insightful reports on everything from ‘How to set sales goals’ right up to the ‘Profitability of your sales results’. With these super-helpful, and easy to read reports you can learn the reasons why most sales were lost, the number of won deals over a defined time period, your marketing leads by region or country, or simply the best performers on your team.

These reports are really invaluable for analysis and future forecasting, evaluation of past performance, sectors underperforming and a host of other nuggets of information you can use to better manage and plan your whole sales pipeline.