While making those sales strategies, have you ever asked yourself this question, “How long does it take to make an actual sale by my team members”?
The answer to this question varies on your chosen industry and niche. Majority of sales departments and teams have a similar goal: achieve the shortest sales cycle possible but without hurting their rapport with the customers.
What Is a Sales Cycle?
Sales cycle is the complete selling process of a business. It is the journey that starts from lead generation to the closing of the deal while going through the various stages of your sales process.
All the activities that are involved while transitioning the prospects to clients are carried out in the sales cycle.
Why is shorter Sales Cycle necessary?
The important parts of any sales cycle are investments and meetings. In the shortened sale cycle, less number of meetings are required for making a bigger impact (a higher level of engagement and quick responses are required in this form). The challenging work put into the shorter sales cycle is more, so it needs some outside intervention. CRM easily provides such intervention. Let’s have a look at the features that are provided by CRM to shorten your sales cycle.
Let’s see if you have the necessary arsenal and make sure that you’re all set for success with a CRM.
Automated Administration Tasks
Having a CRM helps you automate your administrative tasks which help you focus your time and resources on more useful tasks. And average sales representative spends around 23 percent of his time on administrative tasks.
Reduction in administrative workload helps cut the above figure down to 10 percent allowing sales reps more time to focus on generating and converting more leads.
CRM is especially helpful for supervisors and sales leaders. CRMs have built-in communication tools that make conversations quicker. The decision-making process gets quicker, and even though administration might not directly impact revenue, it impacts the time average spent by your sales rep daily.
Understanding of the Ideal Buyer
For a faster deal closure, your sales reps need to be focused on the deals that are more likely to close. But how can sales reps identify promising prospects?
First, your reps need to understand your success rate with companies of varying sizes. It is important for your reps to understand the patterns of a buyer vs. a non-buyer.
Analyzing the win rates for both large and small deals lets your team understand the same.
When the opportunity dollar value is smaller, there is a better chance of winning (closing) the deal. Based on this data you can help your sales reps target the deals between the $3,000 to $7,000 range.
Enhanced prospect research
While carrying out the prospecting process, the major blockade is the manual labor of creating the data of the person being contacted. With a CRM this task becomes simple as your reps can easily create entries for everyone they contact. This becomes a straightforward way of tracking how the prospecting efforts are getting carried out.
Sales reps can spend up to 40% of their time looking for somebody to call. That’s a scary statistic which can easily be delegated virtual sales assistant using a CRM.
Effective contact management
Keeping your customer database up to date is crucial for your business. Logging all your call notes and make sure that every time you someone it gets recorded. Setting up an automatic Bcc is an effective way of doing so.
Now the difficult part comes! Logging all this information manually is a treacherous task and sometimes due to human error crucial parts of the conversation may get left aside.
While leveraging CRM solutions sales teams can easily be briefed who they should reach out to and when. Even the marketing team can be trained about the leads that must be funneled into a nurturing program.
Automated Sales Pipeline Tracking
Tracking leads or prospects is the most crucial aspects of your sales pipeline. This the segment that is most time-consuming because of its manual nature, if you have not deployed a CRM. There are six basic steps in sales pipeline:
- Lead generation
- Lead nurturing
- Marketing qualified lead
- Sales accepted lead
- Sales qualified lead
- Closed deal
- Post-sale
Lead tracking oversees most of the steps in a sales pipeline making the sales process quick but without quicker results. Skipping steps towards the sales goals will not help you close the deals fast.
Identifying the position of the prospects in your sales pipeline and trying to move them along gets tough if you are doing so using spreadsheets or a poorly designed software.
Having CRM automates the sales process. It helps you streamline your sales pipeline saving you major time and helping you shorten the sales cycle.
No More Customer Management Inefficiencies
of an effective sales pipeline is done to adjudge the timing of when and how to market the product and services to the customers. A whole lot of analysis and real-time observation goes into this process. Communication with the customers and providing them with constant support at every stage becomes another crucial point of your entire sales funnel.
A CRM comes in handy during customer management as it helps businesses analyze the pain points of the customers. CRM notifies the users when:
- An information request is sent to you
- When a customer requires help
- When an immediate purchase request is made
- When a product or service is returned or canceled
- When a follow up is pending
- When someone fails to follow through with the sale
- Where there is movement in the sales pipeline
After this much automation, all the reps need to do is decide when and how they can respond. CRM also helps you gather every information that helps reps predict future behaviors and target future marketing campaigns that will work based on the information collected.
Automated Scheduling of follow ups
After the qualified lead and prospects are moved through the funnel, the major task that crops up is timely follow-ups.
Mastering follow-ups are important for your sales cycle as it results in better and faster deal closures. By using a CRM, businesses can stay on track with their sales objectives, and make follow up at regular intervals. This way your sales reps will meet their sales goals on time and keep the clients happy.
Because we all know and understand that the actual money is in the successful follow-up.
Having a CRM Software Helps You!
Having a CRM acts as a boon for businesses of every size. It helps in boosting the performance of any sales team and enhances
- search, sort, and qualifying process for leads
- the timing of follow ups done for sales opportunities
- the deal closure rate resulting to the achievement of sales target
Salesmate CRM offers many sales management features to its clients and allows them to automate their busywork so that their sales reps can focus on achieving the sales targets. With over 1500 customers, we are famous for helping our client streamline their sales process and generate the kind of revenue they are capable of.
If you too are worried about the busywork eating up your productivity and want to know how Salesmate can help your organization achieve their sales goals faster than do get in touch with us.
We welcome you to Salesmate! 🙂 A subtle yet systematic and intuitive sales intelligence-based CRM that provides high quality service without blowing a hole in your budget. Want to know more? Start a free 15-day trial, today!
