Salespeople can be total geniuses with their sales techniques.
But they can become so focused in on their individual sales cycles that they can neglect the fact that part of all sales strategies is the actual management of opportunities—confidently keeping on top of them, making sure all of them are moving along, and knowing where each one stands.
Without an efficient means of effectively monitoring and maintaining their pipeline, salespeople had to somehow keep track of their sales cycles. It got as bad as reminder notes stuffed in wallets or sticky notes on computer screens. The more efficient ones might have used spreadsheets, or contact management systems that allowed notes but the tools available were inefficient at best.
It All Begins With the Sales Process
In the last decade or so, companies began evolving sales processes for their sales forces. A sales process is the exact series of steps a sale travels through from lead to close, usually arrived at through a study of the best practices of experienced and proven salespeople.
The sales process brings about a stability for sales reps—successful footsteps they can follow in handling leads and bringing in a higher percentage of closes. Interestingly, prior to the evolution of the sales process, the more successful reps often had their own sales processes they followed, even if only mentally. If a rep’s company doesn’t have a sales process (and some still don’t) a rep can do well to map out what has worked best in moving sales along his or her pipeline, and in closing them.
A sales process, part and parcel of all sales strategies, is a giant step forward in opportunity management. But factually it’s only about half the story.
CRM Solution
If you take a look at traditional CRM solutions, they rarely if ever matched up with the sales process. This meant that just as in days of old, salespeople had to resort to their own devices to actually manage opportunities and stay on top of them. It meant quite a bit of administrative work in addition to that already required; and that usually meant entering lots of data into CRM, plus additional reporting because reports couldn’t be easily extracted from CRM applications.
Today all that has changed. A leading-edge CRM solution actually mirrors the sales process so that it is logical and intuitive. Sales reps can save data into the stage of the sales process where it actually belongs and, in looking up sales to see where they stand, that data can also be rapidly retrieved.
Sales analytics can be set up for each stage of the pipeline to which they apply, making both tracking and forecasting sales a snap. Lack of accurate sales forecasting was another drawback to traditional CRM solutions, which again caused resorting to supplemental and inefficient methods for the prediction of future sales. With the advent of a leading-edge CRM solution your sales can not only be rapidly analyzed and forecast by sales management, but even by salespeople themselves.
Active Improvement
There is another aspect to sales processes that is often neglected: they are subject to change.
Markets change, product lines improve, industries alter and economies fluctuate. A sales process cannot possibly remain static through such changes and remain useable—hence “workarounds” to a sales process become common with sales reps and sales management to accommodate such changes. This added time and effort is not necessary with the right CRM solution; as the sales process changes, the CRM application can be changed to match.
Sales processes can also evolve as best practices are discovered by reps. But if there’s no way for reps to share their individual discoveries, the sales process becomes outmoded and, worse, those discoveries aren’t shared with other reps. Once again, with a leading-edge CRM solution, best practices can be written up and placed within the sales pipeline steps to which they apply. Hence they are shared with the entire sales force, keeping everyone as sharp as possible.
In today’s fast-paced and fiercely competitive business environment, sales strategies can no longer just consist of sales techniques. They must include the whole range of opportunity management. Sales reps who fully grasp that concept will rise to the top and beyond.
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