A CRM tool (Customer Relationship Management) is a vital resource for a company or corporation. Ideally, it is a management window into the current and future prospects of sales as well as their current activities. For sales, it is the method by which they track and report on each individual sale or prospective sale.
But since sales is the make-or-break point of your organization—if sales don’t occur, neither does your company—a key question is this: does your CRM tool empower salespeople, or slow them down?
Importance of Salespeople
Usually, individuals who succeed in sales are quite unique. They are create their own lives, see potential opportunity that others might miss, and take charge of their own incomes. It might strike you that these are the qualities of an entrepreneur—and it is quite true that a salesperson is actually an “entrepreneur within the enterprise.” Given the kind of ability they normally possess, it therefore greatly benefits a company to make it more possible for salespeople to do what they do best: forge relationships, isolate opportunities and create more sales.
Miring Them Down
Since salespeople regularly perform and are highly capable of such contribution, it would then follow that a CRM tool should make their jobs easier, not more difficult or cumbersome. Yet many CRM tools in use today follow the latter model. Learning curves are too long, and it often occurs that a rep never fully learns the product due to lack of time and the CRM tool’s complexity. Vital data is left out of the CRM simply because important aspects of the sales process are just not included in its design or implementation. The tool requires cumbersome reporting so that management is well informed—at the expense of present and future sales, not to mention the salesperson’s morale. It is no surprise that the very mention of a CRM tool will cause sighs and frowns with most sales reps.
The Ideal CRM Tool
With sales reps’ jobs being so important, it stands to reason that a CRM tool should empower sales.
This solution should be extremely intuitive and easy to use, so that a salesperson can easily find his or her way around, and actually enjoy using it. To clear up any confusions, help should be a single click away, for the exact question that the salesperson has.
Such a tool should embrace all aspects of a company’s particular sales process, and follow a natural progression of the entire route from inquiry or first contact to the close and payment. It should be flexible enough so that a company can adapt it to their own sales process, as no two are alike.
In addition to being easy, such a solution should require minimal time for data entry on the part of a sales rep. At the same time, the data needs to be sufficient for a salesperson to review a sale in progress and quickly come back up to speed. It also needs to be adequate to the needs of management—to be able to track past and present sales, and accurately forecast the future.
Pipeliner Sales CRM Tool
A new, revolutionary CRM tool has recently appeared on the US market which meets all of these requirements. Called Pipeliner CRM, it was designed from a unique perspective: by salespeople, for salespeople. In stark contrast to other CRM products designed solely by software engineers and programmers, Pipeliner had as its mission from day one to be an easy, flexible, intuitive and even fun solution for the salesperson—while at the same time bringing these same qualities to managers and executives. It’s a win-win solution.
