How to Grow Your Sales with a CRM Solution
All businesses want to sell more products, especially the ones that want to grow. As a result, you may think about investing in a CRM solution to help achieve your objectives. The next step may be to choose which CRM is the right one, but in this article we’ll explain what you need to consider before making this move, and how you can actually achieve your objective to grow your sales.
Why Most CRM Projects Fail to Deliver
So you want to grow your sales. At this point many businesses make the decision to buy a CRM application in order to track their sales so that they can see if their efforts are having an effect. The theory is that having visibility of your sales pipeline will provide insight and knowledge that will enable you to close more sales.
In our opinion, this is wrong, and is the reason many CRM projects fail.
Why do we think this is wrong? Because tracking sales means either looking backward, at sales you have made, or looking at your current sales pipeline. Whilst both of these sets of data are useful, neither of these capabilities will result in more sales, because they show you things that are already happening.
Most sales teams, and in a small business that might just be one person (maybe it’s you), already know the state of the sales pipeline. This means that the sales team has little motivation to enter data into a CRM system that is mostly used for reporting a snapshot of your current pipeline.
The result is that using a CRM solution to understand where you are, or where you have been, does not deliver on the objective of increasing your sales.
One side-effect of this is that it is tempting to look for a simple CRM solution. Something that the sales team can update quickly and easily but still provides a snapshot of a sales pipeline. This can work in that the CRM may now be updated more, but it still doesn’t address the real problem, which is that a snapshot of your sales pipeline doesn’t help you grow your business.
If these are the reasons why many CRM projects fail to deliver, how can you make sure you succeed?
How To Build Your CRM The Right Way
A properly configured CRM solution doesn’t show you information you already know, it helps your team by providing next actions to make more sales. The problem with many CRM implementations is that they are not built with this in mind.
A CRM solution that grows sales is one that tells your sales team what they need to do in order to increase their sales. The system needs to turn your sales team into a money-making machine that can process sales enquiries as fast as they come in and close deals as quickly as possible.
An Informal Sales Process
Let’s look at a typical sales process that applies to many businesses.
- An enquiry comes in
- The sales team responds to the enquiry
- The customer and the sales team discuss the requirement
- After some period of time, the sale may close
This is definitely a sales pipeline, but there is no system or process for ensuring this happens as quickly as possible or in a systematic way. Part of the reason is that during step 3, there may be lots of discussion to try and sell something (anything) to the customer, in order to record this as a win.
Let’s take another look at the same process, built in such a way that drives your sales process forward.
A Structured Sales Process
- An enquiry comes in
- Respond. Ask specific questions about the customer requirement. Determine if there is a good fit between the product / service and the customer requirement. Determine if the customer has the budget for the product / service and what their timescales are for purchase.
- Discuss the requirement with the customer. Demonstrate the product / service fit. Ensure that the customer is happy that the product / service will deliver value
- Close the sale
The only difference in these scenarios is that the second scenario is more clearly defined with the intention of selling your product to the right customer quickly.
How to Grow Your Sales?
Going back to the CRM application, you can clearly see the difference if you look at how the solution would work.
A simple CRM would provide the ability to track these deals through the various stages (Enquiry, Discussion, Won), but a properly configured CRM aimed at streamlining this process is more effective at delivering your sales.
An Action-Based Sales Process – Your Money-Making Machine
In the table below, we look at what steps the sales person needs to take at the various stages of our process with clear next actions and defined processes. This design makes it simple for every member of the team to know what they should do next to progress sales as quickly as possible.
| Status | Description | Next Action |
|---|---|---|
| New Enquiry | This is a new enquiry to be picked up as quickly as possible | Make contact |
| Qualification | Qualify the enquiry, establishing whether this is the right customer by filling out qualification fields. | Complete the qualification information |
| Arrange Value Call | The enquiry is a good fit. Arrange a call to discuss further | Contact the customer to arrange a call |
| Quote Requested | The call went well and the customer would like to receive a quote | Send a quote |
| Negotiation | The quote has been sent – time to negotiate the price | Follow-Up on the Quote |
| Won | Congratulations, the deal is closed and the customer is delighted with their new purchase | |
| Lost – Not Qualified | The product / service is not a good fit for this customer. | |
| Lost – Perceived Value | The value call didn’t go well – the customer doesn’t see the value in our product / service | |
| Lost – Price | The customer was happy with the value, but not our pricing |
A well-configured CRM solution will provide exactly this kind of progression, whilst also allowing the creation of tasks to remind the sales person to complete items, integrating with your email system to make it easy to capture emails, and making it easy to report on what is most effective.
Additional Benefits
There are two major benefits to this approach:
- A structured approach to qualification means that your marketing system can focus on delivering automated qualified enquiries. This further streamlines the initial stages and focuses your sales team on high quality enquiries
- Tracking lost reasons allows you to understand where there may be problems in your sales process. This allows you to develop improvements, which can be tracked over time
