Development of the sales team? CRM can help
Having a fast-growing sales team is an exciting challenge — but without the right tools, it's easy to lose control of what drives results. Learn how a well-implemented CRM helps you hire the right salespeople, get them to work faster, and build a repeatable sales model—before small problems turn into a failed quarter.
Are you developing your sales team? Congratulations! Rapid growth, however, tests every aspect of sales management. This is an exciting task, but intense. When all your charts are leaning sharply upwards, a small bend is enough, which can translate into unsuccessful results at the end of the year. Meanwhile, all your needs — from security to marketing and the sales process — demand your attention.
Where should you focus? When you develop a B2B direct sales team, the results are influenced by the most three factors:
- Hiring the right new salespeople,
- Quickly bring new sellers to full performance,
- Build a repeatable sales model and process.
Can CRM help? Yes. CRM can enable you to achieve results with rapid growth because it allows you to focus your team, like a laser, on what you need to achieve your goals.
What to look for in order for CRM to become a growth accelerator?
- Focus on activity reporting — to assess (and train) new hires faster
What to do?
Focus your team on recording sales meetings in CRM. Keep track of who is and isn't logging appointments. Make the team responsible for getting this simple information.
Why would this work?
With modern mobile CRMs, it is much easier for salespeople to capture key information about what is happening to customers. And you get a better insight into what's going on with your customers. And your entire team will spend less time on status meetings, reporting details of what happened, and more time to increase effectiveness.
Why will it help you succeed?
In addition to greater sales transparency, activity reporting will help you see that your most important goal has been achieved: hiring the right salespeople.
Most sales leaders don't really have a clear view that new salespeople aren't working properly, even for a few quarters — after which it's too late to make up for lost time.
However, with simple activity reporting, you will be able to detect problems much earlier. You will see — in a few weeks, not quarters — that one of your reps is not collecting as many meetings, that his meetings are not with the right people and/or that his arrangements are not going as expected. You will be able to step in and take action sooner.
- Get rid of extra stuff — to get new employees on the job faster
What to do?
Put your CRM on a diet! Reduce all extra fields in the CRM mobile app.
Why would this work?
Mobile CRMs are task-oriented and designed exclusively for salespeople. With such a small screen area, it is extremely important to exclude fields that require support, finance or other departments.
Why will it help you succeed?
This tip is about time to increase productivity. It's much better to make CRM so simple that salespeople don't have to be trained—or admonished—which fields they should fill out. If you do not need an absolutely filled field, hide them!
- Detect trends faster to find your niche
What to do?
Select one or at most two questions that you want to add to your team's activity reports to see market trends. This can be tracking the use cases that the customer is interested in. This can be tracking customer industries. This can be tracking the solution being replaced.
Why will it help you succeed?
This helps to build a repeatable sales model. In general, there are different trends in emerging markets. Perhaps you will discover that your product is a huge hit in financial services. Or perhaps you will find that some current solution is amenable to replacement.
Once you have found this repeatable model, you can direct your marketing and sales activities to the path of least resistance. Sales cycles become shorter, sales efficiency increases, and you achieve your goals. Usually, however, we find these patterns first on the basis of anecdotes and only later on the basis of actual data.
In the hustle and bustle of team enlargement, CRM, can seem like a distraction. Indeed, this can be the case if you start adding to the CRM everything that ever appears in the sales process.
But in the new world of task-oriented, mobile sales apps, CRM can become a tool to focus, not distract — and help drive your team's success.
