City Professional Networking Event – Tuesday 9th December 2014

City Professionals’ Networking lunch is a free informal networking event held monthly at The Fable Bar & Restaurant.

If you are a regular attendee of the event, please advise your professional friends and ask them to join us at the next networking event on Tuesday 9th December 2014

Date: Tuesday 9th December 2014

Venue: The Fable Bar & Restaurant, 52 Holborn Viaduct, London, EC1A 2FD

Time: 1:00pm to 3:00pm+

We look forward to seeing you all there

CRM – So Many Benefits for Sales

by Mike Driver, Director of logiCRM Ltd

I’ve been contributing to a CRM Group on LinkedIn recently and one of the subjects which appears often is that CRM is not being used by sales.  It’s not just that it is not being used, but in some cases, contributors put in reasons which attempt to justify why sales should not use it.

In my opinion, not only should sales use it but it should be a central part of their daily job and they should use it thoroughly. CRM must be made easy of course with clear guidelines about what they have to do and what is expected from them.

As this is such an important subject, which I’ve covered before in previous blogs, I’d like to give you some thoughts about the key benefits which Sales and Sales Directors will get from CRM.

Briefly here are some:

• Knowing who from your company has spoken to your clients or prospects, before you make contact with them – ensuring that the left and right hand are ‘in sync’ and giving a much better impression.
• Having all the relevant information about your clients in one place thus widening client knowledge throughout the company so anyone speaking to a client is able to quickly respond to a question which a client may have.
• Using all your existing relationships to cross sell products this means that more doors will be opened and ‘warm’ opportunities will be found more easily.
• Sharing leads from one team or sales person to another then keeping a record of their status and whether they became a sale or not – anyone who provides a successful lead can be rewarded, potentially.
• Recording where leads come from (in addition to colleagues as above ), i.e. from events, marketing campaigns etc or from external referrers – enables much better decisions on where to concentrate lead generation based on good factual evidence.
• Significant reduction in the time taken, accuracy and completeness of producing regular sales reports – this means that management is much informed and sales can spend more time selling.

One of the key aspects of selling is gathering information about clients and prospects.  When a potential piece of business is identified, it’s important to find out whether the company are really interested in your product or service and, crucially, how likely they are to buy.

To make decision about whether a prospect is a likely buyer you need to know some critical pieces of information, or ‘data nuggets’ as I call them.  For example, ‘when are they buying’,’ have they a budget’, etc. You will know what these are in your company and for your range of products.

If sales enter these ‘data nuggets’ into the CRM opportunity record in a structured way on an on-going basis or as part of their sales report, they can be viewed by everyone and analysed.  Sales Directors can see how much of the crucial information is known about each opportunity and then sensible decisions can be made about the likelihood of success.  Another benefit of this is that they will not have to keeping asking ‘what’s happening with such and such’ type of questions.  All the relevant information will be available in one place and far more time in sales meetings can be spent discussing all the options and the best way to proceed.

So many benefits (financial and otherwise) come from proper use of a CRM system – Reducing the length of the sales cycle, making quicker decisions about the quality of the opportunity, wasting time on unqualified leads and measuring the performance and any training needs of sales far more accurately.

So yes, it’s a ‘no-brainer’ and really important that sales use CRM – it will revolutionise your business.

Mike Driver runs logiCRM (www.logicrm.com). Mike focuses on bringing the customer relationship back into CRM, by providing independent and expert advice on how to get real  value, efficiency and team collaboration from any CRM system.