Lack of CRM? 3 pains of your sales team

Ifyou’re not using a CRM in 2019, it probably means you’re operating well without one. You’ve probably built your own tools or are really good with spreadsheets or have combined several key solutions to meet your needs. If you’ve been successful so far in your sales process without a CRM, you probably don’t need to change much.

After all, if something isn’t broken, you don’t fix it, right?

Marketing finds potential customers, sales closes deals, and management achieves its goals. Simple! Well, it may not be that simple. If you take a closer look, you will probably see that your teams are working with some pains. When we ask companies outside of CRM how they will streamline the sales process, we hear the same answer again and again – transferring calls, data, whatever you want, the biggest pain – when one team has to pass critical information to another.

Here are the 3 most common pain points in the sales process without a CRM:

Marketing passing new leads to sales

Why is it painful to sell without a CRM?
Transferring leads from marketing to sales is similar to a relay race. Transmission is key, and when the baton is dropped, the recipient must recover and catch up. Similarly, companies operating without CRM have their own methods of handover. However, this transfer can be fraught with a number of problems that arise at any time when data must be transferred between multiple teams and systems. Leaders arrive with incomplete data or with inaccurate data or too slow to convert. Regardless of the quality of leads, sales is responsible for converting them into customers.

How does CRM help?
In a handover process rooted in modern CRM, marketing and sales have a single view of each potential customer. The details and context of this lead are stored and/or updated in one place. When a lead is qualified, converted and assigned to Sales, all this key data is there and ready for the seller. What’s more, these qualification, conversion and attribution processes can be automated, so sales has everything they need to track in minutes, not days.

Transmission and approval of bids and quotations

Why is it painful to sell without a CRM?
Sales teams are holding up deals, and the valuation stage is where sales are at the mercy of other people’s time, processes and priorities. Although this is the stage of the sales cycle where details really matter, pricing is also the part where everyone wants to move as fast as possible. The process often involves strings of emails with multiple versions and approvals of a pricing document or proposal. There is often pressure to beat deadlines, but rushing increases the risk of including costly errors in the final proposal. When something goes wrong, from pricing errors to communication delays, sales has the most to lose.

How does CRM help?
With a modern CRM, everyone involved in pricing can collaborate and communicate in one common space. The relevant product and pricing details for a specific customer are available in the same view, as are any promotional or approval notes. Sales can then automatically generate a quote knowing that there are no version control issues or errors in copy-and-paste formulas or data tables.

Provide updates on forecasts from sales to management

Why is it painful to sell without a CRM?
Forecasting is one of the main responsibilities of Sales Management, with the added pressure of being a critical measure of business health for the rest of the company’s management. In a non-CRM sales process, this means that sales reps must constantly share updates via email, chat or other tools, allowing sales leaders to gather status updates on every deal in the pipeline. This method is ineffective in two ways: 1 Vendors want to spend time working on their bids, not completing internal administrative tasks. 2 As sales leaders keep a close eye on their forecasts during key periods, they often want more frequent or detailed updates on deals. Forcing sales teams to focus on non-selling activities during these periods is as painful as possible.

How does CRM help?
When your sales process runs on a modern CRM, all the latest details of every deal in the pipeline are always available and up-to-date. Sales executives can use automatically updated reports and dashboards to view real-time forecasts without distracting sales teams trying to close deals. With customized sales stages built directly into the CRM, Sales Leadership can also trust that forecasts reflect the weighted expected value of the funnel, without having to factor in over-optimism or sandbagging.