Sales team development? CRM can help
Are you growing your sales team? Congratulations! However, rapid growth tests every aspect of sales management. It’s an exciting task, but an intense one. When all your charts are sloping sharply upward, all it takes is a small turn that can translate into unsuccessful results at the end of the year. Meanwhile, all needs – from security to marketing and the sales process – demand your attention.
Where should you focus your efforts? When you develop a B2B direct sales team, three factors influence the results the most:
- Hiring the right new vendors,
- Bring new vendors up to full capacity quickly,
- Building a repeatable sales model and process.
Can CRM help? Yes. CRM can enable 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 to make CRM a growth gas pedal?
1. focus on activity reporting – to evaluate (and train) new employees faster
What to do?
Focus your team on recording sales meetings in CRM. Keep track of who is and is not registering meetings. Make the team responsible for getting this simple information.
Why it will work.
With modern mobile CRMs, it is much easier for salespeople to capture key information about what is happening with customers. And you’ll gain better insight into what’s happening with your customers. And your entire team will spend less time in status meetings, reporting details of what happened, and more time on increasing efficiency.
Why will this 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 are not 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’ll see – in a few weeks, not quarters – that one of your representatives isn’t getting as many meetings, that his meetings aren’t with the right people and/or that his arrangements aren’t progressing as expected. You will be able to step in and take action earlier.
2. get rid of extra stuff – to get new employees on board faster
What to do?
Put your CRM on a diet! Reduce all additional fields in the CRM mobile app.
Why will it 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 this 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 don’t absolutely need a field filled in, hide it!
3. detect trends faster to find your niche
What to do?
Choose one or at most two questions to add to your team’s activity reports to spot market trends. This could be tracking use cases of interest to the customer. It could be tracking customer industries. This may be tracking the solution being replaced.
Why will this help you succeed?
This helps build a repeatable sales model. In general, different trends are emerging in developing markets. You may discover that your product is a big hit in financial services. Or perhaps it will turn out that some current solution is susceptible to replacement.
Once you find this repeatable model, you can direct your marketing and sales efforts to the path of least resistance. Sales cycles become shorter, sales productivity increases, and you achieve your goals. Usually, however, we find these patterns first from anecdote and only later from actual data.
In the hustle and bustle of expanding a team, CRM, can seem like a distraction. Indeed, this may be the case if you start adding everything that ever comes up in the sales process to the CRM.
But in the new mobile world of task-oriented, mobile sales apps, CRM can become a tool for focus, not distraction – and helps drive your team’s success.
