3 Ways to Use CRM to Ramp Up Your Sales

As a female entrepreneur, I, like so many others, have to juggle my time carefully. I’m always looking for strategies to use one thing in many ways. One tool I’ve discovered that can do more than meets the eye is customer relationship management software (or CRM).

A lot of people mistakenly think CRM is only something marketers use, or it’s just a place to throw all your contact information. That’s simply not the case; it’s also a fantastic tool to increase sales for your business. And hey, I’m all about using it for as much as I can, especially if it helps me grow my business!

Today’s CRM solutions are much more sophisticated—not to mention more useful—than their predecessors. Here are three effective ways to use CRM as a sales tool:

1. Managing the Pipeline

The more leads you have, the more balls you have in the air, especially if you are a solopreneur. But whether you manage your business’s sales yourself or have a team of salespeople who do so, you need a way to ensure that none of those balls fall down and cost you in missed sales.

Using CRM, you can track opportunities–and even assign dollar values to them–so you know what’s a priority. You can see what tasks need to be covered to get a lead to the next stage in the buying process, and make sure there’s an owner for that task. If that owner is you, you can use the project management features to schedule what you need to do when. Having better insight into that pipeline gives you a better close rate.

2. Ensuring the Project Is Managed Correctly

Closing a sale is essentially a project. You have a client (the lead) and an objective (to close that sale). There may be multiple people involved, from your marketing team sending customized email offers to the salespeople making the sale, and the customer service reps managing the ongoing relationship. Or you have to handle it all, and believe me, it gets complicated without some sort of organizational tool.

To better keep tabs on every aspect of the project, a CRM with project management lets you keep track of sales-related emails, assign tasks, and get notified when project-related files are uploaded to your CRM. There’s no excuse for not closing the deal when everyone’s doing what they’re supposed to, and when you get a reminder that a task needs to be completed by a deadline.

3. Staying Connected to Contacts

Every day, you’re pouring leads into your contact management platform. You’ve got current leads, existing and past customers, and cold leads–and they all matter. One of the biggest factors in the success of both first-time sales and repeat business is how well you stay in touch and provide value to those leads and contacts.

CRM makes it easy to connect with your contacts on social media and keep your email conversations in a single place so you don’t spend time digging through your inbox to find a six-month-old email. You can monitor what people are saying on social media and reach out when appropriate.

Being able to take notes on conversations you’ve had makes it easy for anyone else on your team to see those notes and know where to begin when they take over that customer relationship, or just to refresh your own memory the next time you talk to someone. Spending less time managing your contacts allows you to spend more time actually interacting and providing value to them.

Any tool you can use to streamline your sales process is one worth using, and I give CRM bonus points because you can do so much more with it including master your marketing campaign and stay in touch with contacts. Because CRM has so many functions that are useful to you and/or your sales team, it’s an indispensable asset in your arsenal.

The post 3 Ways to Use CRM to Ramp Up Your Sales appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post 3 Ways to Use CRM to Ramp Up Your Sales appeared first on AllBusiness.com.