What if your salesperson quits and takes all of its contacts and notes on their cell phone upon departure? What do you do to ensure a smooth transition with clients and prospects?
It can be difficult when you lose a good salesperson especially if he or she takes their institutional memory with them. What can you do to build and retain institutional memory? Your CRM is the answer and building a team that uses the CRM is the challenge!
The Short-Term Emergency
Perhaps, your sales team is intact, and no one plans to leave. What if a sales rep gets called away by a family emergency and cannot attend a meeting planned weeks earlier?
In one case, a second rep stepped in for the meeting. She found notes about the prospect, but the notes were not current. The meeting went poorly as the prospect had to start from the beginning and was frustrated by the meeting’s end. Needless to say, the prospect chose another vendor.
Cost of A Disorganized Sales Teams
What turns off a prospect or customer? When a buyer has to repeat itself several times, the buyer begins to doubt your ability to listen and deliver service. Your goal is to build buyer confidence and reduce your buyer’s perceived risk. Looking disorganized leads to lost sales, prolonged sales cycles, increased customer acquisition costs, and greater Follow Up Fatigue (FUF).
CRMs are Contact Centric
When each sales rep uses its own methods to sell and track prospects, chaos occurs, siloes emerge, and the team is left in the dark. It is hard to back up and support a teammate when you don’t have access to critical information.
Organized sales teams collaborate by using the same methods and CRM software. As an owner or sales executive, your client and prospect lists are protected when you have direct access to a sales rep’s notes, quotes, tasks, and emails. The team is always up to date, so when there is an emergency, they confidently have each other’s back.
From marketing through sales, prospects, customers, referrers, and friends are all contacts. Organize your tasks, comments, quotes, service tickets, and emails by contact and have that contact data at your fingertips. Prospects want to believe in you so gather your contacts’ information in one place – your CRM.
CRMs Are Your Backbone
Among your most critical assets are your client and prospect lists. Your “Book of Business” is your livelihood and leaving it in the hands of your sales reps is dangerous. As a rep builds its “Book,” the new clients expand your client list so having up to date information has a direct impact on your livelihood.
A CRM enables you as the owner or sales executive to make selling easier for your sales team. The key to selling is to spend more time with your “A&B” clients and prospects. Your CRM can give you the extra time you need for your highest priorities.
How does a CRM create extra time so you (or your sales rep) can pursue the highest priorities? Here are a few examples:
- Eliminates the need to type routine, repetitive emails and replaces them with a library of email templates that are personalized and sent with a click of a button.
- Sets up outreach and internal reminders to you and reps, automatically, to follow up 1 day after outreach. Your “high touch” and your CRM’s “hi tech” increases your touch points with prospects and clients.
- Eliminates the need to assemble mail lists for segmented outreach using Dynamic Lists, which updates your mail lists automatically.
- Reduces the time spent by you and your sales reps updating each other. Every time a rep enters an update, you see it. Sales meetings are quick as everyone uses the Sales Funnel as the guide.
The CRM protects your most critical assets – your client and prospect lists – and makes it easier for your sales reps to focus on their next sale.
Your Next Steps
Do you currently use a CRM? If yes, what are the benefits that you’ve gotten? If not, what are your current methods for tracking prospects and clients? Understanding a CRM’s potential and understanding your needs are the next steps.
Bright people who work for you are likely to leave your company in the future. It is bound to happen. Protect your client and prospect lists and build your company’s institutional memory by using a CRM.
Please set up a meeting so we can learn about your needs and if a CRM is right for you.
