35 Ways to Boost Sales Productivity with CRM: Now and Later

35 Ways CRM boosts sales productivity: today & every future day.

The following list contains various ways that the use of a CRM system and related technology can help boost sales productivity and effectiveness...

Now:

• To get a quick handle on your schedule for today and this week. It is important to not miss a To-do task, an appointment, a phone call or an important meeting and screw up expectations.

• To reduce my risk of forgetting who, what, when, where, why, and how!

• To quickly find information about a contact's phone number, email, or address.

• To notify prospective customers about an upcoming event such as a trade show or new pricing for a product line using email. 

• To follow up with next action notes about a meeting that was just completed.  Thus not forgetting key elements of who, what, when, where, why and how.

• To quickly view your top opportunities and the amount of time passed since positive progress; so the opportunity and contact relationships opportunity does not become cold!

• To look up other customer accounts in the same geographical area and reduce travel time to reconnect.

• To capture notes of a recently discovered, new competitor's apparent strengths, weakness and your selling strategies against. Extremely helpful “later” and when shared with fellow salespeople and sales management.

• To guide salespeople to greener pastures by using the experiences from the sales manager along with the dynamic reporting of past sales activities .

• To provide sales force automation: Create a quote, send it with an email to an important contact, and automatically record it in your CRM history all with the press of a button or tap of a finger.

• To access sales and product literature and easily attach it digitally to an outgoing set of email addresses.

• To open a PDF of a recent quote to re-send to a prospect or to quickly review its contents before making a follow-up phone call.

• To pop up a picture of contact, just in case you’re in a room with many others and need to quickly recognize them

• To capture important notes and key decisions from a recent phone call so the right commitments are not forgotten.

• To look up a map of a current contacts on your smart phone or tablet.  Maybe you have time to stop by Starbucks.

• To view digital documents about pricing, product literature and competitive battle cards to make intelligent decisions and meaningful conversations!

• To capture quick notes of a recent customer issues (ticket/case) and forward it to customer service for quick follow up.

• Faster scheduling: To quickly view if another key person is available for a meeting; maybe an internal tech rep or sales manager to help with a upcoming sales presentation.

• Easily click on the company's URL to view their web site - check out news releases, product offering and changes in key contacts.

• Relationship Building: To remember to mention that the contact you're about to call has their only daughter now attending the State University or their spouse has started looking into a vacation home in Sedona.

• To remember that Joe, Bill & Richard are obsessive fans for a favorite sports team and would really enjoy tickets to Saturday's game.

• Click on the company's Facebook link to observe how they are trying to attract and influence others OR click on a contact's LinkedIn account to quickly view fresh info about the business or a person’s interests and prior job responsibilities.

Later...Stay tuned for Part II - valuable FUTURE ways CRM boosts sales productivity and effectiveness!

If you'd like to start a conversation about what is possible, a need to make a switch or upgrading your experience in getting more from your CRM, visit our home page or give us a call: 269-445-3001. 

NOTE: Check out Part II - the long term benefits that come later.