It has often happened to me to hear that sellers do not like Crm
Quando scoprono che la loro azienda intende implementare il Customer Relationship Management cominciano a storcere il naso.
This is an old story, which I don’t like to juxtapose opinion with opinion.
Therefore? We field the numbers that are not subjective but objective of the CRM.
Where do these numbers come from? Here is the answer.
HubSpot has commissioned a survey which shows that 62% of a seller’s working time is wasted in administrative activities (35%) and in data entry activities (27%).
From this data we understand that only 38% of a seller’s time is dedicated to the primary activity, to the actual sale.
It’s incredible? No, it is absolutely credible, we think about the times to process the reports, for the transmission of orders, for the upload of new customers to the management system or on lists in excel format, to the management of correspondence (where in the emails you write, or rather, yes rewrite, always the same things), to the time dedicated to fix appointments until you find the right slot that suits the needs of the buyer, etc.
Whether the sellers are paid in full commission or they are employees of the company and then receive bonuses related to the results, think that in everyday life they only dedicate 38% of their time to doing what they are “champions” for, that is to sell . Well, this is a real waste.
And the waste is even more evident where the sellers are real “product specialists”, which means that they are not just collaborators devoted to sales but are real consultants who handle the product or service with total knowledge for which the company remunerates them to give the best offer to its customers.
Attenzione, il danno non è solo relativo alle mancate vendite che si potrebbero ottenere solo ribaltando la proporzione (62% per vendere, 38% per gestire) ma si sostanzia anche in una divaricazione degli interessi, specie laddove il venditore è un agente, il quale dovendo pur arrivare ad un “suo” risultato invece di seguire le direttive della politica commerciale dell’azienda, tende a vendere cosa gli conviene di più.
The two advantages, the company and the commercial one, do not always coincide.
How do you bring sellers back to sale?
Sometimes, to increase sales, new markets are sought, this is very correct
If over time there had not been this trend, SMEs would never have crossed the borders of Italy looking for new markets and our exports would not have achieved the successes we know.
But let’s ask the question differently.
In the areas where our salespeople operate, does the turnover they generate correspond to the real sales potential that the area can offer? And again, if salespeople could spend more time selling and less time on corporate bureaucracy, could the areas generate more revenue?
La risposta a questa domanda così riproposta ci viene dal supporto che la trasformazione digitale ci offre, ovvero lasciare ai sistemi digitali, oggi disponibili ed a costi ormai accessibili anche alle organizzazioni di piccola dimensione come le nostre PMI, tutte quelle attività a minor valore aggiunto e concentrare l’operatività ad alto valore agli uomini che sanno generare il valore stesso.
In this logic, CRM is the modern solution that allows us to bring our sellers back to buyers, removing them from the corporate bureaucracy, perhaps born in recent decades with the writing of redundant procedures tending to a false myth of quality, which today in a increasingly competitive world represent an unnecessary burden that subtracts resources from the real business objective.
How does CRM help salespeople?
The time has come to give some practical examples but first two general considerations:
The CRM configured and implemented correctly is the collector of all the information needed for the sale, here the information is always available, it is collected in a clean and updated way, this allows us not to have to enter different “places” to find it, such as the management system, the agenda, our list of contacts in excel, the e-mail system to retrieve the latest e-mails exchanged, etc. etc.
Here, with the immediacy of the availability of the data we are looking for, we immediately have an image of the time we are starting to save.
The second consideration concerns the management of data confidentiality.
We know that salespeople are rightfully jealous of their contacts and don’t like other salespeople, albeit colleagues, to see their information. Let’s imagine the typical organization by sales areas assigned to individual agents which are gathered in an area that groups them and which is coordinated by an area manager. Well, with the management of permits, each individual seller will be able to see only the contacts assigned to him and belonging to his area while only the area manager will be able to see the results that all those contacts generate in the areas of the area.
Not only that, the seller can also have pleasant surprises when he sees that the marketing actions automatically increase the number of potentially interesting contacts made available to him, in fact if a new contact has asked for information about our product and falls into a certain territory. , it will automatically be assigned to the seller who owns that area.
But let’s go back to saving time, already in this situation of the new contact just assigned, the seller will immediately appreciate the difference between operating with or without the CRM. He will not have to ask for information to third party colleagues in the organization, he will have immediately the relevant information that will allow him to relate to this new potential customer in the most advantageous way.
Workflows are another feature sellers will love, what are they?
Workflows are automatic flows which, when a certain situation occurs, generate a consequent action. They can be linked to external as well as internal processes. In the first case, for example, it will happen that if a potential customer asks for a trivial generic information, which does not require a personalized response, an email will automatically start with the answer. Or in the case of an internal process, if the answer to the potential customer’s question requires direct, personalized contact, a tag will automatically be generated that will notify us of the task we have to perform. Basically the workflows avoid us having to do repetitive actions thanks to the automatic settings we have implemented.
How much time do we waste in handling correspondence? how many times have you ever written and rewritten the same answers? In this case, the CRM comes to meet us with templates. What are templates? they are texts that we have written and that we consider useful in similar and subsequent situations, we will be able to save them and at the time of their new use they will only need to be customized. How many times has it happened to us to write, for example, a reminder email for a payment, if we think about it we always write the same words, in the end what varies is only the personalization part. Or a cover letter for an offer, or a request for information text relating to the same situation. As you use your crm you will realize these situations and the number of templates you save will increase, saving you a lot of time.
How many times have you happened to call a contact to find out the outcome of an offer and he replied that he had not yet had time to examine it. If your e-mail system, be it gmail or outlook, were integrated with your CRM, that phone call could have been saved. The system would answer you on its own thanks to email tracking. Rather, thanks to the information provided by the CRM, you would have phoned another contact knowing a priori that he had received the offer, opened it and downloaded it, maybe immediately after visiting the pages of your site where the product object of the product is described. offer itself.
Here, between the two phone calls which one deserves to be at your attention?
And again, how much time do we waste in managing the slots to fix our appointments, phone calls and emails to propose timetables and then confirm, with the situation that becomes complicated when the interlocutors increase in number. Well even in this case our CRM comes to our aid, just connect it with our agenda. When we have to fix the next appointment, our customer will easily fix the date thanks to the email we will send him and which will interact with our calendar. He will have a feeling of service and optimal organization and we will be able to manage the appointments on the basis of the availability that we have programmed in advance in our agenda.
I don’t want to dwell on other situations that with the help of CRM allow us to save time and focus on selling. Before concluding this contribution, however, one must be mentioned: the end-of-period reporting, joy and pain of each seller, sometimes a real nightmare depending on the amount of data requested. Well, I give you some news, end of the nightmare, just one click and everything will be ready at any time. Not only that, precisely because of this ease of obtaining and aggregating data, they can be monitored throughout the period of activity. This monitoring will suggest the route and allow you to optimize your results.
To conclude, we can say that it is not the salespeople who turn up their noses when the company decides to equip them with CRM, on the contrary it is they who must refuse to work for companies that do not provide them with this precious ally that helps us to increase sales.
Watch the video to find out more.
