Why do you need a New CRM System?
I’ve spent the past 20 years in the CRM space. However, during this time, the one thing that hasn’t changed is the dislike Sales Reps have for CRM and its usage. CRM complexities and organizational compliance requirements only aggravate Sales Reps. It has primarily remained a tool to provide pipeline visibility for Sales Managers. It needs to empower Sales Reps to be successful at selling and keeping their customers happy. As per a recent survey, around 73% of Sales Reps feel their CRM doesn’t assist them in selling more and faster. How can you turn it into a tool your Sales Reps love to use? The following 6 points will help you uncover if you need a new system for your Sales Team:
CRM integration with Marketing
Typically, most organizations act outside of their CRM when performing marketing activities. Sales Reps have no idea about the user journey, buyer profiles and campaigns carried out on target prospects. The system hands leads over to Sales Reps as prospects, when these prospects express interest in any product or service. So that Sales Reps can pursue these leads. You have to integrate your CRM system with demand generation customer touchpoints, such as your website, offer landing pages, email campaigns, and social media campaigns, etc. Leads should automatically be created and updated in CRM with as many details as possible. Sales Reps should perceive CRM as a lead source with real-time intelligence. Using user journey intelligence Sales Reps can engage effectively with the buyers in a more meaningful way.
CRM as a Single Source of Truth
Most companies use CRM completely disconnected from their backend ERP system. ERP holds most of the details about the customer and customer transactions. However, a CRM system disconnected from ERP does not provide accurate and complete customer information to the Sales Reps. Sales Reps inevitably lack the information needed for customer requests. To provide a single source of truth to your Sales Reps, your CRM and ERP must be integrated together.
CRM Mobile App
The CRM solution MUST support all mobile devices because we like to phone has become a primary source of information for all of us. If Sales Reps are not able to access CRM from their mobile phones/tablets, they are most likely to run their book of business outside the system. Access from Mobile allows Sales Reps to access and update their information in real-time. As we carry our phones with us all the time, it is expected that every application and data we need to do our jobs are available on our phones.
Integration with Microsoft Outlook/G-Suite
Today, most Sales Reps are exchanging emails with their prospects and customers through Microsoft Outlook or Google G-Suite. Without having Outlook/Gmail integration, Sales Reps must duplicate their data entry for email activities. Sales Reps hate to capture information online, let alone enter the same data twice. Email exchanges with customers and prospects should be visible in CRM to give a complete picture of all sales activities that have taken place.
Integration with eCommerce
Are you are a B2B business selling online? You must have your B2B site integrated with your CRM application. A new quote requested by a customer through your B2B storefront must be accessible by the Sales Rep in CRM. Also, B2B sites integrated with CRM allow Sales Reps and Customers to collaborate and negotiate Sales Quotes systematically. Sales Quote requests from the B2B site will be available in CRM for Sales Reps to review/update/approve. Because Customers can take the approved quote and place an order from their B2B account online, it saves time and keeps track of all the negotiations in the system. Due to lack of B2B site integration, Sales Reps need to manually enter the data in more than one system, and hence potentially cause data entry error.
Integration with Customer Service
Ideally, a Customer Service application should be native to CRM. It provides the Sales Team complete visibility into a customer’s reported issues, closed issues, open issues, and SLAs. Sales Reps are the first ones to receive calls from agitated customers due to a lack of expected Customer Service. Without visibility into service tickets, Sales Reps have no choice but to apologize to the customer while waiting for the details from their service colleagues. Since customer issues and service tickets provide great insight into opportunities for selling new products and services to the customer, it is important that Sales Reps have direct visibility into that. Without this integration, Sales Reps might be missing new sales opportunities from current customers or potentially risking losing the customer.
SAP Sales Cloud though not as widely known as Salesforce, has everything you will ever need in a CRM system. Since many organizations are struggling with their own share of CRM challenges, If you need any help in improving your CRM solution, or migrating to the latest CRM that provides all the above capabilities out-of-the-box, please contact us.