How to manage your Sales Cycle with Online CRM software
Are you following traditional ways for managing your sales life cycle and need a revamp on your sales process?
A good CRM sales management process is the key to all your sales related issues. CRM automates all your sales and marketing process which helps in reducing a considerable amount of redundancy and time loss.
With a proper sales management process, your business can reap the full benefit of your sales and marketing team.
What is Sales Cycle or Sales Pipeline?
A sales cycle or pipeline is a set of activity or process which is followed by a company while selling a product or service to a customer. These steps are followed to strategies your lead to be converted to a successful sale. In other words, a sales pipeline is a specific sequence of actions that a sales representative follows in order to move a prospect from a new lead to a customer.
What is the importance of a Sales pipeline?
A systematic process for following a prospective sales, helps to create a structured activity which can be followed across the team for more efficient and productive output. It reduces redundancy among the team members and also helps in coordinating the team’s performance and approach towards lead conversions. Sales process steps helps in training and generalising various activities which can be used for tracking and strategizing many futuristic policies for the company.
Before we go ahead and understand the different ways a CRM software can help us, helps understand what are the different stages of sales life cycle.
Sales pipeline stages
As we all know, sales life cycles vary from one company to the other, based on the company’s type, the market share, the type of product the company is selling, and many other factors which helps to formulate the stages of its sales cycle. However, most of sales cycles involve the following sales process steps:
Exploring Potential Sales Opportunities
The sales process tends to begin with the recognition of a prospective client. Once a potential sales source is recognised, our sales team representatives commence the procedure of collecting some necessary information about the lead. Such involves information on their preferred products, contact information, as well as techniques and strategies to efficiently approach the client. Once a well-defined set of sales procedure steps is organized, the sales team members initiate to engage with the customer to gauge their level of preference and gather information on the products they find appealing.
Initiating Contact
The begining contact with a prospective client, implementing your sales strategy, is a pivotal phase in the sales cycle. Before approaching a potential client, it is necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of their business model, preferred products, interaction preferences, preferred time for communications, and the source of the lead. Such a preparatory step assures that the first communication with a potential client delivers a positive and well-informed impression of the company.
Lead Qualification
Following a series of beginning discussions with a potential lead, the sales team members gain awareness of the client’s inclination towards buying from our company. Depending on the collective information about the customer’s interest level, the next steps can be customized. For interested leads, the next step may involve sending detailed quotations, while for leads still uncertain regarding a purchase, further follow-ups are conducted.
In scenarios where a lead has not yet decided on our products, a deeper evaluation of their business requirements is necessary. Utilizing the BANT methodology (Budget, Authority, Need, and Time), the sales team members can explore the factors that are the lead’s budget, required product information, the company’s pain points, and more. Such comprehensive understanding enables for planned alignment of marketing and sales campaigns customised to meet the lead’s specific requirements.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing means consistently engaging the leads on the content they’ll find interesting.These follow ups and engagements can be done through triggered emails, SMSs or even through social media. Based on client prefered mode of communications, various product details will be sent to the leads, which will help to exhibit the value of your product/service to his company. We can send different informative documents, blog links or demo videos on our products to familiarize the client on our company’s brand and service details.
Quotations
Once an interested lead starts responding to your follow ups and sign-up for trials and demos or mentions that he is ready to make a purchase, it’s time to send him various quotations on our products. After the initial discussion of various product specific quotations, we can continue to send complete billing details of discounts and conversion rates etc , which will help them to understand our company’s rates and further motivate them on making up their minds for closing our sales deal.
Sales closure
The most crucial part of a sales pipeline stages is closing a successful deal. In most of the cases, interested leads from small ventures and startups, fails to continue with sales closure due to high quotation rates or budget shortage for the company.
To successfully close a sales deal, our sales team should be well prepared with the company’s status and whereabouts as well as on what kind of discounts and payment options we can provide to the customer based on our company’s policies and marketing strategies. A well informed and prepared discussion can close the maximum no. of sales for the company.
How to improve your sales cycle?
Many companies still follow old and traditional ways for their sales management process.Using excel sheets to manage your contacts and lead details may cause delays in lead response time and prospective client tracking. It can also cause many lead leakages due to manual and unplanned lead follow-ups. Many Interested clients will lose interest in your offers due to unnecessary delays in quotation and repetitive sales work.
A trusted B2B sales cycle Management tool like SalesBabuCRM can be the solution for all such issues in your sales management process. Let’s understand further how we can leverage the advantages of using a good sales funnel management system for your business.
Automation
In traditional sales processes, an average of only 36% of sales team time is spent in productive sales activities, with the rest of their time is spent in doing manual and repetitive non-productive work for following sales management process like adding contact details to excels sheets, manual assignments of leads to agents and more.
A good B2B sales cycle CRM will help in automating most of the sales process steps like adding and maintaining contacts in a centralised database, auto assignments of issues to respective teams/agent, auto notification on lead status and follow up activities, task generation for lead nurturing, quotation creation, report and stats generation and many more.
All these activities of automatically handling the sales funnel management process, helps the sales and marketing team to spent more productive time for customer interaction and lead tracking.
Task Management
A good task management system is the skeleton for the sales funnel management process. With mismanaged sales tracking system we can end up missing most of our prospective clients.
A CRM software with B2B sales cycle process, will have automated methods of client tracking and follow-ups. Sales team can create various reminders and set alert for any upcoming and ongoing sales deals and track them as per the schedule. With these predefined appointment details and auto notifications, sales representative can never miss a scheduled follow up and track their work in the most productive manner.
Various notes and customer preferences can be added to these automated activities to understand the details of the upcoming meeting and be well prepared for any customer interactions.
Contact details
Sales pipeline stages starts with a good lead generation rate. With an online CRM software, we can easily store all our contact and lead details in an integrated database. These details can be accessed anywhere and anytime by our sales team to connect and follow-up with our prospective leads and clients.
Multi channel communication
SaleBabuCRM provides support to manage field sales force at runtime, with its mobile sales App and also gives multi channel support for customers by supporting a cloud environment for data storage and maintenance. Support and sales team are always connected to each other and provide round the clock support for the client with online connectivity to these softwares on their smartphones and other gadgets.
With SalesBabu Mobile Sales App, we can quickly gain pipeline visibility, track team performance, and uncover opportunities to grow the business sales orders. With this App, we can surface hidden insights and get smart and intelligent recommendations so you can sell faster and smarter through our sales and marketing team.
Sales Tracking
Sales management process plays a vital role in overall business performance by tracking sales team productivity and strategizing overall sales performance through sales forecast, reports and other metrics.
SalesBabuCRM provides various sales forecasting functionality like it internally calculates various perspectives such as, lead sources, number of total leads, number of leads closed and show them in diagrammatic manner on the landing page for the users. It also helps decision makers and sales managers to review sales trends for developing strategic and tactical plans for business.
Sales forecast also provides a wider view for stakeholders on various budgeting and resource planning with its Management Information System(MIS) by generating various reports and charts for sales and marketing team. Sales managers and others users can also create customer reports and metrics to track and manage their day-to-day and upcoming worktiems.
Take Away:
Sales Cycle is a critical part for managing your business performance, therefore using a B2B sales cycle support software like SalesBabuCRM will be appropriate way to manage and track your sales requirements and enhance your overall business productivity and customer service.
