What is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system? These systems are cloud-based programs that allow sales reps to perform a variety of functions such as loading prospects from a Microsoft Excel or .CSV file, entering sales activities, maintaining pipeline by sales stage, updating notes and contact information for prospects, clients, and Centers of Influence (COI), and general sales data. Not only do these functions allow tracking and measuring of sales progress and growth, but they provide business owners with protection of historical sales data in the event of sales rep turnover.
The more popular CRM systems are Salesforce.com, HubSpot, Zoho, and Less Annoying CRM, to mention a few, and are relatively inexpensive, ranging from $10-$90/month per user. For a list of CRM providers, visit https://crm.org/crmland/sales-crm.
As part of our fractional sales management services, we not only assist with the selection of a CRM system for your business, but also with implementation and configuration. As we learn the needs, requirements, goals and objectives of your sales team, we integrate them into the CRM to drive utilization by your sales team.
Key questions to consider in this process are:
- Do you want visibility into the sales activities of your sales team?
- Do you want visibility into your sales team’s pipeline?
- Do you want visibility into the status of opportunities in your pipeline?
- Do you want to have access to prospective customer and client notes and data when sales reps leave your company?
Would you like to have someone track, measure, and hold your sales team accountable to managing this data? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions, feel free to reach out to me at kevin@keylangroup.com to discuss how our firm may be able to help.
