24 ways to improve sales productivity with CRM software

1.Set personalised mail-merge templates up so that frequent communications can be produced more quickly

2.Ensure sales collateral such as price-lists, case studies, product specifications, return on investment calculators etc.are all immediately available and can quickly be emailed out to prospective customers

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3.Automate quotation generation

4.Provide mobile access to the system from PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistant)

5.Review the set up of the existing CRM system – are there unnecessary steps, data capture requirements, and key strokes that could be removed?

6.Integrate data from other key internal applications into the CRM system to allow salespeople to get the data they need quickly

7.Implement a lead scoring and nurturing programme to ensure salespeople are only working with sales-ready leads

8.Set up individualised reports dashboards personalised to the needs of the salesperson

9.Establish robust marketing communications processes that reduce the amount of input required from the sales teams

10.Integrate the system into the phone system to speed up making and recording calls as well as launching records
based on the incoming caller id

11.Provide the means for salespeople to get answers to issues quickly through being able to assign tasks to other departments or through collaboration applications such as Chatter

12.Proactively provide information salespeople need to be aware of – for example major customer issues

13.Automate the sales order process

14.Improve key customer facing processes, such as order fulfilment and customer support, in order to reduce the number of instances where salespeople become involved in addressing issues

15.Cut the time to produce management information by automating report production for example forecast, pipeline or sales activity reports

16.Integrate relevant external data and news-feeds into the system

17.Automate key operational processes to reduce sales involvement

18.Integrate product configuration capabilities to avoid the impact of invalid configurations

19 Provide better visibility of user activity to avoid unnecessary duplication of work

20.Provide links to social media applications such as Twitter and LinkedIn so that background research be accomplished more quickly

21.Ensure that sales executives have the reporting information they need immediately to hand – even something as simple as a standard client visit report template can save a lot of time assimilating and printing data22.Integrate with mapping applications such as Google Maps to assume directions are immediately available from within the CRM software

23.Speed up data capture for example through integration into post-code data, or card scanning devices or by providing administration support

24.Ensure senior executives are users so they can answer their questions and queries directly from the system