As you activate your sales enablement plan, you’re faced with a big question: what to do about a CRM?
A Customer Relationship Management platform is deeply entwined with any serious sales enablement effort. In the B2B sales world, you need that CRM to help manage the multitude of contacts you’re juggling and help you keep straight where you are with each of them.
You can try to do that with your rolodex.
But in 2019, you will be left behind.
Good CRM Hygiene Means A More Organized and Effective Approach
When salespeople go all-in on a CRM, they start to see some real efficiencies develop. Join them, and you’ll spend less time trying to remember details about each contact, and a centralized information platform means you or any other rep can access the latest info from anywhere.
How do you ensure this happens?
- Enter new information as you get it — if a phone conversation shifts a prospect further down the pipeline, make that update now
- Refresh yourself before any interaction and have all relevant information top-of-mind
- Make the most of your limited time by developing automated sequences that streamline conversations
By keeping track of your contacts and where they are, you’ll be able to have better, more meaningful contact with them. If they’ve been reading some specific content on your website, you may be able to bring those topics up and find out what’s really causing them pain, for instance, without having to fish around yourself.
Understand What Moves Contacts Through the Pipeline
When you’re dealing with many leads (which, of course, hopefully you are!), you’ll watch your dataset grow. As it does, you’ll be able to pick out patterns. Some form converts better than others. Some piece of content really seems to engage people. Or, you’ll see what people don’t like: perhaps an email series just isn’t producing results in line with your sales goals.
Whatever the patterns are, they’re good news. Because they tell you something about the sales pipeline journey that you can quantify and act upon. You’ll be able to make changes that emphasize what is working and remove those things that aren’t.
Instead of say, making fifty calls and trying to rely on your general feeling of how some approach is going — or at best, manually recording your results and struggling to compare them to an inconsistent previous set of notes — you’ll have all the numbers right in front of you. You’ll have campaigns laid out, records of what you’ve tried, with who, and when. And of course, a full view of your automation efforts.
CRM Automation in the Sales Process
If you’re in B2B sales, then you know the B2B sales process can be extremely long. It can often take months to get to a deal, and throughout that time, you risk prospects slipping through the cracks and not getting the attention they need to make it all the way.
While nothing replaces the personal touch of one-on-one communication, augmenting that with automated communication is vital in today’s B2B sales process. If you find yourself sending the same sort of email to a particular category of prospect over and over again at the same point in the process, you can automate that. Set up a whole series of emails to keep the conversation going between meetings.
For example, if you can count on a certain conversation always happening across multiple clients when you get to a certain point in the process, say on pricing, why not set up a follow-up email to go out an hour or two after the meeting with a nice visual breakdown of your packages to give your contact something to refer to — and an opportunity to ask you more questions between meetings?
So What CRM To Use?
We make no secret of the fact that we prefer HubSpot. We are Platinum Partners, after all, and we’ve helped countless companies across Canada and the US achieve sales enablement success through the platform. It does everything we’ve talked about here (and more!).
Want to find out how to leverage HubSpot in your sales enablement journey? We’ve got a sales enablement webinar coming up real soon you should check out. Otherwise, if you’re lucky enough to be in Edmonton, our first event of the year is all about Sales Enablement for B2B companies looking to experience growth. If you want in on that, head right here.