The Two Major Ways CRM Slashes the B2B Sales Cycle
If you’re in the B2B world, you know how long it can take to win a contract.
You could be waiting months. Maybe even years. Meeting after phone call after meeting after email after trade show after — yup — meeting.
There are times when communication is fast and frequent, and others when you wonder if your contact maybe took a trip to the Moon without telling anyone. And when you go a while without talking and get that phone call out of the blue, you’re scrambling trying to remember where you left off.
You might also have some turnover in your staff during a long sales process, and if you need someone new to take over an account, now you’ve lost even more time as they catch themselves up across reams of inconsistent notes — or go in blind as you find little was documented.
At the end of the day, B2B sales are always going to take a lot of time. But by using your CRM to optimize things on your end and eliminate setbacks stemming from unprepared salespeople, you certainly can reduce it.
Reduce the B2B Sales Cycle with CRM
There are two prime ways you can reduce your B2B sales cycle by using a CRM. One of them is by centralizing and organizing information. The other is in using automation to enhance your outreach capabilities.
Take Control of your B2B Sales Data
A CRM presents the opportunity to get your customer information in order. Nothing’s going to slow your B2B sales process down quite like not knowing what you’re talking about. But rigorously documenting every step in the sales process, both your lead’s actions and your own interactions with them, in one, secure, cloud-based location, means you’re never lost trying to figure out where you are.
Your salespeople won’t need to dissect old notebooks or sift through arcane Excel documents. They’ll have instant access from whichever device they have on them to everything you know about that customer.
- Where they are in the sales process
- How promising a lead they are
- The marketing content they’ve consumed on your site
- The details of every meeting
- Of course, much more!
This means less time spent looking stuff up, fewer communication mishaps, and less time wasted rehashing what you’ve already done. To the customer, you’ll appear confident, in-control, and more capable of actually helping them out — which means, naturally, they’ll be more likely to sign sooner.
Staying in Touch with Automation
Busy salespeople with many prospects on the go know the power of email automation. But there’s more to it than simply mass-emailing a big list of names someone found.
Your CRM can be used to segment your leads based on any number of factors — hot versus cold, whether they’ve taken some action, whether you’ve met them in-person, etc. — and that means you can tailor your message.
Sure, if you had double the hours in a day, you could send more unique, personal messages. But as long as that’s not possible, you can still use smart segmentation and automated sales email sequences to deliver personalized automated messages that do still speak to some of the specifics about your leads.
That means you can keep leads warm while your attention is elsewhere, and with a little effort (rather than an overwhelming, unrealistic amount), nudge people further along your sales pipeline with tried-and-tested approaches.
Again, the result is adding a little more acceleration into the sales process, and reducing the number of people who lose interest when you’re not able to dedicate the time to reach out personally.
Our B2B CRM of Choice: HubSpot
So, you’ll want to know which CRM to choose. Our choice is HubSpot. Want to know why? We lay it all out right here.
Want to get set up with HubSpot? As HubSpot Platinum Partners, we’ve helped more than 70 B2B organizations apply our sales and marketing enablement methods to fantastic success. Why not read this success story to get the details yourself?