Feature Of Sales Management Software
Choose from hundreds, even thousands, of CRM solutions available today - there's sure to be something suitable. There is also plenty of software for CRM that's out there that could meet your needs. Before making a purchasing decision, it's advisable to review the most essential CRM features. First and foremost, understand which capabilities will enable effective pipeline and sales management - you may even discover hidden gems.
Multiple Pipelines
Pipeline View lets you see customers and leads organized according to the sales stage, with color filtering for additional filtering capabilities. Pipelines simplify managing leads by enabling you to move them from sales stages as customers become leads.
Software designed for sales pipeline management often offers only one pipeline. But, if multiple sales streams need to be monitored simultaneously (perhaps tracking different products, countries, or sources of leads), look for sales management software that allows for multiple pipelines and labeled leads and customers. Custom labels allow you to filter your pipelines by assigning tags to each lead, such as location, language, and device segmentation.
360° Customer Profile
Detail profiles are one of the hallmarks of excellent sales management, providing useful data from source leads through past orders and beyond. To be fully effective, you'll want to be able to attach documents, set activity reminders, and connect invoices/quotes directly with customer profiles - discover more about how knowing your customers can benefit your organization.
Put all their information onto one page to quickly gain an overview of a client or prospect's profile and simplify life for salespeople who can now quickly locate information regarding previous correspondence, meetings, invoices, and quotes in one convenient spot.
View of the Company and the Client
Most small-business sales management breeders fail to distinguish between customers and businesses when selecting sales management for small enterprises. Onemore additional detail about each person involved in the purchasing process than just generic company profiles.
Email campaigns that utilize contact details as lead nurturing tactics or are personalized can use contact details effectively; add their names as recipients in an email to add some personalization and make the communication even more relevant for recipients. Select a sales program that allows you to build company and customer profiles.
Lead Tracking
Tracking customers' lead sources gives you an in-depth view of their journey, helping you create targeted marketing campaigns and send sales material most applicable to each of your leads. Filter the pipeline according to lead source and track how many are converted to paying customers. If your new lead count is decreasing, consider checking which traffic channels contribute.
Sales Dashboard
Dashboards are a great way to get a quick view of your sales results. Add graphs, charts, and key performance indicators to your dashboard for an instant overview of your monthly sales results.
Frequently Used Metrics in a Dashboard for Sales:
- Sales/new Customers/Monthly.
- New leads are generated every month.
- Lead-to-sale conversion rate.
- Cost per lead
- Cost per conversion.
- Customer lifetime value.
- Customers turnover rate.
- Net Promoter Score
The sales dashboard can be used during team meetings to give your team an overview of the results.
Shared Calendar
Select sales management software equipped with team calendar features to simplify your sales team's work. An effective calendar encompassing your events and meetings is the key to organizing them all efficiently. Tying customer profiles directly to events allows for rapid identification of attendees who may show up.
Send multiple dates and times out, then have participants choose their ideal meeting time from these options. Once they confirm a meeting date, all guests will receive an email confirmation, which you can add directly to your calendar by simply clicking a button.
Task Management
When you combine all of your activities, such as emailing and calling, in one system, pipeline management is more effective. The sales management task management feature gives you an overview of the tasks you need to do and allows you to set deadlines. You can link assignments with client profiles to see all tasks related to them. When you email or meet clients, you will remember what you need to tell them or deliver to them.
File Location
It is much easier to locate files like invoices or profiles. It's also a good place to store all your contracts so nothing is lost. Cloud solutions allow your entire team to share documents. Check the software storage limitations, as some sales managements offer the storage of less than 1GB.
Import and Export of Data
Companies often need to export customer data. You could upload all your contact lists into an automated email tool to send out newsletters. Importing contacts via CSV or XSL files can be extremely useful when migrating an existing sales management database into the new one.
An effective sales management tool should allow you to change multiple contacts simultaneously through one command, making life much simpler for businesses. Look for software that allows you to select and edit multiple groups simultaneously.
Remote Data Access
Your sales representatives visit multiple prospects per day. To be effective, they must regularly access your customer database to update or gather data. Be sure the sales management is cloud-based and offers a mobile application or interface. You can then access and update customer information from anywhere.
Analytics Are Effective Ways To Reduce Your Risk
Detailed analytics can boost your sales. You can make informed decisions by comparing sales metrics and monitoring your monthly results.
A sales management system should have at least basic reporting tools showing monthly revenue, new leads, and conversions. You can use graphs to show key metrics in the sales dashboard of the sales management software. This will give you a real-time overview.
Sales Forecasting
To plan the quarter, you need to know the future sales numbers and profits. The forecasting tool can help. Forecasting is a better way to forecast future sales. A sales management system will forecast future sales based on the data you have. You can estimate revenue and set benchmarks to help you plan for future periods. It is possible to see the revenue that will be gathered and what percentage you have already booked into your budget.
Email Service Integrated
Imagine having sales management software that allows you to send emails directly to customers and leads. A growing number of sales management solutions include email services. Email's benefits extend far beyond basic messaging: you can link individual emails with client profiles so that it's clear who contacted whom, when, and why.
The Smart Inbox allows you to utilize any email inbox of your choice for both sending and receiving email; while saving information regarding those emails within sales management (and your client profile). Tools used for pipeline management may include email client integration, such as Outlook and Gmail, which greatly facilitate customer communications by synching emails between your sales management system and email service.
Integrate with Email Automation Tool
Imagine visiting your customer profile to review all the emails received recently by each customer and seeing exactly how each responded to your newsletter, whether that means opening, clicking on it, unsubscribing from it, etc.
Integrating email automation software and sales management is an excellent way of measuring the impact and reach of marketing campaigns. Benefit from automated lists of campaigns. Utilizing sales management, create customized contact lists you synchronize with your email system for optimal efficiency.
Follow-Up And Lead Generation
Sales management will keep track of every interaction a salesperson makes with potential prospects - be it a phone call, email exchange, or direct rejection by them - using its tracking tools. The salesperson can make notes regarding each contact; notes about prospects' interest levels may be added, along with comments regarding whether or not to pursue further.
Access the most up-to-date contact details online instead of using an Excel sheet to track phone calls and follow-ups, add reminders to remember follow-ups with certain leads, or automate drip emails for smooth communication.
Remember to Remind Yourself
It's a small add-on, but when you have to deal with over 100 clients, any help is welcome. You can set up sales management reminders to notify you when a client hasn't received a call for a specified period.
Set up an alert two hours before each meeting if you are prone to forgetting them. You can receive a helpful reminder that includes all the details about the meeting, including the time, location, and client. Add deadlines for tasks to remember important emails, calls, and other activities.
Invoicing And Billing
Billing features in solutions are essential to agencies who must invoice clients for project work completed. Invoicing allows you to send client invoices instantly with just a few clicks for project hours spent working on products or services using PDF templates and sales management contacts that already contain contact info.
Many software vendors provide billing integrations. You can quickly view each client's billing history by attaching documents or linking invoices directly to their profiles.
Quotes
Create custom tags to mark quotes as "accepted," "revised," or lost. You will know exactly who ordered which product. The sales team has a full overview of all orders filled and can tell if the client is satisfied with the service.
Integration Of Third-Party Services
The best sales management solutions act as mediators between business processes. Customers are the core of any business and provide subtle customer service.
It is more likely to be able to gather the data that you require for effective sales if your sales management integrates with third-party tools. Pipeline management software should integrate with email marketing and other tools you use to collect valuable data and avoid duplicate entries.
The Customizability Of Views And Role-Based Views
Your business likely employs multiple salespeople who require different information; to accommodate this, you should create role-based data access in your sales ERP software -- only people responsible for accounting might be permitted access to invoices and billing processes, for example.
Sometimes it can benefit each team member's experience to tailor software tools specific to their job function. A salesperson can use something other than sales management for marketing and lead gen. Users should only gain access to tools they require for their job tasks. favorite tools may need to be clarified or reveal unnecessary data for your workforce. A customizable sales management system lets sales managers control which tools and data their salespeople can access.
Seven Trends that are Affecting Sales Today
Investing For Future Growth
As in any game, strategic thinking three moves ahead is integral to sales growth. Unfortunately, this skill doesn't come naturally for sales leaders who make successful use of planning as part of their job descriptions - this allows them to take advantage of sudden shifts in market conditions quickly.
Knowledge alone isn't enough; top-performing sales organizations have an uncanny knack for quickly translating macro shifts to a real impact on their bottom lines. Sales plans with an eye toward the future create first-mover advantages in areas where competitors have yet to enter, driving sales where none existed.
Many sales executives include explicit investments into new growth opportunities in their capacity planning processes. Of the fast-growing firms we contacted, over half planned at least one year, while 10% extended beyond three. It pays to think ahead; over four out of ten fast-growing firms spend over six percent of their annual sales budget towards goals at least one year out from now.
Micro Markets Are Growing
Averages deceive. Averages can be misleading. Successful sales leaders I speak to take an aggressive stance toward uncovering growth opportunities hidden under what may appear as mature markets by breaking larger markets into smaller units where opportunities can be assessed more closely -- for instance, prospects, new customer segments, or micro segments -- identifying areas with subaverage growth rates. Hence, resources are well-spent using large-scale methods alone. Micromarket strategies rely heavily on analytics. Therefore, sales teams need to be more relaxed about details and use information effectively in their sales efforts.
Big Data Analytics And Advanced Analysis
Today's sales force can access much more data than was available four or five years ago, yet gathering insights and translating that data into actionable strategies remains challenging. Sales leaders who successfully do it for informed decision-making while uncovering sales growth strategies to develop stronger growth plans for themselves and their sales force.
Today we are witnessing a shift in how data is utilized. Instead of being used purely to study historical figures, data now serves a different function - making predictions. Arion ERP uses sophisticated analytics not only to find promising prospects and minimize risks; three quarters (75%) of firms growing quickly believe their performance ranks above average, while only 53%-61% do for slower-growing firms.
Even among companies experiencing rapid expansion, 53% report using analytics as either moderately or very effective in making their decisions; for slower-growing firms, this figure drops somewhat lower; it shows sales analytics still has tremendous promise. Needed are data scientists with deep analytics experience who can use that information to turn it into actionable insights for salespeople so that when clients come calling back, they know exactly when and what offer should be made.
Outsource the Sales Function
Sales growth research revealed a trend of large-scale outsourcing of sales value chains (sometimes in large volumes). We noted how automation allows third-party vendors to manage all aspects of a company's sales processes - demand generation, customer acquisition, and fulfillment are just a few areas they handle for businesses.
Target groups, big real-time data analysis for lead identification, and platforms like arion erp are utilized by sales reps who assign customers according to how likely they are to become customers; in other words, sales teams move away from providing services but pay according to new clients acquired rather than simply on service fees alone.
Social Selling
Effective sales teams will explore all avenues to understand their customers. Sellers need to know who their customers are and how they perceive their company. You can learn a lot about them by what they post online, on various platforms, and in different formats: asking for assistance, expressing their opinions, and having general conversations under customer relationship management with complete overview of native integration in sales cycle of the entire company for customer satisfaction by a single platform.
Collaboration with Marketing
At first glance, marketing and sales appear inextricably linked. Yet in my experience working with large commercial functions, their customer relationship is frequently tenuous; sales dominate B2B deals, while marketing typically excels with consumer interactions. Our sales growth research revealed an unexpected result: companies that combine both functions experience greater revenues and profits than their market counterparts.
Sales and marketing must work hand-in-hand so they understand who to target and the path their buyers follow. Although this seems obvious, too often, these two departments function independently, with differing views regarding which clients to pursue.
These insights typically flow one way: from sales to marketing. But in companies I have witnessed Excel, frontline employees report back to marketing to refine offerings further; datasets are integrated to produce more accurate images of sales opportunities.
Marketing directors and sales heads must collaborate closely for businesses to experience optimal success. Failing to collaborate effectively has long been outdated, potentially hindering its performance as an entity.
The Adoption Of Automation And Artificial Intelligence
McKinsey's Global Institute conducted some research, discovering that approximately 40% of tasks within traditional sales functions could already be automated with existing technology; further advances might bring this figure closer to 50% with natural language processing advances such as deep neural nets.
Lead generation is an excellent illustration. Even with sales management systems, 75% of leads generated need to be followed up on; time and money have been expended only to see these leads go to waste.
Some companies we've worked with implemented artificial Intelligence for lead qualification with a 100% contact rate over several months using AI as qualification criteria; no wonder sales teams love using it, while its capabilities go much beyond sales applications alone. AI automation doesn't only apply to simpler components.
Many have asked us whether salespeople will become obsolete; no such speculation. Salespeople remain an essential component of business organizations; questions remain as to what role these individuals will serve and which skills they require, with human interaction remaining key as we believe sales will always require human interaction for success in the entire sales funnel.
Conclusion
Your team may have encountered a wide range of features with reporting capabilities on social networks for team communication that you had not considered previously; some teams only require some available tools for managing their client database and sales pipeline.
Suppose you need to manage thousands of contacts and meetings efficiently. In that case, sales management software is essential for running an efficient sales team. Set forth all breadth of features necessary for success before finding suitable software to fit these specifications. Find an efficient sales management software service to streamline sales operations and enhance business efficiency.
