In today’s business environment, companies cannot afford to lose any potential opportunities by not having a system in place in order to track leads in addition to effectively managing proper leads follow-up. More businesses are utilizing Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Technology Systems to ensure the capturing of every sale and customer activity. Modern CRM systems have become essential, therefore, as a business tool to foster leads to close while also managing current customer projects and maintaining proper customers service levels. Let's review how CRM Systems can help businesses stay profitable.
If your company is considering CRM software, mostly available today as Cloud CRM technology, there are probably key questions to ask your Sales Manager such as:
- Is there a system currently in place to effectively manage each new prospect?
- Do you know what your lead conversion rate is?
- What is the conversion rate by sales rep, by lead source?
- Do you know If your sales team is following up with every lead in a timely manner?
- How many attempts are they making to follow up and how is this recorded?
- Do you know the close rate on each lead? Each Salesperson closing ratio?
The essential challenge, then, is how to effectively improve lead conversion to boost revenue? How to improve lead conversions is a question that most sales and marketing professionals think about often. Companies should make the correct investment in technology to build a continuous pipeline for growth. This all starts with a solid system in place to ensure leads are properly being follow up; amazing enough many companies do not have such a system in place.
There is nothing more frustrating for Sales & Marketing leaders to learn that a new prospect purchased from a competitor because sales did not properly follow up. Today, the timing of new prospect follow-up is critical. Most sales experts highly recommend that initial follow-up on new leads/prospects be performed within 1 hour, doing so increases your chance of converting leads/prospects to revenue significantly. Also having a consistent and thorough lead/prospect follow-up process will significantly improve your team’s lead qualification rates. If your organization does not have some sort of system in place already, such as a CRM system with this Key Feature or proper sales follow-up, is risking lost revenue from lost sales.
Without a CRM system in place with a proven methodology for effective and proper leads follow-up, unfortunately, has the potential for missed opportunities. This missed opportunity equates to a loss of revenue for your company. It is virtually impossible to enforce sales best practices or consistent processes without a good sales tool. The sales process is as important if not more important than the CRM software itself however there is no pre-built, out-of-box sales process in most CRM systems. Hiring a consultant to build this needed business process into CRM is cost-prohibitive for many businesses.
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