How important are sales management tools?
Sales management tools play a key role in any CRM system because it's the link between any business and its customers and prospects.
Selling your products and services is not enough to run a successful business; you must do it at a profit. As the old saying goes “Turnover is vanity; Profit is sanity”. Far too many businesses commit slow suicide by thinking that they are successful just because everyone is busy. This is not a good measure of success.
Success is about making a profit so it's essential that this is not only measured, but also controlled. This means that the whole sales process needs to be managed, capturing accurate “real time” data as part of the operation, not as a separate process.
By using a computerised CRM system, all this is achievable but a piece of software by itself will never give the desired result. As with all systems there is an amount to be planned first.
Sales management systems must contain all of the following:
- Lead Management
- Sales Progress / Result
- Cost of Sale
- Products Selling
- Resource Performance
- Customer Feedback / Perception
- Analysis
Lead Management
All businesses need to understand where their leads come from. Were they from advertising and if so, which campaign was the most productive and therefore the best value for money? Were they perhaps from referrals, typically the best type of lead, and if so, who recommended them to the business and why?
Sales Progress
Once the sales process starts it's essential to understand which stage it's at. The business will need to understand when a sale might be due to close, its value, and the proposed effort that may be required to deliver the product or service. Therefore, this information is invaluable to manufacturing and service departments as well as the sales team.
Sales Completion
Not only is it key to understand which sales have been won but equally (and some would say more importantly) sales that have been lost, and the reasons why and to whom.
Cost of Sale
It's easy to get carried away with selling at all costs. Again, success is not just about getting the sales but about doing profitable business. Any sale has an associated cost, whether it's the cost of a presentation in travel or a demonstration of the product. This must be measured and factored against the possible profit.
Products Selling or Not
It's essential to know which products are selling well and which ones are failing, along with the reasons why. Is the business successful because the price is right, because the product is brilliant, because the service is great? Or are products failing to sell because they are not fit for purpose? Is it because they are too expensive? Is it because the customer service is poor?
Whatever the reason and however painful it is, these facts must be understood and feedback generated to management quickly.
Resource Performance
The quality and performance of staff is important, of course. Typically, the most important and costly overheads year in, year out, will be the people who make up the company.
Measuring their performance is key so that they can be trained into the effective team that you need. This can only be done if they record what they do in the delivery of their duties and then analysing the results.
Customer Feedback / Perception
There's a two-way street regarding customers; how they are perceived by the business and how they perceive the business. From a business's perspective, by recording the actions that members of staff have with their customers, everyone in the business will have a complete view of the customer. This is known as being “customercentric”.
The more knowledge held on customers by the company, the better the service that the business can provide. This puts the business in a positive light, which in turn means the business can become more profitable.
Furthermore, it's possible to change a customer’s view of your business from poor to excellent using customer service, just by treating them well and remembering the adage “the customer is king”.
Analysis / Business Intelligence
All the previous is completely wasted unless the correct “Key Performance Indicators” (KPIs) are recorded. Each business will have its own preferred information that takes priority but using what has been described above will give any business a solid base to work from.
As mentioned already, this information should be captured by the people within the business in real time as part of their operational duties and concatenated into one system. Typically, this should be done in a CRM system.
The sales management tools that have already been mentioned will add value to any business; however, full analysis of this data will enable decision making to be taken to a whole new different level.
Many CRM systems will have many reports written into them as standard, but there are other products that can access the CRM database using what is known as Business Intelligence. These BI tools take sales management to a level where pure, accurate information can be manipulated to give a business competitive edge over its rivals by turning data into invaluable business knowledge.
Deryk Cundy is a Solutions Architect at Collier Pickard.
