How Your CRM Strategy can Help Drive a Successful Inside Sales Campaign

With the evolution of technology, inside sales has become a preferred model for sales. As more sales reps spend more time using technology to identify, nurture, and convert leads and buyers favoring remote (online) mode for purchase and collaboration, CRM is your best bet to bring marketers, prospects, sales professionals, and customers together.

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It would be bold to claim that inside sales can leverage CRM to understand a customer better. It would be even more audacious to declare that sales reps can be more mobile and efficient, and reach their sales goals using CRM.

For inside sales, sales reps work remotely to identify and reach out to their prospects. They mostly end up spending their time with technology instead of people. According to a LinkedIn Sales Report, sales reps nowadays spend the most time using social selling tools and CRM.  

Tools like CRM, social-selling, email and calling tools, social intelligence software, etc. have a huge role to play in running a successful inside sales campaign.

Why is CRM Important for Inside Sales?

A CRM gives you all the details about customer preferences, buying patterns, interactions with your organization, pain points, etc. A sales professional will need to understand a prospect or customer to offer a deal at the right moment and at the right time. In such cases, an ideal CRM for inside sales would help:

• Automate and simplify functions
• Accelerate sales processes
• Facilitate core operations
• Give an overview of sales activity to keep tabs on the sales pipeline
• Provide information to manage customer relationship(s)
   

Also Read: 5 Fundamentals of a Foolproof CRM Strategy

How to Use CRM to Boost Inside Sales?

Lead Management: A good CRM already gives you a 360-degree view of your buyer, which you can align with your lead management process. With the customer (or prospect profile) in place, you can segment, search, sort, and qualify leads to optimize ROI from the leads.

If your CRM can pull data from different sources like social media, emails, or other channels, you can identify your prospects in real time and manage your sales campaigns accordingly.

Also, a CRM can be configured to use buyer profiles and heuristics to pre-qualify a lead so that the sales team can act on it.

Opportunity Management: When you have identified your leads, CRM will help you track them in the sales funnel. You don't have to hunt for opportunities in a disorganized data set. Instead, you can segment data and identify valuable opportunities with the help of criteria-based selections. With the focus on opportunities, you can react and plan sales activities for conversions.

A CRM system can be programmed to proactively track changes in prospect behavior, customer order patterns, etc. and notify or even recommend sales team to act.

Relationship Management: It is vital for any organization to forge a meaningful and lasting relationship with their customers. These relationships not only make for a loyal customer base, but your existing customers serve as your brand managers, advocating your products or services in their circle.

According to Marketing Metrics, “Businesses have a 60 to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer while the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5% to 20%.”

If a CRM can provide insights on how a customer or a prospect is engaging with the brand, a sales professional can focus on ensuring quality interactions and creating meaningful experiences for customers to strengthen the relationship.

• A CRM could be used as:
• A common platform where the entire team can view customer interactions to take proper actions on customer requests and queries.
• A recommender system to prompt activities like a Thank You email with a free coupon on a purchase, or an AMC renewal message after one year of product purchase, and so on.
• A system to create personalized messages based on a customer’s preferences.
• An automated follow-up system which can follow-up with customers or prospects on schedule, because a missed follow-up could be a missed opportunity.
   

Also Read: 5 Ways AI is Changing CRM Software

Time Management: An effective CRM can automate and do-away with a lot of mundane tasks like customer data entry, keeping notes or call logs, etc. A CRM could help sales personnel to save time by:

• Optimizing schedules and prioritizing tasks
• Enabling teams to share data, calendars, and documents which allows them to collaborate as a team and avoids task repetition
• Tracking all communication and interactions, that can help them show up in the right place, at the right time
   

Saved time means spending more time with customers and in turn more closed deals, isn’t it?

Analytics and Reporting: If you know what your customer wants, your sales team can serve it to them. A CRM can store all your customer data, offer meaningful insights about your customer’s needs, and even predict their requirements. Tracking, analyzing and reporting on key customer preferences and how your competition is handling them, can help you serve your customers better.

Also Read: Optimizing your CRM Strategy for 2018

CRM was not designed for inside sales. But inside sales can leverage CRM to help sales reps understand their customer better, be more mobile and efficient, and reach their sales goals.

What’s your take on the synergy between sales and CRM? Let us know in the comments below.