CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. A CRM gathers customer and sales leads interactions across all channels in one place. The capability of a CRM to manage centralized data assists businesses in generating sales and improving customer satisfaction, retention, and service. All of that ultimately leads businesses of all sizes to see significant growth and an increase in profits.1
A CRM is beneficial to the many different teams within a company by assisting them in carrying out their various roles and job expectations. The sales team, especially, will find a CRM to be an integral part of achieving their goals to drive revenue.2
Why Sales Teams Need a CRM
- It offers a centralized data hub for sales leads.
A CRM can hold data on every sales lead, contact, activity, task, etc. In one platform, you can input the contact information for each lead you make, log activities relating to a contact or company and assign and track tasks. Most CRMs are hosted in the cloud which allows you to access this data on any device, anywhere in the world. It also acts as backup of all your data, giving you peace of mind that your valuable information won’t be lost.
- It fosters collaboration among team members.
As a central place for all data, including contact info, activities, and tasks, a CRM is an incredible tool for collaborating with the rest of your sales team. Depending on permission settings, each team member can access the same data at any time. Notes can be viewed by anyone, tasks can be assigned to other salespeople, and productivity can be easily monitored by team leaders and management.
- It makes it easy to track contacts through the sales lifecycle.
A well-built CRM doesn’t just hold contact and demographic data on a lead. It’ll also allow the sales team the ability to document each touchpoint and event relating to a specific lead. From the moment you first make contact with the potential customer to when you finalize the sale to when you check in with them a year after, you can document each of these moments.
Additionally, with the ability to document activity and events, you can create workflows and templates to have a comprehensive, repeatable process for working with each sales lead and customer. Your CRM can ensure that each sales team member is following a specific process laid out by the leadership, allowing productivity to be measured. This also prevents leads from falling through the cracks, potentially losing a sale.
- It provides a wide range of metrics and reports.
A particularly important benefit in using a CRM for sales is the availability of metrics and reports. The extent of the reporting functionality of most CRMs is quite vast. Reports can be run on a variety of factors and data points. For example, a sales team member could run a report that shows all sales leads that haven’t been contacted in the last 12 months, to implement a cold lead marketing campaign. Or a sales team leader could run a report on sales made this quarter compared to the previous quarter.
Reports empower sales teams to find new opportunities, identify gaps in the sales process, challenge themselves to improve, and compare results from one timeframe to another.
- It’s cost efficient.
Even though CRM systems can come at a higher price point, they in fact can help you save money. Specifically with the sales team, a CRM will reduce common mistakes in generating quotes or orders for example. Correcting mistakes usually requires a higher amount of effort, time, and expense than the cost of a CRM.
Cost savings also occur in the efficiency of the system. While it may seem trivial, manual data entry, manual task management, and manual note taking is slow, clunky, and pieces of it could even disappear. Any and all information stored in the CRM is safe and secure. In addition, activity and tasks can be replicated across different processes and workflows which just a few clicks of a button. Research suggests that in 2021, companies have seen an average of $30.48 returned for every dollar spent.3 4
- It can integrate with other sales tools and marketing platforms.
CRMs are often built to be modular and/or communicate with other systems, like email marketing platforms, payment processors, customer service portals and ticketing systems, front-end websites, and social media accounts.
This empowers sales teams to build full, comprehensive sales strategies that span multiple channels and dramatically cuts down on the workload, with a significant increase in reach and results. Data from the CRM can instantly flow to other platforms to automate processes and prevent duplication of tasks and activity. With a CRM at the center of the sales team’s arsenal, a company is poised to maximize growth.5
xTuple’s CRM solution, xT Sales, is a platform designed specifically for manufacturing and distributing companies. xT Sales is a powerful CRM that will provide the necessary tools to any sales team to meet and exceed their goals, without bloat and unnecessary features bogging them down.
xT Sales is a scalable growth solution that allows manufacturing sales teams to track sales and interactions for perfect customer service. With this CRM, you can increase upsells, cross-sells, and improve customer retention. Through its user-friendly interface on any device, you can view transactions, nurture relationships, and tailor offers. On top of all that, xT Sales is one of the most affordable CRM solutions out there. To learn more about xT Sales CRM for manufacturers and see how to get started, click here.