It has gone through various reports that a good percentage of sales teams look to reduce their sales cycle, simply because longer sales cycles seem to be less effective. A long sales cycle expected to kill deals, because the longer a sales cycle is, it is less likely for a prospect to get converted. Besides, longer sales cycle consume more resources and businesses need to wait longer to see profits.
The sales cycle is business’s complete selling process that starts with lead generation and ends with the closure of the deal , passing through the different stages of the sales process. While making sales strategies businesses are often concerned about the time. It takes their sales team to make an actual sale. Though the time may vary depending upon the industry and niche. Every sales team prefers to achieve the shortest sales cycle possible without affecting their rapport with their customers.
Let’s look at the ways how CRM shortens Sales-cycle
Good Understanding of the Buyer
The sales representative needs to concentrate on the deals that are more likely to get a quick closure of the deal. This can done effectively by lead scoring feature of CRM. When a customer’s digital footprints counted and taken into account to prioritise the customer interest in a product/service. The chances of early and successful closure of a deal is closely associated with a high lead score. To achieve this, the sales representative first needs to understand the success rate vis-a-vis varying sizes of companies. The representative should understand the buying pattern of different clients. They should analyse the success rates of different deals and their team should understand the same. While making good use of the CRM software, the sales team can easily develop a good understanding of the buyer.
Automated Administrative Tasks
With the help of CRM software, the sales team can automate their administrative tasks that will help them to utilize their time and resources more efficiently. As its discovered that a sales representative spends 23% of his time on repetitive administrative tasks. If these repetitive administrative tasks automated then the time saved can further used for generating and converting more leads. Thus, CRM software is quite useful for the sales team. As this software comes with built-in communication tools that facilitate quicker conversations and easy follow ups. With the use of this software, the decision-making process gets quicker and sales representative time is readily available for lead nurturing and customer engagement.
Tracking of Sales Pipeline
The most important aspect of the sales process is to track leads or prospects, which is also the most time-consuming process because it is mostly handled manually. The basic steps of sales pipeline are lead generation, lead nurturing, lead qualification and lead conversion. The most crucial aspect of the sales pipeline is the tracking prospects or leads, and it is the most time-consuming because of its manual nature, if the sales team have not deployed a CRM.
Lead tracking handles most of the steps in a sales pipelines by speeding the sales process but without quick results. Sales reps by skipping steps towards the sales goals will not be able to quickly close the deals. Determining the prospect position in the sales pipeline and trying to move them along gets tough. If sales reps are doing so using a poorly designed software instead of Sales CRM. CRM automates the sales process and streamlines the sales pipeline saving time of the sales team and helping them shorten the sales cycle.
Improved Process of Prospecting
Sales representatives while looking for a prospect face major hindrance in the manual process. It is of creating and maintaining the data of the person with whom they have contacted. However, using a CRM software, this task becomes simple. As the sales representative can easily make an entry for every prospect they have contacted. And the activities associated with are also recorded for future reference . Thus, monitoring the sales representatives becomes easy, as prospecting efforts get easily tracked inside the system.
Also Read: ERP Software Facilitating Breakthroughs in the Automobile Sector
