Hiring good people is only half the battle to creating solid sales teams. Many good people enter the sales department only to crash and burn weeks later.

Turnover is a constant frustration, and many who stay will underperform.

New representatives often find the actual tasks and sales processes somewhat mysterious. This is true even if they understood the process of their last company or industry well enough to be a top performer. Every business is different. Salespeople need help and guidance on prioritising which actions and tasks they need to accomplish daily to succeed. They need to know where to place most of their efforts. Fortunately, a good CRM can take the mystery and guesswork out of the process.

During the onboarding process, focus less on teaching the rep the CRM's “how-to” and more on teaching salespeople how successful sales representatives conduct their day-to-day work. This approach helps new hires quickly grasp the company process and sales funnel.

Look at the generic sales lifecycle: Calls, Appointments, Meetings, and Closes.

A CRM will quickly shake out the rough numbers a salesperson must hit to make or exceed the quota. This data lets salespeople start on the right foot by distilling the process into simple actions.

Armed with insight gleaned from your CRM, you can confidently tell a newcomer, “You’re new, so we only really expect a 10% appointment set rate right now. We also know from experience that 20% of appointments drop, no matter how successful they are. We also only expect you to have an 80% close rate during your first year, and you need to close 32 sales to meet the quota each month. Therefore, you need to make 500 calls each month to set 50 appointments. This will get you in front of 40 people on average, allowing you to close 32 sales as you maintain your close rate. We know from experience that most successful appointment sets happen between 8 am and 9 am, so you need to sit down and make 25 calls to people in our target market every morning during those hours.”

Those are specific, actionable insights.

Salespeople can quickly become productive by tackling tasks rather than fumbling blindly through the sales process, attempting to pick up bits and pieces from high performers, or attempting to apply formulas that worked at their last job incorrectly.

A sound CRM system can also highlight those times when the focus of the sales department is misplaced.

For example, your target market may be “homeowners.” You may have three primary home value brackets that you sell to homes under £100,000, homes worth £100,000 to £250,000, and homes that are worth more than £250,000. Most of your business comes from the middle bracket, but what if your sales team focuses on the £250,000+ bracket based on inaccurate assumptions they will be more eager to buy? Quotas slip. A CRM will help you quickly identify problems and guide your team's focus to the market segment that produces results.

Call recording keeps representatives from making embarrassing, avoidable mistakes, like forgetting any special needs that customers have expressed or trying to prospect a customer already with the company. Such errors can cause sales loss, but that information is not readily available in many organisations. It may be buried in sales records or a file cabinet, attempting to track its downtime inefficiently.

This information is essential when assigning an existing account to a new sales representative. Call recording allows the representative to get to know your client just as well as their predecessor did, which means a smooth continuation of the relationship. 

Customers feel confident your organisation is on top of their preferences and needs.

They won’t be alarmed by staffing changes because they will know that they’ll always be taken care of. Simply put, it’s a better customer experience that leaves each account feeling like they are dealing with a top-notch organisation. Salespeople benefit from the call record feature, too.

They gain confidence knowing they are armed with the information they need to make a sale. It shapes interactions with prospects and improves how they carry themselves, which in turn helps salespeople close deals. Call recording helps enormously when you have multiple people handling leads.

Do you have an inside salesperson responsible for setting appointments for outside sales representatives? Chances are they already assessed the prospect’s needs, desires, and concerns. If those assessments are recorded in the system, outside representatives can review the call and understand a client’s needs before ever setting foot on the customer’s property.

Armed with this information, the representative can plan their approach and craft insightful questions rather than repeating the inside representative’s work. This leaves the customer feeling far more confident about the organisation and sets the precedent that it’s the organisation and not the individual salespeople with whom they’re building the relationship.

Automated tasks can also reduce problems with follow-up. It’s very easy for sales representatives to get busy and distracted. It’s easy for them to get too focused on new business and neglect to nurture existing clients. Automated tasks, and manager-assigned tasks, can reduce this problem by firmly working follow-up calls and emails into the salesperson’s day in a place where they can easily see them and respond to them.

Revive Stale Deals

CRM software can make matters clear to you.

A great way to understand areas of opportunity for your rep is to track the causes of lost deals. Your CRM should break this data into salespeople, sales teams, and departments. For example, if the most common cause of lost deals is the objection “it costs too much,” then you need to train on communicating value.

You can pass this insight on to managers, who can help the underperforming representative develop scripts to meet this response and reframe the representative’s mindset and, by extension, the client’s attitude about price.

Reduce turnover and increase motivation.