Learn these 6 Super Tips to help you reduce the CRM grind and supercharge sales

Salesforce to Story Selling

For all the reasons you made the decision to build a career in sales; the opportunities, the earning potential, the camaraderie, the business, the travel, the lifestyle. It’s not a fallacy, it is possible to make it to the top 5% of the top 5%.

Here are six super tips to help you reduce the CRM grind and supercharge sales.

Embraced and leveraged correct ly, salesforce.com, social selling and story telling can be a true asset in your empire building.

Introduction

By now, if your company is leveraging salesforce.com or a similar CRM suite, you will have spent hours in the dreaded CRM grind. However, being effective at logging customer and prospect information is absolutely essential to your success.

Every phone call, every discussion, every proposal, every document shared, everything!

Keeping your contacts, accounts and opportunities up to date makes you more efficient, less prone to error and gives you clean data to work with - the net of which is better business results.

The rule of thumb is a competent sales person can handle a maximum of 50 accounts in your pipeline at any given time.

Now add three contacts at each account and you’re tracking conversations and promises to 150 people.

Get logging, lumberjack.

The greatest development in the sales craft has been the explosion of Social Selling. #SocialSelling, according to CEB (www.executiveboard.com), is an essential tool to help the sales person (the #challenger) educate prospects, rather than traditional ‘selling’. They do this through helping the prospect think about their business differently through uncovering disruptive insights .

Your customers and prospects expect you to know who they are, what is happening in their world and what is important to them.

Educate your prospects on the value, specific to their business rather than selling your product to any Joe. This is only possible if you leverage the tools in your ever expanding tool kit to give you the insight necessary to know them as well as their BFF.

Link up with LinkedIn, chat on chatter, tweet on Twitter, subscribe to various social feeds, read annual reports and speak to your colleagues in other parts of the business that may have had experience working with the account. It’s incredible what you’ll learn from chatting to others within your own company, let alone what is publicly available.

Then log it, lumberjack!

Social Selling

You are running your own book of business, where you are concerned with reducing risk and maximizing return, just like a high profile investor.

One of the best ways to reduce pipeline risk is to ensure that you have multiple sources of opportunity. Multiple contacts at each account is a great start.

Too often salespeople are bitten on the hand by their key stakeholder leaving the company and the project being suspended or reset.

Then create multiple opportunities at multiple accounts. Ensure that you’re in different parts of the business, having conversations about adding value across the enterprise.

Diversify the portfolio

If you find yourself working for a company with a single value proposition, get creative. There is every chance that your solution is adding value to other parts of the business, you just don't know it yet.

Schedule onsite meetings and ask your contact to make a few new introductions over coffee or host a lunch and learn.

When you don't have control over the product roadmap, you still have the power to constantly refine the go to market proposition.

Be creative, disruptive and persistent.

Get Creative

From the day you start in sales, you will never ever have enough time. The key to not missing opportunity, numbers and your sanity, you need to be efficient at data consumption. If you follow the first super-tip you will have clean data to work with too.

There are many great solutions to interact and consume salesforce and CRM data, such as Interactive Workflows, data visualization dashboards and reporting engines. The key of all is to better present data ready for your easy consumption.

The best solutions are those which allow you to not only analyze, but update opportunities and customer data on the fly.

Your CRM would have built in views, reports and dashboards, use them! Granted, if you decide on the standard reports and dashboards you will need to put a lot of effort into building them, or you may have a company supplied administrator that can go back and forth building them for you, but it is essential to know how to consume the vast amount of data you’re logging.

Data Consumption

Interactive workflows allow you to

both update and analyze in one screen

Story SellingNow you’re embracing social selling, the next step is Story Selling. Incredibly, people in a presentation environment are ~22 times more likely to remember facts if they are wrapped in a story.

Remember, selling is not about how amazing your solution is - it is about educating your prospects that there is a better way. It just so happens that your solution is the better way (and why).

A super effective way of taking a step toward story selling, is to learn where your customers are finding value from dealing with your company. Then, share those stories with your prospects. Be careful not to share proprietary or confidential information though!

Bringing your solution to life with a story of how your solution adds value to customers in similar markets or industries is very powerful.

About the Author

Father, husband, software technology businessman, change agent, innovator, overachiever, motorcyclist, outdoor enthusiast.

Mark Dwyer is the Chief Revenue Officer of CRMflow.

“Salesforce customers can now expect a truly enhanced interface that enables sales and marketing organizations to better manage customer relationships, analyze performance and reduce the CRM grind”.

Connect with Mark@mc_dwyermark.dwyer@crmflow.com https://ca.linkedin.com/in/markcdwyer

About CRMflow

For over a decade the team behind CRMflow has been building better business software. We believe that providing a better flow of key business data enhances productivity, increases revenue and allows people to make better business decisions.

Interactive Workflow Technology powers a fresh user experience for salesforce.com customers, resulting in better connected, more consumable data.

Free 21 Day Trial available at www.crmflow.com

Connect with CRMflow@_crmflowhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/pvelocity