Tips to maximise sales team efficiency

Customers are at the heart of all businesses and therefore the process of acquiring new customers and gaining repeat business from existing customers is a vital part of any business.

Managing leads and customer contacts efficiently is a key part of any sales job. A customer relationship management system (CRM) makes this easy, particularly a web based solution, whereby as long as your team have internet access, they can access their data from anywhere in the world.

CRM systems allow for reports on any aspect of the business to be generated quickly and easily. The information gained from these reports can help to manage a sales team more efficiently as follows:
1) Performance – Analysing the performance levels of all members of the sales team can allow a sales manager to establish the strongest and weakest members of teams. Realistic sales targets can then be set and bonus schemes can be set up based on sales performance.
2) Forecasting – a sales manager can report on actual and forecast sales against budgets. If there is a shortfall on forecast sales, then they can use incentives on strongly performing sales team members to help narrow the gap.
3) Member Activity – Reporting on the number of existing and potential leads a sales person has, allows a new lead to be allocated to the person with capacity. This ensures that a timely follow up will be made.
4) Sales Pipeline – reports can be generated on the status of all contacts, to ensure a continuing pipeline.

A CRM contact system is updated instantly, allowing real time information on any sales activity. This allows a sales manager to see what is happening at any time.

Meetings are an essential part of the process for many sales teams and ensuring that these are scheduled in an optimum manner allows for efficiency and the best use of time. For instance, ensuring that meetings in the same geographic vicinity are scheduled together. A CRM system allows everyone access to an online diary, which allows meetings to be scheduled efficiently and prevents diary clashes.

Setting clear goals and rewarding achievement are a key part of the sales process. Many sales teams work on a bonus structure where they receive a bonus or incentive for sales won. Understanding how individual team members operate, their strengths and their weaknesses allows a manager to use their team efficiently. Are they good at winning new business? Are they good at converting leads from a website? Are they good at doing follow up and paperwork or do they need admin support? Do they need help generating leads or are they good at sourcing themselves? By knowing members of the team and using the report functions of a web-based CRM software database system, a sales manager can deploy their team effectively in their strongest areas as far as possible.