Improve Your Sales Pipeline, Part 1: Sales Management
We’ve all heard the statistics – more than 30% of leads are never followed up. And 30% of salespeople only make one follow up call, when it’s been proven that the “sweet spot” is closer to six. And with increased reliance on online sources, it’s been shown that a lead left to languish even 10 minutes decreases the closing odds by 400%. (Statistics from Harvard Business Review)
There are three keys to improving your sales pipeline – in this article, we’ll review the first, sales management. While improved training and oversight can tighten up your sales pipeline, there is no substitute for hard, cold facts to inform your sales team’s actions. With a well-implemented CRM, you can more effectively manage individual sales efforts, follow each prospect through the pipeline, and determine optimal follow-up for your products.
Targets can be set for the company, teams, and individuals. Through individualized dashboards, management can view the targets of each team member as well as their personal targets. Each salesperson can view their own scorecard and personal targets. Once a sales manager sets the targets, everyone receives personalized scorecards that indicate their progress visually to keep them engaged and on-track.
Using intelligent technologies embedded in your CRM will improve your sales team’s productivity, and you can ensure that your company doesn’t fall into the category of poor lead follow-up. Once leads go into the pipeline, they are assigned to a salesperson, appear on their dashboard, and are tracked both in aggregate and individually. Lead data is sent to each salesperson at the time they need to follow up, and the sales team lead can see whether or not the follow up is completed.
Your CRM should include functions to create contests, which further engage and incentivize your salespeople. A panel with each sales team shows the sales manager how the whole group is faring, and individual contest pages show salespeople how they are stacking up against others. A typical layout is a horizontal “race track” bar graph, with a progress meter for each salesperson in the individual contest.
Even a slight improvement in your lead closing rate can yield dramatic results. Take a few moments now to calculate what even a 5% lead close improvement would do to your bottom line. You can see how a small investment of time and effort can really pay off. In the next two articles in this series, we’ll look at how your CRM can transform cross-channel customer data into valuable insights; and how to discover customer pain points you can solve.
At AspenTech CRM, we work with hundreds of companies each year to ensure their sales teams are functioning at the highest possible level, enabled with the data they need to constantly improve their performance. Improve your bottom line – give AspenTech CRM a call today at (866) 880-4228 or click here.
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