The start of a new sales quarter is always an exciting new milestone, no matter if that means a chance to start fresh or to continue the momentum from last quarter. Beginning a new sales quarter means new leads to chase down, new deals to close and new goals to meet.
Despite the promise of a new quarter, however, too many sales representatives fail to take advantage of this window of opportunity. According to a study by Altify, two-thirds of sales reps fall short of their annual quotas.
Whether you're starting from a clean slate or you want to repeat your great results from last quarter, you'll need all the help you can get. Good sales teams recognize the value of technology: High-performing sales teams use five applications, on average, as part of their technology stack.
Of course, having the right solutions means nothing unless you know how to use them. In particular, you need to know how to make your customer relationship management (CRM) tool work for you. Here's a look at the different ways that your CRM solution can help you continue to reach your sales goals.
Maximizing Your Potential
CRM tools help you streamline the entire sales process in order to maximize what's already in the pipeline and close deals that were pending from last quarter. By making reps' jobs easier, CRM software makes it easier to handle potential issues as they come and smooth over any stumbling blocks. In turn, your sales reps will be free to spend more time cultivating new prospects and growing their pipeline.
Prospecting and Analyzing
The more visible your sales pipeline is to your reps, the better they can continue to identify promising prospects. Mobile CRM tools, in particular, can help reps save time and work from anywhere. A study by web design and development firm Innoppl found that 65 percent of companies using mobile CRM achieved their sales quotas, versus only 22 percent of companies not using mobile CRM.
Good CRM solutions also include some form of analytics so that sales reps can examine their past performance and obtain actionable insights for the future. Through personalized dashboards, CRM tools can reveal valuable information, such as the average time for deals to close or the likelihood that the deals currently in the pipeline will succeed. CRM tools help you understand what went right -- and wrong -- last quarter so that you know which course to follow.
Feeding the Pipeline
Ultimately, CRM tools are only as valuable as the information within them. The highest-performing sales reps establish good habits by entering as much data as possible into their CRM tool about their interactions with prospects. Even better, choose a CRM solution that automatically logs interactions, saving your reps the time and effort of manual entry.
Final Thoughts
From closing deals on the brink to putting new prospects in the pipeline, there's a lot you can do to start this new sales quarter off right. In the end, the most important factor for reaching your sales targets is knowing how to use the right tools in the right ways in pursuit of your business objectives. Solutions like Rollio's CRM automation tool is able to let sales reps spend less time manually entering data and more time interacting with prospective customers.
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