If you’re looking to boost your sales team’s productivity, one of the best ways to do this is to use technology to help you simplify and automate your client communications both internally and externally.
If you’re a business that works with B2B clients, you will find that most of the time your client communication takes too much time and effort. Whether it’s your sales teams or customer support teams that liaise with clients, there will be a lot of time required to respond to enquiries, write and email proposals to clients, and general communication to stay front of mind with your clients.
If you’re not using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management software), then you will most probably be hiring an admin assistant to help your sales team speed up client communications.
On the other hand, if you’re using a CRM such as Hubspot, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign CRM and many others, then you will learn that these platforms, if set up correctly, can actually help you automate your client communications thus saving you time and money on additional overheads.
For those of you who are not familiar with a CRM, it’s a software application that helps you find ways to employ what you’ve learned about each customer so that you can provide greater value for your customers and your business.
In this blog, we are sharing 3 main things you could set up today to automate your client communication and boost productivity for your sales teams.
Automate calendar scheduling to boost sales calls
There is no magic bullet for selling more, but the tools available to salespeople these days are limitless.
For example, these days prospects can easily schedule appointments with your sales team over Zoom. If you’re using GSuite for your business, you can connect your Gmail with your CRM so your sales teams can effectively record emails, update notes and tasks directly within the Gmail account.
There are also options for one-click calling, live chats, automated proposals and so many other tools that bring increased levels of selling effectiveness.
This is all about working smart. According to the Nucleus Research, they found that easily accessible data for your salespeople can shorten sales cycles by 8 percent to 14 percent. For example, every CRM will have something called ‘lead scoring’. Lead scoring helps sales prioritize leads by working only those who have reached a certain threshold based on their sales-readiness. If a contact already exists in your CRM, you can track their website behaviour and see what they’ve viewed. All of this is available at the fingertips for your salespeople. We use ActiveCampaign CRM which does all of this and more. You can check it out here.
Transparency between sales and marketing to reduce information silos
Having transparency over your customer journey will go a long way to keep your marketing and sales teams aligned. Most CRM’s will help you merge your sales and marketing efforts into one easily accessible dashboard. The interactions from sales, service, social and financial shared to a customer’s CRM record lets marketers target leads and customers with a more personalised experience.
Your CRM should be “one source of truth” when it comes to customer information. Departments such as Customer Service, Sales and Marketing all have to have visibility of each other’s business units activities. This level of visibility for each of these departments helps them to plan, propose, make decisions quickly and act on key customer actions.
Improve customer experience
These days it can be easy to get lost in the digital marketing world. With so many potential touchpoints such as email, chat, social media, website, phone etc – all data sources can become fragmented which in turn can hurt your customer experience.
Automation can help bring these data sources together so a service team has a complete customer profile to resolve complaints effectively.
In this instance, we would recommend using tools such as Zapier, Integromat, PieSync and many more in order to connect different apps together and automate your client communication for a more seamless customer experience.
In conclusion, it all boils down to knowing your customers. When you’re using a CRM to help you automate your client communications, your sales conversations become more about improving the whole customer experience so you can action customer requests quickly rather than wasting time chasing open tickets with internal departments.
You’ll need a marketing automation plan in order to achieve a seamless customer experience online. We can help you set this up – contact us to discuss your projects.
If you’re interested in what technology we recommend, you can also check out our Recommended Tech Tools resource.