Help, we’re running after the wrong sales opportunities!

How a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system can support sales success

If you ask the sales department, there is always too much to do and never too little. There are new sales opportunities, product inquiries, sales projects, target customers, cross- and upselling opportunities with existing customers, and much more. Wow! So many trees that sometimes you can’t even see the forest. The opportunities are there, so the store should be buzzing. But it’s not? Then it’s high time to see if the sales team is really pursuing the right sales opportunities and not the wrong ones.

The linchpin should be the CRM system for sales. On the one hand, its function is to capture new sales opportunities and ensure a continuously filled, transparent pipeline. On the other hand, the system must be able to help the sales team navigate in goal-oriented fashion through day-to-day business with all its tasks and sales opportunities, to ensure perfect collaboration on the team. This means highlighting the opportunities that are actually relevant and controlling the processing according to a best-practice approach.

Let’s imagine the following: The sales staff’s daily TO DO list is long; everywhere they look, there’s something to do and someone wants to talk to them. As a result, the only way to work is according to the urgency principle. You take care of whatever’s burning. This means that the important analysis and prioritization of the individual sales opportunities is neglected. Or you overlook a new opportunity with a potential customer.

In addition, there may be a tendency to make appointments where you feel most comfortable, either because calls can be made predictably on a level playing field or because you just like the customer. Customers who are “more demanding” initially or who communicate directly are neglected. Daily and weekly schedules fill up regardless of actual potential. Especially in sales with long-running sales projects, a lot of valuable active sales time can be wasted.

At the end of the day, the question remains: Why doesn’t the sales team take advantage of the best sales opportunities?

The only way to optimize sales opportunities is to analyze the current process

We at valantic help you analyze and evaluate your individual situation with tried-and-true methods, and we initiate targeted change processes taking advantage of the digital possibilities. These changes can be in the organization, processes, or sales roles. The first step is to find out what the value drivers and energy guzzlers in your sales process are. Hurdles and optimization potential must be identified. Following this, a case-by-case best practice procedure will be developed, one that will be established as an exemplary procedure for your sales team taking into account the digital possibilities.

Making the most of sales opportunities thanks to a partnership with valantic 

The management of sustainable changes is made possible by a goal-oriented and established KPI set. On the one hand, these KPIs serve to ensure transparency for all individual employees with regard their own day-to-day business; on the other hand, they enable the management to maintain a consolidated view of the situation and the improvements achieved.

In the best case, improvements are tracked in iterations. Once changes have been established, they are left to do their thing and the results achieved are examined. The process then begins again to identify new improvements for how employees can work more efficiently and effectively in the next round. There is still room for individuality, especially so that the performance of the true performers is not restricted.

The CRM system as an analysis and control tool

A CRM system introduced for your company as a digital tool supports your team’s sales process and provides the necessary transparency to establish and follow best-practice procedures. It will provide guidance to employees while still giving them the opportunity to decide for themselves what to do when. In addition, state-of-the-art CRM systems such as the SAP Sales Cloud can collect digital experience values and derive optimized recommendations for action for the people acting in sales, so that the scarce resource “time” is used to exploit the best sales opportunities.