Customer relationship management or CRM systems are essential tools for companies to organize information, aid in planning, drive revenue and help sales reps make more money. Unfortunately, many sales reps are not taking advantage of the various ways that CRM can make it easier to stay on top of prospects and leads and push sales through all avenues. These tips for maximizing your use of CRM will help you realize the benefits and start posting numbers that put you among the top sales reps on your team.

Stop Losing Track of Prospects Early in the Process By Using CRM to Close More Sales

When you are sending out several quotes a day as a routine, it is understandable that you might not remember sending certain quotes. However, if you forget about a quote sent to an interested and qualified prospect, you may forget about that prospect entirely or not follow up in a timely manner, causing the prospect to drop out of the sales cycle. Sales reps who use CRM consistently have fewer ‘lost prospect’ incidents because most CRM systems can be configured to automatically send reminders at set time periods following a sales event. Stop losing prospects who requested quotes and might be ready to buy by always updating your CRM with important sales events.

Consider Branching Out into Social CRM – a Relevant Tool for Sales Reps

Now that many organizations and sales reps have embraced traditional CRM systems, new CRM tools are flooding the marketplace. Not all of these new options are useful or relevant to all sales reps, but social CRM is one of the few that most sales reps should be considering. Social CRM, either as a stand alone platform or as an application that runs off of an established CRM database, can allow you to establish deeper relationships with your audience by connecting you to potential customers on social networking sites. Using social CRM also makes it easier to:

• Judge how satisfied a customer is following a purchase, and track referrals that follow a sale
• Keep in touch with prospects throughout the sales cycle without constantly relying on the telephone or e-mail
• Strategize to maximize sales based on where sales from social CRM tracking activities are clustered

Understand Why You Lose Sales with Customized CRM Reports

One of the tools that many CRM systems offer that sales reps underutilize is the ability to run customizable reports to understand sales activity. These reports can help you make more money by pinpointing and targeting areas in your sales cycle where improvements can be made, and one of the most useful ways to deploy this information may be in learning what your lost sales have in common. By running a report on all of your lost sales through your CRM system, you may find that:

• Certain milestones in the sales cycle tend not to occur timely in a lost sale – so that if you pushed these milestones, you might be able to prevent lost sales
• Key notes entered early in the sales process may indicate that your lost sales have early indicators, which could allow you qualify prospects more accurately
• Commonalities in event timing, quote requests, and meeting participants lead to greater insights on why sales might be lost

Make More Money By Making Better Use of Your Time

Time loss is a constant worry for busy sales reps, but you may be losing more time on redundant or irrelevant activities than you think. CRM is a great way to track how much time you are spending with each prospect, and compare prospects against one another on various parameters to see whether your time is being spent with the prospects who will make you the most money. You can also use CRM to track whether your current lead generation and closing techniques are productive enough to bring your numbers up to where you want them to be.