6 ways to streamline selling process with integrated systems

Most sales experts and business leaders agree on the principle – “The more customer-centered your company, the greater your ability to profitably grow sales.” Many sales organizations are embracing effective customer support solutions to revamp their sales process. But before driving prospects to the sales channel, organisations need to understand their business niche like what do they do best, who needs what they do, how do they approach prospects and more.

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Challenges while improving sales process

Streamlining the sales process presents a more cost-effective and less risky opportunity to pave the way for top-line growth of the organisation. However, there are some typical challenges that can emerge while optimizing sales processes:

• Scattered data: This problem arises when salesperson struggles to identify the selling content among the available solutions.
• Unsynced info: This problem arises when sales reps receive information faster than they can process.
• Confusion among teams: This problem arises when systems in an organisation are not connected, which leads to disorganized flow of content and resources.
• Inefficiency: This problem arises when sales reps are unable to execute the sales process within the expected time interval.

Streamline process with Smart Selling

To make these challenges less daunting, organisations need to integrate various tools and techniques with their sales process to increase customer retention and revenue. Listed below are some of the tools that can be used to streamline processes across marketing, sales and customer support:

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1. Integrated sales and marketing systems

Customer Relationship Management(CRM) systems make it easier for sales and marketing people to manage, track and nurture every sales lead. It tracks every action of the customer from calls to emails, meetings and much more. Integrating CRM tools with sales and marketing provide operational processing across entire customer lifecycle:

Leads – Qualified lead – Sale – Customer – Repeat customer

Benefits: It helps

• To identify new leads quickly and easily
• To access data from anywhere and at any time
• To increase sales with cross-selling and up-selling opportunities

2. Automated System

Automated systems such as CPQ make it easy for salespeople to automate a number of time-consuming and repetitive tasks such as sales processing, tracking of customer interactions and many more.

Benefits: It helps

• To keep track of each customer transaction
• To predict future sales with automated tools
• To track competitors

3. Social sales platform

Social media helps salespeople to generate more leads and build deeper relations with their clients. Social platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and many other can be used to find true buyers and opportunities to improve sales.

Benefits: It helps

• To know prospect’s needs by adding FAQ section
• To build brand loyalty by using right tags on Facebook and Twitter
• To increase customer retention using direct messaging on Twitter

4. Reports and dashboards

Reports and dashboards help salespeople to get the immediate real-time view of the data they need, and the managers to drill down on the team’s performance and goals by simply dragging and dropping on the fields.

Benefits: It helps

• To find pre-existing reports or fields easily with quick search
• To determine metrics like number of reps, number of wins, win rates, revenue, sales discount and more to measure business objectives.
• To measure the performance of assets like web pages, landing pages, and calls-to-action.

5. E-commerce sales

An E-commerce portal helps salespeople to reach out to the customers when they need assistance and encourage their purchase decision. Offering a real-time chat channel helps customers to make contact with the salesperson and take immediate action.

Benefits: It helps

• To monitor stock level of the increased sales
• To create markets for niche products
• To gain new customers with search engine visibility

6. Mobile-friendly Systems

The mobile platform can improve the entire sales cycle by allowing customers to evaluate and purchase products and services online. A CRM platform connected to smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices allows salespeople to remotely access critical customer data.

Benefits: It helps

• To reduce customer queries with automated SMS and email notification
• To shorten sales cycle by streamlining tedious and time-consuming options
• To improve insights by providing single view of the prospects‘ profile within the preferred device

Take-away: Best Practices for a Seamless Sales Process

• Offer seamless experience by interacting with customers through multiple channels
• Create and use service standards to measure salespeople’s performance
• Use follow-up communications and automated nurture campaigns as ways to keep in touch with the customer at the right juncture of the customer journey
• Integrate your support channels with various tools and technologies

Want to integrate support services for great business results?