We try to pitch Lucep as a sales platform that complements your CRM, but the objections we face from small businesses are quite often the opposite. More along the lines of “We already have a CRM and we’re not getting any additional revenue or benefits from it.”
So we try to share a more detailed overview of how digital transformation of CRM should be the goal when you get some kind of system to automate the process.
In this article, we’ll try to address this objection and figure out how to get your sales team to use new CRM systems by explaining the hidden benefits.
Why use CRM systems? To align marketing and sales.
AThe simplest answer is contact, task and lead management. But if you poke your head out of the spreadsheets and look at the real world of marketing and sales, the biggest management problem is to align them.
There’s an entire detailed article we have on the definition of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and how you can get your marketing and sales teams to agree on it, pass the leads seamlessly forward to sales, and get them to respond on time.
What a CRM does is align your marketing and sales teams by automating and speeding up the marketing stage of the buying cycle. It automatically picks up the lead at source, adds it as a new deal into the system, and sends it to the appropriate “owner” of the deal instantly.
Telling your sales team that the CRM will automate a large part of the marketing process and align it to sales goals should by itself make them happy enough to want to use it.
How to use a CRM? No training needed.
Ok, so your sales team is ready to look at the CRM. But they’ve never used it before, and this is where the CRM implementation goes awry. The CRM has a different sales process. In order to start using it, sales team members would have to modify how they sell. That’s too much to ask of people who are already doing a high-stress job.
Whoever is implementing your new software has to work hard on understanding the existing sales process and replicating it. Then you have to allow people time to familiarize themselves with the functions and data entry process.
This is a free trial period during which you let your users try it free, by entering data into their existing spreadsheets as well as the CRM. After 2-4 weeks of this, no further training is needed.
Hidden Benefits of digital transformation of CRM
At the end of this digital transformation of your customer relationship management process, the question that will still arise from your marketing team is this – why are you taking on so much disruption of business and the cost of buying a CRM, if it’s going to do exactly the same thing that we’re already doing? In addition to smarketing (aligment of sales and marketing), these are the hidden benefits that a CRM brings:
1. Omnichannel customer engagement.
2. Customer identification at source.
3. Targeted marketing through segmentation.
4. Enablement of social sales.
5. Link analysis to understand relationships between disparate data sets.
6. Smart lead distribution.
7. Manage customer relationships on the go using CRM mobile apps.
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